Final-ish render for the fort

This is the final image I presented at GDC this year. I received some pretty good critiques. Perhaps I shall learn lightmapping and take it into UDK now.

Exercises

A friend showed me a painterly exercise on conceptcookie and I thought I'd try it out. Here's the link to the exercise.

This is my result so far:

I've noticed that my stylistic abilities are lacking. It's a bit hard to let go and think outside of what you normally see everyday. I also have problems with saturation and blending hues. My painting gets pretty muddy and streaky. I also get careless and not zoom in. What I learned is that when painting, it is important to zoom in with a small brush and have more TLC for whatever it is you are painting.

Tiling textures

a w.i.p...

Grass and Dirt take 2

So I reworked my grass and dirt textures after studying Kuko's textures and I have to say I actually am satisfied with the grass :D

Here it is tiling in maya:

I think I may need to rework the dirt a bit more later, but I am done with the terrain for now. Moving on to finishing the foliage. I want to try to have this all in UDK by this Saturday.

Palm trees

So I fixed up the bark textures and painted some leaves today. I still need to paint some ground foliage, but I'll get there.

Here is what the tree looks like placed into the scene.

Now that I look at it, the tree seems a bit overwhelming. Going to ask for opinions.

Treess?!

So I've fixed the tangency of my model so far. The textures still need refining but I figure I should finish modeling and texturing all the trees and foliage before I go back to refine them.

My first attempt at a palm tree was a bit humorous, it looked like a pineapple tree. Needless to say, it wasn't working out well for my environment. This was when I forgot how important references were.

After looking up some references on "jungle and tropical trees" this is what I have came up with so far: a gray type bark texture for the palm trees and a darker wood bark for the smaller leafier trees. I realized I should prehaps invest in a botany book or something so I can actually look up the names of these trees for better references.

It seems that blogspot has super washed out my texture for some reason, but in photoshop the textures are a lot darker o_o. The brown bark texture is tiling pretty nicely in maya, but the gray bark has some obvious tiling issues. Still need to tweak them.

Making things better

So after some critiques, I've manage to change some of the models to emphasize more on the silhouette. I think it reads a lot better and is closer to the concept.

Edit: minor changes in textures. Going to need to fix the roof tangency next.

Fort in marmoset

So I threw in the model with textures and am currently messing around with the light settings.

Fort Final....sort of...

So I added some foliage and went back to refine some of my textures. This is my final image of the fort in Maya:

I was also working on some tileable grass and dirt textures. I dread painting it because it seems unnatural and premade:

Someone mentioned that my grass looked too much like an "American dream lawn" and did not look wild enough to be found at a pirate fort. So I attempted to repaint another grass texture:

I found this grass texture to be a bit more fitting. I blurred it because I wanted it to be subtle and have a softer feel like the grass textures in WoW. It's still a bit far from what I wanted it to be, but now I know that grass is one of my weakest areas.

This is my first attempt at tileable dirt. I realized that it looks more like a rocky ground texture rather than dirt so I tried to soften it a bit more.

I will need to repaint the grass and dirt textures before I can finally render it into Unity. 

Ropes o_o

Just wanted to do a quick update. I finished up the door details and added in some rope. I can't believe it's taking me 3 months to finish this x_x. I have to work faster. My goal is to be done with this is by Wednesday and have it presentation ready by the end of this week.

 

Edit: I've notice areas that have some tangency occurring. I may have to adjust the model or just zoom out a bit for my beauty shots later.