My art director did a rough plasticine model to shape concepts, so then I made rough meshes. I am cleaning up the meshes now, making clean loops and the like. It takes a while, but it is nice work. I find this much easier to get a good form instead of pushing and pulling from a cube or a sphere, eg. scratch. It is.. nice to do a rough overall shape quickly out of simple geometry so you can get a rough shape quickly but putting shapes together. like drawing.
Like above. I am working with my AO rig, fine tuning it. I find you can happily have high Shadowmap resolutions with low Sample rates. In final renders, just amp up the samples and it looks fantastic! For modeling, for speed sake i keep the maps kinda low and the rest low also. i have put some lights in objects, and experimented constraning them to objects to add some light bounce. So far it looks quite nice and atmospheric. I love soft shadows, and the muddy look everywhere does look good and makes thigns more realistic and grungy. It's a style!
so after a short while, this is what came out. Something like out of dreamworks of pixar.. more or less.
From there I boolean everything together. I try keep the polycount kinda low. The unions get dirty or have bad meshes, so I do a "heal verticies" with increments from small to large to clean most of the mess up.
After that, I clean the mesh. I use clintons object info plugin to find Ngons, and I too clean those up. I also clean up mesh loops and make sure I have closed and clear loops. This is quite a zen like process and can take some time, but you get good at it after a time.
I was feeling so zen after that that I got the fern/leaf shader and made two quick ferns with deformed double sided planes. I also stuck spheres with reflections in the scene. i like working with soft shadows and plants around. It makes it so much more pleasant!
Here is a 3D version, sometimes working in 3D helps you get an idea. I use two screens, one for editing, and the other for viewing in 3D. It is a lot of fun!
So.. be in store for more today.
