Style Matrix Shop Front

Name: Chris Lonsdale

P Number: P12206538

DMU Email: p12206538@myemail.dmu.ac.uk

Email: ChrisTheJam@gmail.com

Caravan UV

Caravan Albedo

House UV

House Albedo

Base UV

Base Albedo

Shop UV

Shop Albedo

Marmoset renders.

UE4 renders.

Round two. It may seem like another oddball pick to go for another 3D project. But I'd rather experiment now rather than later when it matters more. It's like taking a girl for coffee as opposed to proposing to her, getting a mortgage, a dog, a red collar for that dog then worrying about what food the dog has to eat. I'm having fun before I tie myself down to one niche whether that be 2D or 3D. That said I will definitely do a 2D project for the style matrix simply to see how much I enjoy 2D for an extended period of time. This is pretty much the first time I've been told I can paint solely as my project. When people ask me what kind of games I play, I tell them I play one game. I play League of Legends. I like how it plays, and I love how it looks. To work for Riot games is a dream job so I wanted to gain insight into how the 3D artists work at Riot. If I were to work at Riot I would be a character or environment artist and not a 3D artist but it makes sense to understand the technical limitations of what the game can contain. Also hand painted textures are just really impressive I find.

I started by sketching what I wanted to make. Initially, a small diorama with a gypsy caravan as a shop selling potions. I looked into the art style of games like Dungeon Defenders, League of Legends, DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2.

My initial sketches grounded the idea and revealed it's blandness. Later on I expand on the overall idea. But at this point I continued on to modelling.

 Modelling proceeded for a couple of days. Not entirely challenging considering it's rather low poly. I was still unfulfilled with the design and shape. So I briefly went back to concepting.

I sketched the idea of having a house attached to the top of the caravan. A mobile shop/home. I feel like this design is way better and much closer suited to the style I wanted. This design decision made me a lot more enthusiastic about working on something more than just a caravan. Then I had to simply model the house part on top of what I had already made. Being low poly, it's very quick to iterate.

Unwrapping was fairly straightforward after the helmeted character brief which was infinitely more complex. The shop has very simple geometry so a lot of it was planar mapping with occasional pelt mapping. I moved onto texturing. Substance painter helped with figuring out the base colours by using masks that could be assigned to each face. For instance if I wanted something to be blue, I'd just click it. Like a fill tool for polygons but in real time with a 3D view. Once I had all the colours figured out I used photoshop to hand paint the rest of the textures. Substance painter just gave me a little head start. I did something incredibly stupid when texturing though. I wanted to make a hybrid between pbr and hand painted. Elements of both but not quite as good as either it seemed.

The final outcome is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Some parts look really nice like the bottles. And then other parts I just couldn't get right. It looks slightly inconsistent all over. Possibly due to the skewed art direction, trying to make it pbr and hand painted. It's a shame because the model and concept, all the technical parts of the project are really nice. But then I failed at the painting part. In my eyes I did anyway. Definitely something to improve on.

The project was insightful if anything. It showed me that stylisation is literally the opposite of realism. That's obvious. I mean in terms of workflow. A stylised shop will take less time to model than a high poly character. But hand painting a shop will take more effort to reach success. Stylising something certainly isn't easy. For this project I actually liked how it looked in UE4 in contrast to Marmoset. Marmoset handled the materials better but UE4 worked better with the flat diffuse colours which works better with hand painted textures. All in all it's not a bad result. I just don't find it incredibly appealing in the end.  But it looks decent and fits the brief. Ultimately I don't think the textures are up to par with what I envisioned and I hope to go back to this project to work on them. That said, this project was very enjoyable. More so than the helmeted character brief. There's something very rewarding about hand painting your own textures. This could be a potential outlet for my fmp depending if I get better at hand painting textures.

December 10th 

I revisited all the textures and essentially re painted the whole model so it feels more appropriate and consistent. The base, I'm still working on.