Week 3 (Egyptian Area)

Intro BA7 Designs

So for my third week i am going to be focusing on designing three of the main set pieces for the egyptian area. The other two objects will be designed throughout the fourth week. Below are my BA pages on designing the assets in the coming week.

BA7 Research  Egyptian

Alongside my design reference the research reference will be used to help gather any information necessary. 

Photo Reference

Egyptian Pillar modeling

So i have finished creating the basic mesh for the objects. The meshes have been altered in areas to create a sense of damage to the pillars. most of the detail will come when adding normal maps to the textures. The Pillars are broken into two objects to maximise UV space. I am going to spend the first day of this week designing some egyptian style engravings to post around the pillars. These will be handdrawn and added as an overlay throughout the design. 

Below is a UV snapshot of the main part of the pillar. The largest outline at the bottom is the main cylinder and the engravings will be designed in mind for fitting round this UV page. The areas at the top of the UV are the damage aspects of the pillar, and will be a slightly different base texture compared to the rest.

Hand drawn normal map design

Alterations in Photoshop

Addition of engraving and texture

Variation of Pillar Designs

To create these six variations i simply altered the layer property on each from left to right

Pinlight, Overlay,Color Burn, Linear, Multiply, Soft light

I still have a day left planned to spend on making these pillars i am going to choose two of the six i have made and shall alter the mesh and Texture Sheet. After looking at each pillar i have chosen the three i liked were Linear, Multiply, Soft light

I also developed two blank Pillars each different that will accept various materials i have made that can be added easily to the mesh.

Casket 

The casket is another asset that i have set myself to complete this week. While designing the casket consideration of the scale were used by importing the lich bodies i have already designed.

After creating the mesh texture sheets were designed for the two objects. 

To finish off this asset i also changed the geomitary slightly to make a more carved/ smooth effect.

As i still need to complete the egyptian chest this week i plan to stop working on this casket, if time presents itself which i have planned for i will make slight changes to this mesh. My only issue being the small amount of falloff at the top of the texture. 

Chest Egyptian

Now that i have designed my original concept in maya i am unhappy with the style and structure. This is primarily due to the pillar additions, and the accurate representation of egypt, as that sort of style is out of character for the theme of this area.

Reference material

 

After looking around i have chosen this to be a favorate of mine and will work to design something similar next. Note This chest was carved out of calcite, though is normally made of ornate and beautiful materials

Base design

Texture Ideas

  

  

  

After seeing the result of the last texture sheet i drew and  placed in the texture sheet of the Egyptian "Pillar" after seeing its effectiveness. quickly i decided to spend more effort in the Egyptian style, because of this i received these books from the library

• Write your Own Hieroglyphs   (New book)
• Spells of Eternity                      (Used in BA7)
• Witchcraft a History                 (Used in BA7)
• Celtic Inspirations                    (New book)

By taking imagery out of these books i laid out some concepts that can be added to base textures sheets. Primarily this is for the chest design but i also have sketched a few concepts for one of the Egyptian walls, all of which i am drawing out and looking into how to write hieroglyphs effectively to enhance the scene. However my scanner is out of action until Tuesday causing me to have issues with creating my texture sheets for this object. Yet this gives me more time to come up with some designs for both Egyptian walls and have the drawings for each asset ready by Tuesday.

Now that i have completed some of the artwork i am ready to start making texture sheets for the assets in mind. Using these illustrations as an additional layer to bring out aspects that i want to be promenent within the assets. Now that i have this base line done it is time to begin work on the egyptian chest texture sheet. 

The egyptian walls were remade after i felt them to be too angular, to solve this i redesigned the walls quickly in mudbox and then re imported ito maya. I also felt some decal would be needed to add to this area so i created four different ruble meshes to add more depth to this area of the level. In total i made four seperate blocks to be used as ruble through this area.

This is a near complete version of the egyptian area. it is laid out as i planned it from BA7 the ground was not perfectly aligned but it is an example of what this area will look like by the end of the project. With some slight improvements i am going to apply after i have a basis for the rest of the area.