Personal Portfolio Development - Project 1, Week 4

 We've come down to the final week of the Spongebob living room project, and I've got to say I feel pretty satisfied with the results.  The final modeling/texturing task of this week was to create cards to help give the wall-mounted fishhook's head the appropriately hairy appearance, which wasn't too much trouble.  Besides that, the only tasks on the table for this final week was to get everything into unreal, create materials, and set up a lit scene in Unreal to show off everything set up together.  All of that went fairly well, except for the last step - lighting in Unreal is not my strong suit, and it was pretty difficult to get everything set up so that it both didn't create too many weird shadows, and didn't blow out the whole scene.  I eventually managed to get satisfactory results by just turning off shadow casting on the lights and carefully tweaking the luminosity.  Did look a bit flat without the shadows, but hey, maybe it suits the cartoon look pretty well.  Looking back on this project, I had a lot of fun with it.  Like I said, the unique aesthetic of everything being made from scavenged marine detritus makes for some pretty cool and playful stuff that you can get into.  In fact, I had so much fun with this one, that I've decided I'm going to keep on with this theme and do another room in Spongebob's house in the same style.  Next time, it will be the bedroom, so expect to see the beginning of that one next week.

Personal Portfolio Development - Project 1, Week 3

 Work continues fairly smoothly on my first personal project.  This week, the task at hand was to texture all of the game resolution models and create the tiling textures for the floor, walls, and ceiling.  I was able to accomplish all of that pretty well this time around.  I did run into a bit of a problem with directly re-creating the exact look of the references - all the original stuff looks hand painted, and, frankly, I'm garbage at digital painting.  However, I do feel like I managed to bring across the spirit of the source by giving all of the objects a good deal of visual texture.  In the end, I still feel like I was pretty successful in giving all of the objects an authentic look and feel, which you can see below.  In any case, for the final week, my only remaining task is to create a final lighting and display in Unreal, assembling all my textured models into a nice little diorama to show them all off.

Personal Portfolio Development - Project 1, Week 2

 I had intended to get this update posted by yesterday, but extenuating circumstances prevented me from getting the final model just right and collecting the images.  Fortunately, I'm operating on more of a general time scale than hard and fast deadlines, but even then, I don't plan on making this a habit.  Now, with that out of the way, I can happily say that I met the expectations I set last week - all of the models are now clean, complete, and have good game resolution geometry.  I succeeded at making these models nice and efficient, too - the biggest, heaviest models (the hanging fishing lure and the television) still don't break the 6K triangles mark, and most of the other models are hovering at or below 3K triangles.  So, very easy on the processor.  Some of these models (the interior door, the porthole window, and the television) have offscreen high resolution models, for normal baking during the texturing process.  In any case, here they all are:

So, with the new models presented, the question becomes - what next?  Well, now that I have my game res geometry, it's time to move on to the texturing - each one of these needs a texture to help them match the unique, stylized appearance of the original cartoon.  I'll be doing that in Substance Painter.  Besides the aforementioned high resolution models I already have, I also want to go into ZBrush to create some high-res versions of the hanging fishing lures and the end table - they have a little bit more intricate detail that I couldn't quite get right using Maya's tools, so I'm going to get that detail in there with a normal bake.  Besides that, I also still need to go ahead and make the tiling textures for the floor, ceiling, and walls, which I'll be sculpting in ZBrush and translating to textures in Substance Painter.  After that's all done, I'll need to set up a final lighting and display of all the stuff in Unreal.  So, still a ways to go, but, for now, my focus is on texturing.

Personal Portfolio Development - Project 1, Week 1

 Now that I've made it to my fourth and final semester here at FIEA, things are a lot more open and self-directed.  My biggest responsibility right now is my environment art contributions to my venture project and my job searching.  But that doesn't mean I'm not going to let my personal portfolio development slip either, so, going off the three to four week schedules we established during the past few semesters of 3D art, I'm going to be producing a few more portfolio pieces in a similar fashion.  

For this first project, I'm going to be creating the titular character's living room from the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants as a 3D environment.  Besides just having quite a bit of nostalgia for the source material, I've also noticed that it's just a really creative, interesting look environment - a lot of the objects in the room (and the show in general) are made to look like they're distinctly made from scavenged marine garbage.  The seating is old inflatables lashed together, fishhooks are repurposed in various ways, doors and windows look like they came off old ships, and so on.  So, I decided that I'd be re-creating this unique look as a set of objects to create a mini-environment.  The good thing about this stuff is that, by following the stylized look of the cartoon, it means that I won't need to worry about realism, so the whole process won't be prohibitively work-intensive.

There are thirteen objects total in this set I'm creating - an armchair, a sofa, two kinds of door, a window, two kinds of table, a phone, a potted plant, two fishing lure wall decorations, a picture frame, and a television.  Besides modeling and texturing those, I'll also be creating tiling textures for the wall, floors, and ceiling to complete the look.  As can be seen below, this week, I've gotten the initial 3D models for all of the objects listed.  Most of these models are still fairly heavily WIP, and will need more cleaning up and refining before they can be declared finished game res models, but they still get the distinct look across.  By this time next week, I intend to have them all finished, so I can begin work on making textures that match their cartoon appearance.