Week 3 - The Environment & its Inhabitants Part two

Modelling Grass/Brush

We began this week by creating environmental assets to populate the relaxing island of Haven. Using designs previously created by Conor, we modeled smaller environmental features such as brush and grass. The focus of creating these assets are purely for aesthetic purposes.

As Haven uses Poly Art Style, we have the advantage of having a low poly count for our objects. Although the polygon count can rise with the amount of detail being added. When modeling the grass/brush it was important to keep the poly count down and not get carried away adding detail as these objects are going to be heavily used around the island. It is important that our assets keep a low poly count due to Haven using the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift is a Virtual Reality headset. The headset looks similar to a goggle. Using the Oculus in our game we render the scene twice. Once through the Oculus device and another on the computer, which will view the rendered scene of the Oculus.

Below are initial images of the first iteration of grass and brush models:

These models where then reviewed by the team. Feedback from the team suggested trying different shapes and maybe adding more variation to the strokes.

Keeping the Poly count down was easy, when creating the cubes the segments were kept low and the desired shape of the objects where created using a minimum amount of segments. There were normally 3 height segments per grass blade. Here are the final renders of the grass/brush assets:

Final Concept for the Deer

Nicola took the designs Gavin had draw up in week one and made a colored amalgamation producing a final concept for this creature, this was to help Gavin to model it later in the week. This was painted in Photoshop and presented to the group for peer review.

Modeling the Deer Creature

This week Gavin started modeling the deer creature from the game, this went through several iterations and was peer reviewed by the group at each stage. This model was created in blender and was also made to conform with the chosen poly-art style. it was a challenge to make the wreath around the deer's neck in this style as it would be pulled and distorted during the skinning stage. the silhouette of the creature also looked wrong with this addition so it was ultimately removed.