I thought I would give you a bit more from my progress and where I am with everything. As you may know I have been busy brushing up on my ZBrush skills with some simple speed sculpts and trying to learn all the new features that have been put into the program since I have last used it.
To be completely honest I have really skirted round using the program because I didn't understand how it places new tools in scene so I am just forcing myself to get used to it. I have done a few 10 min speed sculpts just to get back into the tool sets and getting different forms. Rocks in particular I am working trying to get organic wear and tear quickly. Below is one of my rough attempts at doing some rocks using clay tubes and trim dynamic.
I mentioned earlier that I have been busy with another Art test for a different company and I thought I would share with you what I did and how it went. For this Art test I was set a challenge to replicate Ground based off a image. This task was very similar to what I did for TT Fusion but had a different challenge based on perception of coverage, species type and height variation. I choose to use a wild grass section from the London Meadows which you can see below as I had the freedom to select my own reference picture this time around.
I first started my challenge by really studying the structure of what plants made up the characteristics of the environment, whether this be by shape, colour, clustering or height. I had to ask myself what makes this field distinguishable. I wanted to make sure also that there was enough coverage and variety in each height layer in the grass.
After choosing the flowers and plant shaped that I though stood out or highlighted characteristics of the meadow grass, then began the difficult task of trying to find out what species of plant they were to get correct references and pictures to work from. Spending time researching stuff like this is pretty vital for trying to replicate something. you can never have too much reference to work from as it helps breath believability into your work.
I then went about the task of modelling the individual plant pieces in highpoly which I could then use to kit bash plants together once I had baked them down with render to texture.
Once I had modelled the bits of the plants I wanted to recreate I then ordered them in front of a square plane. This means that when I do a render to texture I had my diffuse, normal map and alpha map in exactly the same place in a game resolution texture of my choosing (1k, 2k or 4k).
With all my plant pieces arranged ready to bake, I did a render to texture with a super sample pass and 0 padding. This was so my Alpha mask was really clean and would give me the best results when I used it UE4 as a opacity mask.
With my diffuse normal and alpha textures now baked I created a new square plane in 3ds Max and applied them to it. From here I went about crudely separating each part out with the cut tool giving enough geometry to bend and deform each piece. This would give me a good amount of kit bashing objects to construct my plants with.
You can probably see from the image how I have used all the pieces in each plant and also reused pieces the same pieces in different ways to create a variety of shrubs, plants and flowers of different heights and shapes. I paid close attention here to my reference image as I wanted to make sure that each piece would help with each vegetation layer of the image. This would help me to build up densities of different plants for each height layer of the the reference photo and not create unrealistic plant heights that would break the believability of the piece. I would look at each piece in a orthographic view next to each other here to aid this process.
In Photoshop I then created a spec sheet for the plants. Using the select colour tools and the all important refine selection I was able to pick out variations of height and details from my diffuse texture and integrate them into my specular map.
Once happy with my spec texture I removed any light information from my diffuse texture. This is so the normal and spec could work well with the lighting of the environment. I find its easier to pick out details for the spec with lighting information still in the diffuse texture, but you can do this at a earlier stage if it suits your style of work.
I did a quick detail pass using NDO to enhance my textures I had baked then brought my models straight into UE4. I created a master foliage material, terrain blend material and static mesh material so I could create instances for each object so I quickly change material properties without having to rebuild the whole material to see what it was doing in the engine. Doing material adjustments in this way is just an all round time saver and you have mode control of the over all result.
After creating a new foliage layer, placing each plant piece and painting a terrain with some blends I got pretty much the final result.
I broke up some of the plainer parts with quick rocks I created with ZBrush and Substance Painter to add a little more character to the piece. This was also show off my organic baking onto solid objects even if they were simple ones.
I was pretty pleased with the over all outcome but reflecting on the final outcome of this I could have done better with the grass by creating them from photo reference rather than modelling each blade of grass in Max. This would have helped the piece by keeping everything at a photo real level rather than having a stylised bits and some realistic. I could have also matched the green saturations better with the reference photo for my submission. This would have been a easy change with some simple node manipulation in UE4 but I wanted to show what I submitted rather than me changing it to be perfect.
This pretty much covers my process for creating this piece and I hope this helps anyone who is looking to create foliage in the future using the same pipeline as me. All in all, it took 2 and a bit days to create. I am happy to say after a few interviews and this art test that I was successful in my application and am now employed again at Playground Games in Leamington Spa. This has seriously made my year getting this job and I'm literally crapping myself with excitement to work with such a prestigious team of artists.
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