Through the gate: More sculpting
At the start of the week I was greeted by stas and he gave me some feedback on what to do for this project. I explained I was using it as a learning project and he agreed it was a good idea to be learning these things before FMP. He suggested that I go and concept some things that I wanted as I was still unsure what I wanted. Therefore I went and started concepting assets for the altar room and designing a colour palette to use for the dungeon.
After getting on with what Stas suggested I do, I spoke to Chris and showed him what I had and explained what everything was. He suggested that we look at more aztec and polynesian things. So we went to the library to look at some books he suggested such as "Man and his symbols" by Carl G. Jung and "Arts of the south seas" The collections of the Musée Barbier-Mueller. As well as this I looked into mandalas and aztec patterns so that I knew what I was going with so I didn't stray into asian things.
After speaking to Chris and looking for reference in the books I go on with sculpting more assets;
Stairs
Floor Piece
Altar
I finished off the environment assets and moved on to assets for the altar:
Book with ribbon
3 candles
Chest with coins
Single coin
Crystal bladed dagger
Skull fully sculpted from a sphere in Zbrush and then retopologized into a 200 tri, 350 tri and 500 tri model.
I then baked all 3 skulls to see which one worked better I ended up going with the 350 tri one (the middle in the above image).
I also redid a lot of my bakes as I learnt the importance of smoothing groups and UV islands in baking normals. Mike also showed me how to use xnormal correctly. My bakes are now cleaner and don't have harsh seams.
After getting my sculpts baked down I decided to go over my texture planning and came up with this:
I then downsized my textures to the right size. I have 2x 1024x1024's left so I have plenty of room for anything I want to add.
I also spoke to Tio this week she suggested I get rid of the purple colour pallete and go with greys, oranges and yellows as the purple is too cozy. Also with the stone/rock walls, columns, floors and altar I should look at aged stone such as dark mossy stones in cemeteries; add more greens and browns and let the lighting colour the room. I'm going to test out my colour scheme and see if it works and if not look into what Tio was suggesting but I feel like this won't fit into the vision I have in my head.
Mike Kelly came to see what I was working on at the end of the week and basically told me to keep going and to look at this artists zbrush sculpts for inspiration: look at artist thats good at sculpting http://orbart.free.fr/index.php?Gallery=105
Here's where I am now with my work:
New smaller floor plan
Altar room
The rune, glow and the book animate.
My plan now is to try and get the rest of the texturing done and get it to work together.