Some progress II

After loads of attempts of trying to get Mudbox running on my laptop and nothing good, I decided to give it a try to Zbrush. My plan was to make the stalactites and stalagmites in high poly and then capture the details on a normal map. The product was quite good looking, but I think I spent so much time trying to get this level just for one piece and thinking of the amount of pieces that I needed to make it look decent. 

At the end, and after spending so much time looking at tutorial after tutorial, I decided to just edit one big mesh and make it look as good as possible with a tileable texture. much more easier as Zbrush does the complicated UV mapping for you and it's really easy to export back to Maya once you set it up. After running a decimation to avoid killing Maya on the attempt to export an object with over 1 billion polygons, I got quite surprise that it changed from quads to triangles... never worked with them and my previous 3D professors where completely against working with them. 

Didn't care...

So manage to get the normals working and to get it all fit and scale with the rest of the scene. So far is the object that's spending most of my poly-budget, but hopefully will be worth it. 

I still want to play more with Zbrush, since it's a really different software, that quite took me a while to get my head around, but seems like one of those in which I can see myself getting lost for hours just trying and trying all the tools. 

After duplicating the half of the cenote (cave) on which I worked on, and merging them together I saved and closed Maya, but is until now that I noticed that by doing that I completely destroyed the UV map and it was turned into a square, so now I either work with an automatic UV proyection or start working on a uv mapping of an object that has over 67,000 polys and loads and loads of organic bumps. God save my soul if I chose the second option. (which I probably will) 

A Pulse of inspiration

While thinking for some inspiration for the style of my game environment, I certainly look at many kind of games just to give me an idea of the level of details.
Even though I know that Unity can export games to many platforms, I decided to look at PS3 references (since I can always "experience" it for myself.

While playing the game, Final Fantasy XIII became a strong influence in the process, and more because of the pretty cinematic, it's because of the detailed and beautiful work Square Enix has done with most of the scenarios. More than looking at the high-tech ones, I focused on a part of the game called Pulse (Just got there, took me ages!)   

This image above is the concept art for it. Full of details and breath taking I would say. Knowing the company they could make part of the cinematic in this kind of scene and make it look surreal, but is it going to look just as nice inside the game?

For me...I think it does. I spend some time (while levelling up... this is a good harvesting area) looking at the flowers, rocks and cliffs, plants and little details that normally I wouldn't notice for the urge to go and kill the next monster. This made me realize that for game engines, you cant just expect to spend ages modelling everything perfectly, but spending time on the textures, that's what makes the difference.

I started looking more and more at the concept art and other screenshots of other parts of the game, and pretty much it game me an incentive of populating my scene with low-poly details. Hope this helps to get my scene to look decent.

Some progress I

After a long time of thinking what would fit better for my environment and making sketch after sketch about some of the more important aspects (aka the snake) I decided to go for the public opinion to help me decide on which concept to go for. I posted some polls on facebook and tumblr just to get a general idea of which design is more "liked". 

At the end most people liked number 4, but more than heading me towards choosing one, I got some really good feedback. 

I manage to start modelling it from scratch and tried starting with different primitives (cylinders and cubes mainly) and ended up working with only half of a cylinder and mirroring it at the end. I'm still going to work on it. Add some more details and the feathers, but mainly I wanted to get this as a "low poly" model and work on zbrush (for some reason just can't install mudbox) and work on a high poly model to get some normal and detail maps for the low poly model. 

Doing the UV map for it was quite complicated specially for the head part, but I think that I manage to get something decent at the end. It is quite complicated to model organic stuff, but hopefully I get better at this soon.