Christmas Personal Project – The Fox, Hare and Bird Diorama
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During
the Christmas break, I made a mini low poly diorama based off a design on my
bed sheets which had a collection of forest animals on.
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I wanted
to see now that my house was complete if I could make a project in short time
frame that I was happy with, and the idea for this piece had been in my head
for a few weeks at this point.
Mood board:
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To begin,
I made a mood board of different diorama pieces that I thought would inspire
me. I also collected images of work that had simplified/stylised foxes so that
I could guess what would make the fox fit a low poly style better.
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The
project was to be low poly because I had not approached high poly workflows
yet, and I also had to hand paint the textures because we had not approached
substance programs yet.
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I made a
sketch of the diorama quickly using colours from the bed sheet, as well as from
my references of Japanese hot springs since they were environments that would
feature bright colours in contrast with the snow.
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Mood board |
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No Snow cap iteration drawing |
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Snow cap iteration drawing |
Modelling:
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I will
not go super in depth into how I modelled everything on the scene for this
project since this post is meant to just document that this project exists.
This was the blockout I made of the piece, including some basic rock textures
since the rocks were the same object repeated many times, so I wanted to unwrap
it only once, and it also features some alphas inspired by the bed spread. The
water, animals and mushrooms were also textured, and the ground plane had a
basic tiling texture to mimic the background of the bed spread.
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The tree
was the only thing I modelled differently – I created two assets, one for the
trunk and one for branches, and then created some splines in max for where I
wanted the tree to have branches follow. The assets had plenty of geometry to
allow them to deform along the spline with the deform path tool – so the tree
looks like a combination of branches that split naturally.
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Because
the animals were so low poly, I modelled a basic shape for them and then posed
them manually. This is a destructive way of doing this, but I do not know how
to rig yet and imagine we will cover that next term when we do characters, so I
left it for now.
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I was
happy with the look of the model, I thought it worked well to mimic the
appearance of my reference and to be a 3D diorama piece.
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The water
textures are basic now, but I do hope to add a water shader instead of the
manually painted water since it would look more dynamic in the scene.
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Model Blockout |
Unreal work:
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Going
into unreal, I thought I would be able to make two versions of the scene: one
in the day with snow, and one at night with some fireflies. I have covered fireflies
before where I used a tutorial for the house project, so I wont cover that
here. The snow was also from a tutorial (See this link: https://youtu.be/sw1HAmAnYFQ), so I will
not go into depth on that here. Basically, it was a simple circular white
material set to spawn over a large area with a collision box on the scene to
terminate when it hits an object’s collider.
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For both
scenes, I thought to add at least a normal map to the water to make the scene
more dynamic. I used this tutorial (see here: https://youtu.be/r68DnTMeFFQ) on how to
add multiple normal maps with a panner to create a water effect, and then went
one step further into looking at toon water shader tutorials to add a white edge
to the water. I used this tutorial to look at how you do that, and then blended
both tutorials together to create my final material (see here: https://youtu.be/5zoflexdo70).
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The
waterfall was a bit different. I again used the water ripples tutorial to add
some extra dimension to the flat plane, but I then also added a flipbook
animation to the water to make use of the texture I made before. This, although
it looks a bit choppy, fits the style of scene well; the whole scene looks like
it could have been a paper cut out, so adding some simple animation stops the
water from seeming to high resolution compared to the whole scene.
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Since I
wanted it to look like the scene was the same but at different times, I added
the snow caps to both models.
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Finally,
I made two separate lighting set ups for the different times. The night scene
had no snow and had the same fireflies, as well as an exaggerated glow in the water
to compensate for the lack of overall lighting. I also added stars, which were
just the fireflies with a longer lifetime set to spawn far away from the scene.
The snow scene has an overall flatter bright lighting set up which mimics the
effect that snow fall has.
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Still water material |
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Waterfall material |
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Snowy Day version |
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Starry Night version |
Final Conclusions:
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I was
happy with the outcome of this, and I posted this as my first post on
artstation which has some other screenshots of lighting, as well as making two
different video flybys that show the scene in motion more.
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The
artstation post can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8ezJkE
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The snowy
day video can be found here: https://youtu.be/gVYeexxnqYA
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And finally,
the starry night scene can be found here: https://youtu.be/QcM3aCDvCaw
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I may
return to this once I know more of the high poly workflows available to me,
probably over my free term/summer period.
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