I realise I have been quiet on here - this has been due to finishing my last project and setting up a new portfolio.

The finished project -

My new portfolio: http://clairewarren.carbonmade.com/

I may still do some adjustments however I have decided to call this done for now.

I have a new exciting idea for a personal project. It is a winter scene with some Christmas elements. The idea so far is that it's a secret place in a forest with snow covered trees and an iced over lake. A clearing in the woods. Someone has made this into a bit of a wonderland - fairy lights in the trees, a snowman, two pairs of ice skates - a pile of presents perhaps. This secret place could be a father's present to his daughter or a gift from husband to wife. I think I'm going to try leave the interpretation open.

The idea is that it is a secluded spot and there are trees surrounding it - a hint of a light in the distance from a distant village.

I havn't fully painted the concept yet but will show you a reference and the beginning on an ice skate I am making.

So the climbing plant is just about ready to go into UDK.

The Process

To create the textures I first created leaf and branch textures in Photoshop, I then applied them to the mesh in Zbrush. The leaves each had an individual UV map from earlier before I duplicated them everywhere - so I knew that the leaf texture would work. The tree branches' UVs were created in Zbrush and then I imported a texture from Photoshop. 

One important step is to add some colour variation to your leaves otherwise they'll just all be one colour and it will look like a block of green. I did this by polypainting in Zbrush. You need to first polypaint from texture (using your leaf texture). Then using the paintbrush with colourise turned on and RGB (turn off Zadd/sub) you can paint over the current texture. I turned the brush strength right down to just 1 and then painted different shades over the leaves. I just used a yellow randomly applying it to various leaves and that seemed to work quite well. You are basically painting on the vertex - so if your mesh doesn't have enough divisions this could be an issue (just sub-divide more). You can do something similar in UDK but it would have taken far too long with all those leaves.

Finally I used the GoZ funtion to extract both the normal map and diffuse map. I created specular and gloss maps in Photoshop.

The image on the left is the plant tiling x3 to give me some idea how it will look as a whole. The Ivy is on a plane of 18 polys - so very low. The 3D appearance is mainly created from the normal map (below). It's using an alpha channel at the moment for transparency.

I have finished placing the leaves!! Phew!

By the way I realise how I said this was Ivy - well it's clearly not - it's a climbing vine plant. I had ivy stuck in my head because that was the original plan. I apologise if I disappointed or even offended any ivy lovers out there.

So next up I will be running some tests - checking this works as a normal map and that it duplicates well to make a mass of this plant.

A little about my project. I am working from a concept by Adam Baines (below). I'm working in UDK and this will be my first full game environment! This is both exciting and daunting all at the same time.

The climbing plant will replace the roots on the viewer's right hand side. This is pretty much my last major asset - I am near the end of the project (I've been working on this for a few months when I can). Once I've completed the Ivy - EDIT - Climbing Plant - I'll be fixing some of my current textures and adding some extra detail. I'll talk you through what I've already completed in another post.

Started adding leaves... this could take a while. Maya has totally crashed with the millions of polygons so I've moved back to Zbrush.

Ivy adjusted to not look so repetitive and a little bit thicker -

I thought I'd create a space to share all that I learn on 3D Art - particularly game art creation. It's also a place you can watch my progress on my 3D journey. I'll just jump in there and get started. I'm currently making some Ivy -

Vines are being currently created in Zbrush using Zspheres -

My leaf is modeled in Maya -

I'm planning to work some more on the texture above and project it onto the leaf mesh.