Practical 1: Start to Finish

Within my MA, I decided I wanted to focus on the subject of art styles and exploring and attempting many different art styles and breaking it down. I'd like to look into how different game companies define their styles, how they create their styles, etc. 

Personally, I really adore the style of games like Sea of Thieves, League of Legends, Slime Rancher 2, and probably many others... But these are my absolute favourites! 

With Sea of Thieves especially, I love their chunky sculpting and painterly approach in their assets. I think the wobbly and literal imperfections is very appealing along with the often visible paint strokes in the textures.

For the projects I will be undergoing in my MA journey, I am thinking that it will involve a lot of research and breaking pre-existing assets/styles down. I know Riot Games provides a lot of different behind the scenes content and resources that easily explains their processes and intentions in their style, which would be perfect for me to reference and could make that project in particular flow a lot smoother. 

But, I know that along the way when exploring other art styles, there may not be such brilliant step-by-step tutorials and general resources provided, and I will have to do a lot of the breakdowns myself and thoroughly study what that game has already provided. 

When it comes to realism, as well, this is still a style of course, but certainly not my favourite. Most likely my least favourite - both to look at and create. However, this still must be a big chunk of my MA, because a lot of stylisation has of course trickled down from realism itself. As well, I think it is important to show (or try to)  that I am capable of working within multiple different styles and can adapt in my portfolio. 

I feel like this matters a lot more to me recently after a Industry Practitioner talk from Louise Andrews, head of Art at d3t, which was on the 8th of November 2023. This talk in particular introduced me to the concept of co-development studios, which I was not familiar with previously. These kinds of studios work with tons of other different studios which allows them to be constantly working on different styles and games. As I listened to her talk, I think I realised that I was particularly interested in these kinds of studios and like the idea of working on a lot of different things without having to be changing studios every couple of months or years. One of the things Louise suggested portfolio-wise was showing as many different styles as possible. 

My Project

Firstly, I really fancied making a full wizard's tower environment. I had the image in my mind of a cute little old dwarf wizard, adorned in very stereotypical purple and starry garb in a fantasy setting. Except, in this made-up world full of actual mages and crazy fantastical elements, this dwarf in particular is far from an actual wizard in reality, and rather just believes himself so; thinking that the stars talk to him and that his purpose is to 'regain' knowledge of magics from his past lives. 

Sketch of Grimblegoff - my wizard dwarf idea!

James, one of my MA lecturers, said to me last week that I could do, for example, one kind of asset from a particular style of game and then re-imagine that kind of asset in another style. His example was perhaps trying to remake the Slime Rancher gun in a totally opposite style, like Cyberpunk's. 

This got me thinking of what I would like to do, and I landed upon the idea of a chair for the main environment's asset. I figured that a chair is something that can be so common in any kind of game and can be presented in many different styles, and can allow me to explore the idea of; 'how far can a design be pushed while still being readable as its original purpose?' (in this case, something someone can sit on). 

Now, further into the week, I had a chat with Josh (another MA lecturer) and ended up pinpointing what I wanted to do more. I realised that creating a full wizard's tower environment could potentially take up even my whole year on the MA, and as such, would not allow me to actually explore many different styles as the environment would of course need to be consistent in style.

At the moment, I think for the upcoming projects I will be creating a series of dioramas in various styles, with at least one running theme or asset throughout them all. For example, diorama 1 will contain a chair, table, rug and orb. Diorama 2 could include the same assets, however, in a different style entirely from the first. Dioramas 3, 4, 5, etc, will continue to evolve from there.

This will allow me to demonstrate my understanding in various art styles and show that I can work within multiple said styles. 

My chair concept art sketches

At the start of this week, I created a Pinterest board for the project and in general gathered a lot of references from various sources and collected them on PureRef. I got to concepting 7 different chairs.

I will explore and explain each design individually next, however, I was becoming more and more inspired with the potential world behind the wizard dwarf in my head that these chairs would belong to. I got to the idea that perhaps Grimblegoff (yes, I've decided to name him now.), the very fake wizard he is, has perhaps stolen the tower from a previous wizard and all of the contents inside were left behind. This would give me my reason behind why these designs can be so elaborate, as previously, I was struggling to think of why I could justify this -- given the fact Grimblegoff is just a senile old dwarf that has deluded himself; he'd of course have no style or possessions of his own. I'd like to think that the previous inhabitant of Grimblegoff's stolen tower was quite the acclaimed wizard in this made-up universe, with a very refined style. 

Over time, however, Grimblegoff would have added his own (perhaps unrefined) touch to things; additions of a tacky cat bed, furniture gaining various cat scratch marks, and overall wear and tear. Given the fact he is a dwarf, perhaps it is implied in the environment the previous owner is not, it would be important environmental storytelling to establish the differences this has created in the environment. Perhaps the tower would have ended up with a lot of cobwebs and dust in taller places the dwarf cannot reach, or the tower would now have various additions of stools, ladders, or stairs littered about the interior so that he could reach things like counters at a normal height. 

I think that worldbuilding and lore is a massive part that goes into creating a good environment or assets as a 3D artist. It is very important to keep in mind the potential backstory and general storytelling of the world in order to create effective art. Otherwise, how can you establish whether something fits within an art style? How can it be established whether the artist did an objectively good or bad job? In industry, it is to my understanding that a 3D artist would be having to create their assets for a already established world, and it is their job to make sure their work fits seamlessly into it. 

References 

I use both Pinterest and PureRef to collect my references for this project. While working, along any stage (be it Maya or sculpting in ZBrush) I always have my references up on PureRef on my other monitor for ideas and also to make sure I am staying within the style I have set.

My Pinterest board for this project: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/MYOCHII/grimblegoffs-tower-project/

And my PureRef:

I also found two particularly inspiring dioramas on Sketchfab: 

Link: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/chair-c57875b3926440ffbf89003f49249e06

Link: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-wizards-chair-9aea3b516d3e4e169710049b32282670

Other assets concept art

My tower environment idea

Chair Modelling Process

Firstly, I was quite rusty and nervous to go back to modelling. I hadn't touched Maya in a few months since graduating from the BA, so I felt like I had to account for time that it would take for me to re-remember things. 

This is the concept art I decided to go with modelling. I felt like it was one of the more visually interesting ones but also simple enough to be translated over to 3D. I also thought the silhouette, again, was more visually interesting and that when made into 3D could be pushed even further. 

A lot of the concept art had some elements that were just mindlessly sketched too in favour of creating an interesting silhouette, instead of thinking about more practical elements of the design. With this chair concept in particular, looking at it again from a stand point where I was about to model it, I realised that I couldn't make a lot of sense out of the arm rests. The shape looks cool in the concept, but I think translating it over to 3D would mean rethinking the design a bit in order for it to make sense. Some of the other chair designs suffer from this on a grander scale too, with many of the ones in the middle looking quite grand but I think in reality wouldn't make a lot of structural sense. Perhaps they could be a fun and unique challenge to model, however, given the fact I felt quite nervous and rusty with modelling anyway; I decided to go for a simpler design that I still thought was effective.

I decided to start with the back of the chair to ease myself back into it. I knew early on that I really wanted to sculpt this model, so I kept that in mind - making each "part" of the chair separate objects instead of extruding from different bits of itself. I kept it relatively low poly at this point because I thought these kind of organic shapes would smooth nicely and keep the silhouette later on as well, given that the topology allowed for it.

I then decided to move on to the arm rests, the part I was probably dreading the most, to just get it over with... But, I remembered I could just take a far more comfortable approach; using the create polygon tool in the mesh tools option.
(1) I went into the frontal 2D view and simply made the silhouette I wanted the arm chair to have from the front wth enough vertex points to make sure it could still eventually be smoothed and rounded out nicely. 

(2) Still in the 2D view, I added cuts and a loop through the middle to fix the topology and mostly give it quads. Some points needed triangles, though I tried to avoid it, but it was crucial to keep the flowing silhouette. I also made sure to add the middle loop because I thought I'd might like to bring that loop out a bit to give the whole arm a rather bulbous appearance later on, accounting for that. 

(3) Now in the 3D view I just extruded the whole object outwards, mostly trying to match the overall size in comparison to the back of my chair at the minute.

I also added the a "base" part that would connect the two eventual arm chairs together on the bottom. I only extruded this out towards the vertical half of my chair, because I intended to fully model only half of the chair at the moment, fully UV that half, and then be able to mirror and merge the objects that would be esentially identical and symmetrical on the chair; like the arms here. This was just so I wasn't individually modelling things that needed to be the exact same and wasting time. 

The actual very bottom base of the chair with the legs was a bit more awkward and I wasn't too sure how to approach it. I still think my approach was most likely not the best, but it worked for me and still made sure I wasn't individually modelling identical parts, so it still saved some time. Similarly to getting the arm silhouette, I drew the actual "leg" in the 2D view with create polygon (left in the image above), extruded, and UV'd it (again, so that I am not later on UV'ing the same object 4 times). 

I then needed to attach these four little legs to a shallow plank of wood for the bottom frame of the chair, keeping in mind the exact rotation each leg needed to face and such. 

I ended up bringing in a new square to create the base of what you see in the right image, just without the legs. I placed one leg on the corner where I wanted it exactly, and then made a hole in the base where I could combine both objects and then just target weld the required points together to actually fill in that hole. Rinse and repeat with one other leg on the same side, and I was able to just mirror the whole half to get the same on the other side too. 

Not much is to be said about the actual seat, however. It was just a simple square. I made sure to add a few more edge loops though because I wanted it to smooth nicely in Maya later on but also give me enough faces to work with when put into ZBrush later. I also added a bevel along the outer sides so that the pillow just felt a bit more fluffy even at the low poly stage here. As you can see too, I messed around with some individual loops and points to add some volume to the pillow, making it feel flatter in the places where I imagine someone has sat on it for a long time, etc.

I then had all my main parts of the chair and just needed to assemble them. As you can see also, I ended up deleting various faces and parts of some models because they would not be seen when all properly put together, so there would be no point in rendering them etc. I also smoothed these parts and tweaked each one a bit more, for example, I added some extrusions to both the front of the main tall part of the chair back and also the arm chair to define where I wanted the padding to be. 

For the embellishments at the top of the chair from my concept, these were quite odd to do. I took various different approaches before landing upon my final method. I knew that I wanted these to be like carved wood from my concept with some spirals carved in. Again, with such a weird shape, I used create polygon in the 2D view once more to get the right silhouette I wanted. I kept trying to include the actual carved inner spirals in the model with various extrusions going in and out. 
I ended up realising I didn't need to do this and that I was just losing sight of what was more important on this asset. I didn't need to actually model these indents on the spirals to such perfect degree because I knew I could just simply sculpt them entirely in ZBrush and the baking would make it look good, and pretty much how I intend. 

Now I just put everything together and checked it out so far. On the right is how it was looking. I felt like it just didn't feel right. It wasn't looking as visually interesting or had the same kind of chunkiness and fun silhouette that I usually love from games like Sea of Thieves (which I was referencing throughout the process). 
So I combined all of the parts so that when I selected something to deform it, it could also do anything around it too, and went to work on making it all look a bit wonky and funky. I selected a point from the top and used soft select and made the overall top half of the model bigger. Similarly, I did the same with the bottom, making that overall smaller as to make the chair more top-heavy. 

I also made the rotation of the top of the chair a bit skewed to the left as well, like it is leaning over. It felt like it had way more life this way. I made sure this was at the very end too, after everything had been UV'd appropriately and had no texel deformity. A lot of it was manual taking a point and moving it but with soft selection turned on and brought to a massive radius it was quite simple and was just trial and error.

At this point, I felt like I was almost referring to a lot of the accumulated character design tips and tricks that have been floating about in my brain for a few years. I ended up liking the idea of making the chair silhouette a lot more cartoony and top heavy, as it felt like this silhouette deformation gave the chair a personality of its own, like it transformed into a character. I ended up leaning into the top-heavy silhouette a lot more as I felt like it perfectly aligned with the tone and personality of the whole environment, and specifically my dwarf wizard character idea -- very silly. 

At the time I was also researching some things for my contextual and literature review essay, and was taking notes from a GDC talk from Peter Ellis on the art of Fortnite. 

I was really inspired by these two images shown in the presentation; how Fortnite stylised their assets and the general guide they followed. There was lots of kinked line work and funky silhouettes. But sometimes the concepts became too funky, so they made a guide (right image above) to make sure things were being stylised properly - not too much, and not too little. 

In the left image, this example was used to show their initial rethinking of the style of Fortnite. It was said in the GDC talk that the game was initially a lot more realistic with its style, a lot more in the horror direction, before it got to its current style. 

Peter Ellis explained that when figuring out the style they just took their realistic assets they already had and simply applied some deformations to it just to see how it'd look and fit. 

I really loved this because it is literally something I frequently do in my work a lot! This technique was taught to me early on in my third year of the BA by my lecturer Josh and ever since then I've been obsessed with it - so it was nice to see I was doing something literally used in a massive game like Fortnite too! 

Anyway, here is my final UV layout for the chair. As you can see from the right image above, there is not any texel deformation and I also allocated a lot more space for areas of focus in the model like the chair back/padding and the arms.  

SCULPTING.

I wanted to start with sculpting the padded parts of the main pillow, given that this was the main part of the whole asset. But before that, when I imported my chair into ZBrush, I made sure to separate the major parts (like the cushion, small pillow, chair legs, and arms, etc). This meant that in ZBrush I could simply hide the parts I wasn't working on at the moment, and also ensure I didn't accidentally make a chance on the wrong piece. Kind of like Photoshop layers! 

After this, I took a screenshot and did a very quick sketch in MS Paint to map out where I wanted to sculpt the padding (image above) and their buttons. I wanted to go for a more triangular look rather than a more realistic, rounded look. I was heavily inspired by Sea of Thieves for this and throughout the whole process, so, I thought I'd continue this. 

I started with placing these 'V' patterns, trying to match my plan above. I just used any normal brush for this -- I think this one was clay tubes. I was not being precious at all, as I was pretty much just placing my own boundaries and I knew that the end result will end up looking a lot different anyway.

Carrying on filling in and building up volume! I wanted these padded areas to look full and quite voluminous.

I got to a point where I was happy with the general volume of each padded triangle, and so I started erasing some areas to make space for the buttons.

I added the buttons and also started to smooth my whole sculpting up until now. With a small line brush, I also added some depth in between each padded triangle to try and sharpen the shapes and make them pop a bit more, as I noticed some of the padded areas were starting to bleed together into one shape when they were meant to be separate. 

Inspired by Sea of Thieves and general stylised sculpting as well, I also went in some areas with an edge polish brush to create some carved, edgy parts. 

I also experimented with adding some marks around where the buttons are where the fabric would be pulled. I ended up not going with this element though, because it looked too out of place with the style. I found that a lot of these experiments (I tried more later on, too) would actually add too much detail, and create an odd mixture of heavily simplified and stylised art, and then weird realistic details like this. When I then took to referencing other art styles I liked similar to what I was going for, I found they also left out intricate details like this.

At this point, I asked around for some feedback online and from some friends to see what they thought of this sculpt. I was worried that something looked a bit too off, and perhaps too stylised in one direction. A common statement was that it looked like stone, rather than soft cushioning, which I agreed with.

To experiment with this, I played around with some modifiers within ZBrush. Generally on all of my models I create within this style, I usually finish with adding the clay modifier, which emphasises the nice flat and sharp edges I like. In this case above, I felt like there was still some potential in it, but at the current moment it was still way too strong and even made it look MORE like stone.

I think I then ended up finding a good mix between the two, and ended up toning down the stoniness. I found that this was able to blur the padding but also keep the silhouette and distinct shapes I made, which ultimately is what I wanted -- as I was not trying to create a convincing realistic asset, but leaning towards something more visually interesting and unique.

With the chairs of the arm, since they are inherently rounded in most of the areas, I had to also plan how I was going to add in my edgy and sharp style and create edges that stood out but also look natural.

I tried to split up these parts into different rectangles and squares that still kept the general flow, since these bits sort of spiral in their own way. These annotated areas are where I tried to split up the bulk of these pieces. I found that it was quite easy to go overboard with these elements too, making things look too spikey and then overall take away from the fact it was meant to be a soft, comfortable armchair. 

For the wooden spiral details, I also continued with the same philosophy. 

Moving onto the next bit - the pillow. This bit was possibly the most straightforward out of them all, as very little needed to be done do it, sculpt wise. This is because I felt like I really did have to keep the 'structural integrity' in a way, making sure that I did very little edge sharpening work overall. It was important to me that this part still felt like a soft, comfortable place to sit, given that no pillow is rarely ever with sharp edges.

To try to introduce some interest in this pillow, I experimented with adding a large cut where the inside stuffing was seeping out, perhaps from a cat scratch or something. I liked the idea of adding this because I felt like it would add some visual storytelling to the asset, which I've learned is an important thing to add in order to create good assets from many places, but particularly from many League of Legends resources and tutorials.

I sculpted out the little cavity where the stuffing would fit, and added some spheres to create the base shapes of the stuffing.

But... No matter what I did, I just felt like it looked really odd and out of place. I thought it didn't make sense to have an excess of these very clearly rounded sphere stuffing areas, but on the other hand, if I went in too much and sharpened up the stuffing, I would lose the rounded spherical shapes I had and it would no longer look like stuffing at all - or in this case, look like stuffing even less.

When I was trying to figure out if it was worth it or not to keep trying with this and see if I can incorporate it, I found that zooming out to see the asset as a whole and physically taking a few steps back from my screen helped me to come to a conclusion -- this detail was far too insignificant to include. I thought that the chair's silhouette and shape language was its best and most interesting feature, and I didn't want to take away from that. When you look at it closer as a whole, too, I thought that your eyes -- or at least mine -- were far too attracted to this out of place element, instead of taking in the whole asset.

Another reason I felt it ended up unneeded is because: when I planned the design of this asset anyway, I ended up adding the little pillow on the left side to introduce a small amount of visual interest and variety in the first place, which I think is what I was also trying to do with this little cut and seeping stuffing on the pillow. I thought that having BOTH of these elements would perhaps detract from the objective each of them served -- and that the pillow itself did this well enough.

Moving onto one of the final parts, the chair legs. This part was so minor and was less significant compared to the rest of the parts, so I felt like it didn't need a lot of attention. I just generally took an edge polishing brush and ran this over the edges of the model here. 

However, I did encounter an odd thing, though it was easily fixed. Sometimes on the legs there were faces that were missing, which created holes. I just used the ZBrush ZModeler tool to close these holes though, since all you need to do with this is click the edge of the place you want closed. It was quite a quick fix that didn't really impact the whole process. 

After this, I was able to just finish the model and do final little details in the sculpt. 

I was ready to take this into Substance Painter and bake!

This sculpt was also relatively low-poly too, so I didn't need to decimate it or anything like that. I think this is because I wasn't doing a hyper-realistic sculpt, but a simple stylised chair instead.

So then I put my chair into Substance Painter and baked... And zoomed out, it looks alright! I think you cannot see any obviously glaring problems, however...

Upon closer inspection, there were clear problems in the baking, but seemingly only where different pieces touched or were close to touching. They were really annoying! I couldn't wrap my brain around them at first, as I couldn't remember what else I could do, though I knew there must be something -- I just hadn't remembered it!

At first I thought this problem was because I ended up merging all the parts together into one static mesh and, of course, baked all as one. 

So then I tried importing into Substance Painter a file from Maya that was still one file but had all the separate pieces -- still the same issue. All this meant for me in Substance Painter was that I could, similarly to Photoshop layers and my ZBrush setup earlier, I could toggle off and on different parts.

This didn't fix my problem, though.

I played around with literally every baking option and didn't fix it. I thought perhaps it could be a problem with the cage projection, and that the radius could be too large, but even with playing about with this I couldn't get the issues to go away completely. Some options were better than others and reduced the amount of the issue, but, none were PERFECT.

I thought that I even forgot to soften the mesh in Maya and perhaps this was the problem, but once more, nope. 

THE SOLUTION.

My boyfriend suggested I explode the mesh, which I was quite hesitant to do. For some reason, I have never done this before nor had to. Usually within the last year of the BA I genuinely never had baking problems and it was always straightforward. This is why I still think I was forgetting to do something probably quite simple, but, it doesn't matter too much now. He found this picture above to explain it to me and apparently it is a method that is quite commonplace, frequently used by Riot Games he found in research he had done previously. 

So, to start with, I have all my low poly parts in Maya laid out like this, separate. I wanted to give each part plenty of room to avoid any weird projection on the bake, if I had to make the projection cage really large, for example.

Next, I imported my high poly sculpts from ZBrush. Thankfully I made sure to already save two different versions - the combined sculpt, and sculpts with the parts separated into their own files as well.

Though of course, I had to make sure that both the high poly parts and the low poly parts were in the EXACT same place, otherwise the bake will not be perfect. However, this was not the problem I envisioned it to be at all. I turned snapping on, and made sure I was only moving each part along the same alignment and remember the amount I moved. But, I just turned the move tool's increment quite large, to move 90 degrees each time. Same for the rotation tool.

I could envision this being a problem though if my high poly sculpts were in fact of way higher amount of poly's. My computer thankfully handled the current amount well, and it didn't lag or crash. But I'd like to avoid in the future ever having to put my raw, high poly sculpts into Maya because it may not be handled so well. But, this method of 'exploding' was not intended to be in my pipeline at all from the start, and I believe in the future I will be able to make preparations for this early on and know when I'll need to use such a method.

Then, I import my low poly exploded assets into Substance Painter, and apply the exploded high poly sculpts as the bake meshes. 

Bake - and as you can see, perfect! No weird overlapping parts or glitches.

And then, to go back to the normal combined parts mesh and the way I intended to work, I edit the project configuration to change the selected exploded mesh to the normal, combined chair mesh. This change does NOT effect the bake at all, which is how the 'exploding' method works. 

Here you can see how the bake looks in all its fixed and perfect glory. From the close up too, you can compare this with the past not-perfect bakes, and see the new evident amount of NO BAKING ISSUES!!

TEXTURING

Now we're past baking... It's time to texture! Any problems here on out will be of creative dilemma and decision making, which, is honestly worse than technical problems.

I set up my folders and separated the parts once more, for the same reasons I did last time - being able to control what I am specifically working on, and just general organisation. 

.

Here is how the chair looks textured in Substance Painter.

I also uploaded it to Sketchfab, which you can view below. On Sketchfab you can view the 2D texture maps and also rotate the model in 3D, as well as see the wireframe, etc.

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/wizards-chair-066842ba3bff414281fac174003e1970