Through the gate

   At the beginning of the week I explored colour pallets which I plan to begin on next week. This week however I focused on finishing and planning my unwrapping. I've got 2 x 2048's to play with which equates to 8 x 1024's. So set to work splitting them up as evenly as I thought was best. Also I'm leaving room for some alphas for foliage I haven't yet done. Its been a long week for more than just work related reasons and I think I'm slightly lagging behind despite doing 11 hour days...its tough being a game artist.

   Mike P had a chat to me at the beginning of the week and told me to scale it down a bit more than I did last week, and also got me to think more about the composition involved when peering through the gate. originally I thought the project was more focused on what's behind the gate, but from what I was told on Monday, I'm to focus on the literal view through it.

Notes over paint.

   With that in mind I did this over paint over of notes of the starting view, it includes a few things I had already done by this point. Like the building placement and the way I opened up the gateway a little more to allow more in the shot. I also tried to arrange assets to draw the viewers eye in more, I did this with the sloping of the building roofs and the walkways. The other notes are for things I hope to achieve in the future such as the foliage and rocks in front of the gate and finding something to break up the plain skyline.

Photo bash over paint.

   Afterwards I made this photo bash over paint to help me visualise my goal better, this was nothing special and didn't take me long but the impact it has on your view of the project is huge.

   I took my hand at a bit of 3D coat this week, and decided to lower the poly count of my floor mesh that I made in Zbrush. First time using the program and I feel like a pro with it. Its so simple. The controls are so easy you can retopologize with one hand and the results are great. But after retopologizing, Mike K mentioned I might not want to use a normal and AO with my mesh as the size of it would be distorted and be a waste of texture budget. So I scrapped my newly retopolizied mesh and went back to the old higher poly version, also scrapping the maps i'd made.

3D Coat floor mesh progress. 

Layouts coming along nicely.