Whew, it's been a while since I've been able to post something for you guys. My time has fallen prey to that thing we call Life lately. For a while there both my wife and I were sick with upper respitory infections and we were out of town for a bit. Anyway, enough about all the boring stuff, back to the art!
GraveYard Gate Update:
So the GraveYard Gate is done! I got a chance to sit down tonight and power through. I really didn't have that much left to do it was just finding the time to do it. This was a challenging one. I had to learn how to make effective low poly trees and do some serious detail balancing. Fortunately there will never be more than 2 characters in this scene at a time so the rest of the team won't have to worry about balancing like I did. The lead informed me that we needed to hit between 4k and 5k for this scene. The final count came to 2,900. Given the fact that I still have almost 1500 polys worth of wiggle room I think I may suggest some unique detail and a second pass at the trees to add more braches or smooth out some of the curves. Once more for a refresh here is the original concept followed by the final image that is currently under review. Should there be any desired changes by the lead I'll post an updated final.
Concept:
Final Submitted:
A thought about Trees:
What I found was that trees are not terribly difficult to do, save for when you need to make them super low poly and still look good. The trick is to think of the tree as a series of tubes or cylinders. (See Fig.1)
After you establish where the "meat" of each tube is going to be the rest is just welding the ends together and then tweak for branch or trunk shape. (See Fig.2)
I tried to create a quick base mesh in ZBrush but the geometry created that way was messy and did not lend itself to branch instancing very well. (See Fig.3)
Ultimately I decided it was faster, more efficient, and it gives me better control to do it "manually" with cylinder objects in Max. This way I can create one branch, twist it and make it very natural looking and then copy it to the next location and in the end, weld the resulting ends together. (See Fig.4)
Next week I will be on travel for work however when I return I will be working on the first episode of my Polygon Pilgrimage. I've been brushing up my material skills as well as getting my feet wet with Unity for an upcomming project.
Until then thank you very much for your time. As always comments, suggestions, ideas are welcome.
Enjoy!
Cheers~
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