Native american Area

Native American Area

Intro

This area of my map is going to be focused on the sioux tribe, and the way they preserved and conducted funeral rights and death. Because this area is going to be set outside and atop a cliff side only a few modular 3d models needed to be designed. Keeping in line with the native american ways, i will be designing a range of different idols that were commonly used in funeral rituals and the raised grave which  were used to hold the dead body.

Base Idol Creation

To start the design of the native American idols, i created a base made of wood and started designing small leather strings that will hold up various trinkets

Trinket design

Alot of these idols are going to have variation in the attachments i have made from the base. 

By understanding the materials and items that were used in Sioux culture it allowed me to understand what some of these idols would could of looked like.

• Feathers
• Bone
• Wood
• Leather 

With these materials in mind i made a range of small assets that will compliment the area, items such as bone charms, religious relics and feathers. I also decided to add small easter eggs into some of these idols and have symbols from the other cultures i have been designing, such as the valknut, ankh and reverse pentagram. 

I created these 3D symbols  using paths in Photoshop and importing and modifying the paths into polygons. 
To create the hanging leather i used EP curve tool and converted them into polygons. This skill is really usefull skill to know and will be usefull through the end of the project and will be usefull skill in all future 3D design.

Variation of idols

 As i wanted to design a range of different idols i spent a long time working on trinkets and different  feathers that i could add to various idol bases to create a variation in style and looks. In total i wanted to design around seven or eight of these idols so they can lead a path around the small native american area. By altering the size of the wooden beams and the amount of them it allowed me to have a variety of style and looks with each  different idols I also discovered a new way of designing assets using paths and photoshop it helped me design complex symbols in a 3D format such as the valknut and ankh which will be usefull for both personal knowlege and assets around the area. 

Conclusion of idols

In total i designed eight different idols that are now imported into unreal, due to the size of my texture sheets and normal maps, ive had to up the field of view attribute in unreal to stop it from appearing blurry compared to the rest of my assets. 

In all this is the halfway point through my native American area leaving only the raised grave to finish off area.

Start of raised grave

The other asset that needed to be designed for this area, is the raised grave. This is how the Sioux tribe preserved there dead. I started by designing the wooden legs to get a base layout. I also added some cloth aspects to the scene. Such as the hanging cloth around the front and back of grave. I also added a small amount of cloth aspects going round the beams that hold the object together.  I then added the character rig "Norman" to the scene and placed  him in a laying pose ontop of the raised grave and created a n cloth that would drop over the body to create the effect of someone under the sheet. I also ended up using a lot of the trinkets i used in the idols to add around areas of this area. With in mind to the factor that the lack of thick trees around this sort of area i decided to keep to thiner wooden poles to keep this asset in design with the original idea

I also incorporated a small easter egg in the format of an ankh a valknut and a pentagram onto this asset, to show the relevance of the four areas. Though my project is more leading towards a more focusing on death culture throughout the four areas. I still am adding small easter eggs throughout to try and keep the concept of the four  areas being meaningful to one another. A task which i feel is going to be hard to achive as without much narrative in the level the hidden narrative must be hidden amongst the assets.

Native American Headdress

A small add on to the raised grave that i added is the headdress. This wasn't part of my original design.  Yet after doing small amount of work on feathers i felt like this would be a good addition to the set of designs for the native American area. I started by designing the feathers, and combining it to a head brace. From here i used the bend tool and created a curvature for the object. I then designed two texture sheets for each,feather and applied them to the headdress. To finalize the object i added two leather straps to hold it in place on the raised grave. I am happy with how i made this asset is was fast and efficient, only taking me a few hours, This shows a clear improvement in my skills  from the beginning of the level to the end. Yet i am happy with the clear progression i have shown even if it simply in this asset. It is probably my cleanest assets up to this point and i hope to keep up this quality for the final area.

Texturing The Raised Grave

 Getting the texture for the raised grave took me a while, due to some UV issues After a while i  started to clean up the uv sheet by hand and designed more onto the texture sheet to try and make it stand out a bit, i originaly tried to achive a white sort of dye for the inscriptions but decided to brighten up the texture a bit more. I also felt that this style of dye would of been more used in native american culture.

The long poles were trying to mimic a cut wood texture similar to pine. I used a range of idols that i had already used in the native american idols, this helped bring a bit more detail into the models.
I finally applied two more ncloth meshes hanging on the front and back beam each with Siox Symbols of God, and eternal life.

Normal Map alteration

When adding normal maps to this model it started to get some bad falloff around the seams of the model this was due to the UV sheet still being a bit patchy. Because of this i decided to relay the sheet as a Ncloth, this fixed alot of the issues with the falloff and still kept some detail of the normals from the paints. I have shown exsamples in the images on the right, top view is before new Ncloth, second is with the new NCloth and normals applied.

Raised Grave in Unreal