DMUGA Week 20 - Getting down to business + making water!

So, this excitingly magnificent week includes:
-Shader problems
-More shader problems
-Lighting problems
-Stress
-More stress!

Here's why:
I didn't get off to a great start on Monday because the only half-decent thing I managed to create was a water shader:

Material Instance

Water Shader

Water Tutorial:

Part 1 - UE4 - Interior Water #1

Part 2 - UE4 - Interior Water #2

I'm using the indoor water tutorial because it best fit the kind of look we wanted to achieve, we didn't want a murky river as it is a newly formed river of tears so it is quite blue and translucent.

In terms of anything else, we distributed the assets across the team today for who is going to make what. This was all perfectly fine until I actually tried to make some materials to test some things out first. I watched this semi-helpful tutorial on how to get a texture to 'creep' in through another one, but mine didn't turn out all that great unfortunately:

Snow tutorial:

Unreal Engine 4 Snow tutorial

My Concrete texture was tiled a lot in these images due to the size of the unwrap I was making it for:

I spent the evening tweaking so many tiny settings to get the water looking as best as I could, and also tried making some other materials which also didn't work out very well. In summary, it wasn't the greatest of days, but I did try some things out and all is good if it's practice (unless there's a fast approaching deadline... Which is always!)

Moving on to day 2 this week and it definitely went a lot better than the first because I learnt a lot as well as made some progress in the modelling. I spent a couple hours in Z-brush learning about it & sculpting one my of steps, then attempted my first Z-brush bake. It didn't go too well, but I learnt the process and definitely will apply it from now on:

I'm unable to get the baked low-poly version as an image, but I can assure you that you wouldn't even want to see it!

I also got the base mesh for the fountain modelled, and fiddled around with some more textures. My plan for this is to sculpt the fountain in Z-brush.

Life drawing was really fun this week as we tried a new method which involved sketching whilst the model was moving around, and stopping for 20 seconds repeatedly. This got me more relaxed and was very helpful in speeding up my drawing:

There were more problems with the water shader/(s) which we had to fix, plus, get more in-depth with our grass plan!

Here's one clump I painted - It wasn't the best, but I don't dislike it completely either - Not sure if we'll end up using it, but it is there as a back-up:

Not an actual texture sheet of course - just a screenshot from Photoshop

As Wednesday rolled on, yet again major issues with the water shader/(s) not working properly, the lighting effected it dramatically, and some more stress piled on whilst trying to combine a translucent water with an opaque to get nice reflections... It worked kind of:

Opaque Water

Underwater

Translucent Water

We decided it looked a bit better with the translucent water so that's the one we're going for at this stage.
I managed to get in some 'okay' grass shaders which took a VERY long time as there are numerous problems with lighting on foliage alphas e.g. grass. I ended up changing it to 'UNLIT' and just modifying it that way. This will be used in lit areas, but we may have to make another version for use in darker areas.

A couple of flowers I got done also.

Thursday was a relaxing day in comparison to the others because there was mainly just the stress of the grass not looking good in shaded areas of the map, however, Anya came up with a way to 'fake it' and it works pretty well! So I was really happy about that and it was a big weight off our shoulders.
I also tried a new technique today when it came to making a bush (Which I've never done before!). It involved making a high-poly version of a section of the bush, then baking it to a single plane. I've done similar things before, but not using the mesh-paint tool to paint the leaves onto the mesh.
It turned out 'OK', it wasn't as good as what I expected, but it was decent enough in my opinion:

Flower & Bush Models - 3DS Max

I also got round to texturing some fungi, and importing all of the meshes so far!

Friday was surprisingly a good day as I felt as if we made some good progression. I sorted some minor problems out, made the beginnings of our "DarkWorld", and did some general touch-ups on materials & lighting! The 'DarkWorld' I think will be one of my favourite areas because it has an ominous feel to it all, and I think that when there are trees/foliage, the table, house, & 'glowy-ness' fungi etc in the scene, it'll be really good.

Through the rabbit hole... Alice's Dark World

I think we've made some good stuff this week, just really need to speed up a bit so we can actually get it done on time!