The Animal Shrine - 05 - Hansel and Gretel

Work fom yesterday and today

Yesterday, I started texturing. I wasn’t planing on starting this soon, but I wanted to have a preview of what is to be. I also knew that I will go for a pipeline that I haven’t mastered before, so I wanted to make sure I can do it properly. I started with objects I have the exact dimensions of. That is the wooden supports that go around the place to create the “scaffolding”.

This is the result:

Close up screenshot of one of the buildings the the wooden structure it sits on. The wooden supports are now texture in a worn, aged wood.

I knew that I wanted a wooden texture, but to be fair I imagined I will need to do a detailed pass of Substance Designer and then use that in Painter to layer out more finished non-tillable texture feel.

Instead, I got the object in Zbrush, did a high-poly detailed sculpt of it and then baked it on low poly. I then layered a few colors together using the Curvature mask that Substance Painter bakes. The result is what you see, and to be honest I am pretty happy with it. If I manage to give everything else the same level of detail, I reckon it should be good.

As you can see in the image above, I modelled the basic shapes of the house a bit more. It got me, to what looks like in Maya, a Hansel and Gretel House. Note, I’ve marked with reddish color, shapes that don’t matter. What is white, is the shapes I need to bake and texture and then repeat to get the rest (the roof of course will be a piece of its own, with and UV of its own).

Maya screenshot showing the main building and the different pieces its made of. The gray colored parts of the building are the ones that will have unique texturing. The others (the reddish color) will either be mirrored or use tileable textures.

I’ve been working with modular pieces quite a bit (as seen in the wooden supports). I realized that I can do much more with less models than I imagined at first. After I learned my lesson with the wooden supports, I made sure to make the most out of the shapes I create with the house models.

As always, lets do a GIF! My favorite.

Gif progression from the frontal part of the shrine where the torii gate is. One can inspect the slow build up of the scene up until parts of the buildings start to have textures and proper fences static meshes go into place.

Note, I haven’t put much work into the lighting scenario. I am really happy with the modular pieces though, because they are really low poly and I managed to get the most out of them by baking.

You can see them laid out here:

Checkerboard landscape with 7 support, wooden beam static mesh props on top. Unreal 4 screenshot.

What I did is two big pieces (a part from the very small one) I modelled those those out - sculpted them in high detail - and then baked. Then I cut the pieces in the very middle. I didn’t have to do any changes on the UV or textures. I managed to get 2 extra pieces out of one sculpt. And that did make quite the big difference. Using those, I could manage to recreated and replace all of the basic brushes in Unreal.

Something else - quite obvious but still - a cube (or parallelepiped) has 4 sides. If you sculpt and bake those properly, you can rotate the same object each time you repeat it and get enough variation out of it!

I’m gonna texture the new pieces I did for the main buildings soon (the emissive windows and etc.) and I hope it looks good. I’ll share all of the results with you.

Good night from me, and I hope you are doing great!

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