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Weekend Project: C3/DS Metaroom BG
I've tried to make a C3/DS metaroom background a few times (okay, a lot of times) through the years but I've always bounced off it, either due to a lack of skill, lack of any concept or scope issues. I thought I'd work on a really simple one as a weekend project / proof-of-concept kind of thing, since I think I'm at a point where this is a thing I can actually do.
Concept sketch: MS paint doodle. Rough concept of a Japanese-style garden with a big cool tree as the focal point. Honestly wouldn't be a very interesting room to use in-game, but that's not the point here.
WIP Step 1: wow, this rendered out darker than I remembered. I've used Path curves for the perimeter (one for the general perimeter, one for the dome perimeter) with Full fill, bevel set to give dimension, curve radius tweaked to vary thickness, etc. The ground is just a plane I've plopped down and extruded according to the concept.
WIP step 2: I've extruded the ground back out a few times to give it some depth, have shaped the basin for the pond, and dropped a subsurf modifier on it to smooth it out.
WIP step 3: Starting with a cube I've extruded out the tree trunk. The top of it is still pretty funky here. It's mostly going to get obscured by branches and foliage later, so that honestly wouldn't have mattered.
WIP step 4: refined the tree trunk just a bit, added in the background dome and wall, roughs for the bushes and very rough rocks. These are mostly for composition at this point. It's hard to tell, but the dome is half a UV sphere rotated and resized to be the right shape. The background wall was a plane I extruded out to fit the perimeter of the dome and then extruded out to fill the remaining space.
WIP step 5: Got absolutely lost in the weeds for like an hour or two trying to figure out a good material setup for water. Still not happy with it- right now it's very noisy in render and the front isn't quite right. (The white sphere is just a test of the water's behavior.) Foliage added to the tree: I roughed out the shape of a branch in vertices, skinned it, adjusted the thickness, subsurf'd it, decimated it down. Grabbed a free flower texture online and mapped it to a plane, gave it a little dimension, set up a basic material for it. Set up a particle system on the branch for the flowers (using vertex group to paint density), tweaked it until I got okay results, converted the particle system to a mesh, and then finally set up a particle system on the tree using the new branch-and-foliage object (again using a vertex group to determine particle density). It works okay. The scale and density is a little off.
WIP step 6: Very minor changes here. Very minor changes to the scale of the tree's foliage. The whole scene is getting quite dark so I cranked up my lighting strength a little- right now it's just a single sun lamp and a spotlight, but really it all needs a bit more help. It's only going to get darker as I cram more stuff into the scene.
... and that's the point where I got tired. Let's see what I can get done tomorrow!
Concept sketch: MS paint doodle. Rough concept of a Japanese-style garden with a big cool tree as the focal point. Honestly wouldn't be a very interesting room to use in-game, but that's not the point here.
WIP Step 1: wow, this rendered out darker than I remembered. I've used Path curves for the perimeter (one for the general perimeter, one for the dome perimeter) with Full fill, bevel set to give dimension, curve radius tweaked to vary thickness, etc. The ground is just a plane I've plopped down and extruded according to the concept.
WIP step 2: I've extruded the ground back out a few times to give it some depth, have shaped the basin for the pond, and dropped a subsurf modifier on it to smooth it out.
WIP step 3: Starting with a cube I've extruded out the tree trunk. The top of it is still pretty funky here. It's mostly going to get obscured by branches and foliage later, so that honestly wouldn't have mattered.
WIP step 4: refined the tree trunk just a bit, added in the background dome and wall, roughs for the bushes and very rough rocks. These are mostly for composition at this point. It's hard to tell, but the dome is half a UV sphere rotated and resized to be the right shape. The background wall was a plane I extruded out to fit the perimeter of the dome and then extruded out to fill the remaining space.
WIP step 5: Got absolutely lost in the weeds for like an hour or two trying to figure out a good material setup for water. Still not happy with it- right now it's very noisy in render and the front isn't quite right. (The white sphere is just a test of the water's behavior.) Foliage added to the tree: I roughed out the shape of a branch in vertices, skinned it, adjusted the thickness, subsurf'd it, decimated it down. Grabbed a free flower texture online and mapped it to a plane, gave it a little dimension, set up a basic material for it. Set up a particle system on the branch for the flowers (using vertex group to paint density), tweaked it until I got okay results, converted the particle system to a mesh, and then finally set up a particle system on the tree using the new branch-and-foliage object (again using a vertex group to determine particle density). It works okay. The scale and density is a little off.
WIP step 6: Very minor changes here. Very minor changes to the scale of the tree's foliage. The whole scene is getting quite dark so I cranked up my lighting strength a little- right now it's just a single sun lamp and a spotlight, but really it all needs a bit more help. It's only going to get darker as I cram more stuff into the scene.
... and that's the point where I got tired. Let's see what I can get done tomorrow!