Week 3

 Wow week 3 already! I am keeping myself to a tight, planned out schedule, so I know I am on track but I still feel a little nervous when anyone points out that midterms will be coming up soon! Next week will be my last week working on the smaller shots for my reel.  After that I will be moving onto my large Victorian town shot which will be a big challenge to get into engine in only 4 weeks but I think it will add to my environment portfolio significantly.

Ooh I love making assets to much!  After such a long time of working with large scale scenes, complex environment textures and a lot of procedural stuff it is so nice to come back to the warm and comfy world of prop modeling!  I am trying to push my polycount as low as possible so I can use lots of the same prop in a scene without slowing it down.

I up rezed the grass and yarrow textures for my intro shot using textures from Megascan.  I also built a lot of color correction variables into the shader network to ensure I could get the right feel for the intro.

This was a very fun prop! its the hand lantern that goes in the front of Cyrus' sail boat.  which you can see the light from in the below image.

 This shot was a bit easier than the last and I am starting to get a hang on lighting in Unreal.  There was more I wanted to do with the reflections in the water but they are created using screen space reflections.  So I can't just aim lights at the water.  I might be able to figure out some other tricks but for now this is where I am going to leave it for a little while.  Though I am going to make the ships sails dynamic soon, its been on my to do list since last term :p

My first pass at the stylized character midterm Just taking it to block out for the first week before I start refining any of the shapes.  The method we are using is slow going but I think I have made a good start.  Looking forward to this weeks class to see how to move forward.  It was a tricky decision to decide whether to do 2 pieces or spend the whole term working on one.  I think I made the right choice going for 2 pieces though since with this kind of sculpting the less you nudge it around the better it looks and this one is already looking kind of lumpy :p I hope I will have the technique more nailed down before I start the final.