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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #7

I decided to keep going forward with the scene I had and started texturing the different parts.

Overall, I struggled here quite a bit as well since I had strayed away from my initial concept a lot due to the shortage of time I was now under.

I decided to play around with pre-existing textures in Substance Painter and created somewhat good looking textures.

After this I took the pieces into Unreal Engine and started putting the scene together.

I came across another struggle here. Somehow, the textures looked very different from what they looked like in Substance Painter. It was mostly the colour, everything seemed to be looking a lot lighter in shade, which maded lighting extremely difficult as well. I had to hold bacck a bit on how I lit the scene.

Another issue I came across quite a lot was Unreal Engine constantly crashing. I figured this was most likely dude to the scene not being optimised well enough. I had fairly mid-poly models and some of the textures were very high res.

I still decided to go forward with it and lit the scene as well as I could.

This is what the render looked like:

In the end, I was not quite happy with how my scene looked. Even though I tired my best to save it through the lighting, a lot of things which were wrong with my scene from before held me back here.

But I was still extremely happy with my research and concept development, and if possible I would like to work with the same concept again and make an environment which is closer to what I had initially imagined.

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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #6

After I had modeled a good amount of modular assets, I began putting them together in order to make a test scene in Maya.

At this point, I was extremely low on time. Mostly because I had spent a lot of time on research alone and also due to certain health reasons.

I also underestimated how many different assets I needed to make the scene look good and fill it up properly.

Here is what it looked like in Maya:

Overall the scene itself was fine, but it's definitely something I needed to put more thought into.

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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #5

After I had a good concept to work with, I started modeling some of the modular parts for my environment.

I realised from my research that steampunk in general had pipes and gears as an intergral part of the aesthetic, since the main inspiration was victorian archetercture during the post industrial revolution.

This was a new thing for me, since I had never modeled modular assets in this way before.

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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #4

After making the rough sketch, I wanted to create a concept which would give me a more clear idea of the colors and different assets I wanted in my scene.

I used the Midjourney AI tool, and started feeding it prompts to get a specific kind of scene.

My previous research really helped me at this stage, as I had a very clear idea of what I wanted.

I ended up with multiple concepts which I collected into a moodboard.

This was a very interesting exercise, I learned a lot about the research part of the entire production process and about world building in general.

I definitely want to do more of this in future projects, since I feel like I created a good foundation for someone to make a steampunk environment.

[pranay-bansal-practice-1]

Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #3

After I understood what kind of scene and composition I wanted, I made a rough sketch consisting of different parts which all came together to make a coherent scene which would also be a faithful representation of Steampunk.

At this point I had done an extremely good amount of research, and I had a really good idea of where I wanted to take the scene.

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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #2

Once I had looked at enough references, I decided to do a deeper research of steampunk to identify all the key points which made something Steampunk, here is what I found.

After I had identified the key points of Steampunk, I started taking more references.

U searched on the internet for already existing images and also used multiple AI tools.

Here are some of the references I collected for my concept:

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Practice 1: Development Project 2

Post #1

For the second development project, I wanted to make an original environment from scratch.

I have always been really interested in Steampunk, and so I started reseaching on whatever I could find on steampunk in order to make a faithful representation of the aesthetic.

Initially I began searching for already existing pieces of media which follow a steampunk aesthetic to some degree.

A few pieces of media I took inspiration from were Arcane, Steamboy and Bioshock Infinite.

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Practice 1: Development Project 1

Post #5

After I was done setting up the lighting I took a few renders, here is how they looked:

There is definitely room for improvement in Multiple areas, and I feel like overall this project helped me in understanding where I lacked as an artist.

It was extremely helpful in order for me to build a good modeling, texturing and lighting foundation.

I am hoping to take everything I learned here going forward into the next semester in order to make a more fleshed out proper environment scene.

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Practice 1: Development Project 1

Post #4

After I was done with the texturing, I brought the model into Unreal Engine to begin the lighting process.

Since there were multiple parts of the bike I wanted to highlight, the lighting process here was very interesting.

After I was done with that, I set up a few cameras to get some good shots of the bike.

Here is what the camera and lighting setup looked like in the UE viewport:

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Practice 1: Development Project 1

Post #3

The texturing process in this project was a really interesting, and I learned a few different things about Substance Painter, like the Alpha sticker function.

Texturing itself here wasn't too difficult as most of the bike was made out of similar materials, but adding some of the details and making it look good was a bit challenging for sure.

This is what the textures look like in Substance Painter.

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Practice 1: Develpoment Project 1

Post #2

Once I ha modeled the bike and was happy with how it looked, I further began fixing whatever problems I found with the model.

These are all the separate parts of the bike I ended up with after some aditional cleanup.

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Practice 1: Development Project 1

Post #1

For my first Development Project, I decided to take the Sci-Fi model I had created for the 3D Printing assignment and take it further into a finished high quality hero prop.

This is what the mdoel looked like at this stage.

As I started working on more things in it, I started to notice a few issues.

Some of the parts had bad wireframes or didn't look right in general, and so I started fixing some of the old parts while working on more new parts as well.

These are some of the small new parts I modeled.

A few parts of the bike were extremely challening to make because I couldn't find a good reference for them. Eventually I had to just fill in the gaps myself and model what felt best in certain parts.

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Practice 1: 80.lv Article

HOW TO CREATE A MAZE-LIKE ENVIRONMENT WITH AN INDIAN AESTHETIC USING MAYA, SUBSTANCE PAINTER & UNREAL ENGINE USING MODULAR ASSETS

I wanted to add some cultural value to this project, so I decided to look at the streets of India as reference and create and environment which would only exist in someone’s mind. To me that meant creating a maze-like scene in order to evoke a sense of other-world-ness and mystery.

I started looking for different references to accurately create an environment which actually looks and feels Indian, atleast to an extent, but also looks detached enough from reality that it intrigues the viewer.

After I had a good amount of references, I started making the modular assets for the scene.

The key to making modular assets efficiently is to make sure everything snaps together perfectly.

For that, be sure that all the different assets are around the same increments when it comes to the height and width.

Another thing to keep in mind is where to place the pivot on the assets. I found that placing the pivot on the bottom left corner for most of the assets worked well, since the pivot is the point where all the assets will snap from.

After that, I created a simple test scene in Maya to understand more about how I wanted all the different assets to come together, and if I wanted more make more assets to fill the scene up, which did happen.

The next part was to texture the objects. This is where the references come in handy again. I looked closely at the references to create textures which looked realistic and believable. Most things in real life won’t look perfect, things have wear and tear and have gone through time as well. It is extremely important to get that through with your textures.

As you can see, I added a bunch of dirt and imperfections to my textures to make them as realistic as possible.

Next came setting up the scene in Unreal Engine. Composition is extremely vital in any environment you’re trying to make, but more so in an environment like this, where creating a maze but making it look believable is the tough part.

And so, everything needs to connect and flow together properly.

Lighting is also extremely important, even though Unreal Engine did most of the tough part on that front for me since my scene was fairly small.

In a bigger scene, lighting will be way more essential, as you will have to choose which parts need to have more focus with a certain type of lighting, and which parts need to be devoid of light to make the viewer be able to comprehend what is going on in the scene.

You can go further and play around with the camera settings in Unreal as I did in the image below.

I added some bloom, lens distortion (which was done by using nodes) and chromatic aberration in order to enhance my scene even more, which goes to show that camera plays a huge role in how good you can make your scene look.

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Practice 1: 3D Printing

Post #3

The support for the back wheel was just one of the things I struggled with and made a lot of different renditions for.

Overall, this was an extremely fun exercise. Being a big fan of Akira, this is something I have wanted to make since a long time.

This is what the model ended up looking like, and given the amount of time I had, I was very happy with it.

Even though it is still quite incomplete, I would still love to go forward with it and complete it so I can use it in a proper scene in the future.

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Practice 1: 3D Printing

Post #2

Initially I made a quick low poly blockout of the bike to understand the different parts better and how to go forward with making them.

Even though it looks simple for the most part, this was definitely the most difficult hard surface model I have made yet.

Some parts were extremely challenging and I surely learned some new things about modeling that I wasn't aware of before.

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Practice 1: 3D Printing

Post #1

I had a somewhat clear idea of what I wanted to do when given this prompt.

I have always been a big fan of Sci-Fi, and so I knew I wanted to make a Sci-Fi model.

Initially, I had planned to make a DeLorean from Back to the Future, but I soon dropped this idea and decided to make the bike from the movie Akira.

This is what the bike looks like, I took a few references and found some blueprint images of it, even though the blueprints didn't have enough details to help me out a lot.

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Practice 1: Light and Shadows

Post #3

After watching the tutorial, I began messing around with different lights in Unreal Engine.

Eventually I was pretty happy with the renders I got.

I tried to capture a very quaint vibe with the lighting. The scene already being so well made definitely helped me a lot.

Here is one of the lighting passes.

After this I tried to do some different types of lighting.

These are the 2 I ended up liking the most.

Overall, this was an extremely fun assignment. I enjoyed myself a lot and learned a lot about lighting environments in general. Even though lighting is very intuitive for the most part, learing few key skills is really important is what I've realised, and I'll definitely try and build a stronger foundation in this area going forward.