Hey guys welcome to update 2 of my environment art mentorship blog. For this entry I'm just going to be going through the process that I went through in creating the larger parts of the environment starting with the floors!
(sorry for the gap between posts, its hard to juggle all this and stay on top of classes and such but alas...HERE WE GO)
Starting off with the modelling of the planks themselves, I had a few specifications I wanted to keep in mind while I made them. I wanted each piece to be reusable, I wanted to have enough variation to make it look unique, and I needed to make some gaps in the wood for objects like floor grates and trap doors.
On the left is the first iteration of planks, I had one specifically made for trap doors, a couple with holes and a relatively clean set as well as rafters. Now, my plan was to sculpt these planks....my plan was to sculpt about 30 planks double sided....in less than 10 years....gooooood luck.
So the second image are the new planks, obviously less in number and these were assembled into kits and re-used around the level.
Mind you, this is all before I quickly discovered I had NO IDEA how to sculpt wood :)
I'll just run you all through this process of learning how to sculpt wood to an acceptable level down below. But in all reality I learned so much through those couple of weeks and have been able to carry it through to the rest of the project. Again, big thanks to Ayi Sanchez for taking the time to give me some pointers and direction on workflows and techniques on how to do this!
Day 1: BAD | Day 2: Less bad
After these two practices I was advised to focus more on the contour of the planks and focus less on the flat surface of the sculpt because the texturing process will go a long way. It worked out pretty well!
Texturing these planks was another adventure on its own! I learned so much about the process and again its been super applicable to the rest of this environment.
I started the texturing process by making a tileable texture in photoshop from some acquired images from the internet. The purpose of making that was to give me a good base where I could start to add color and pull detail from the sculpt as well as the tileable.
I also made a wood grain normals generator because I thought it might help in the texturing process. I ended up using it only a little bit but it did add some nice detail here and there.
Normals Generator only - didn't end up using this very much.
This is just the quick steps I went through in texturing these planks. It started out with a quick sketch (at the top) that I used to find the colors I like. I later abandoned that tileable and made a much better one that I used moving forward. From there I just kept layering up the albedo, adding in color variations, tone differences in the planks as well as smaller details like scratches and grease.
Thanks for taking a look!!!
