Dungeon Crawler Environment Art - Week 7: A rocky time

This week I have made a big effort to try to actualise my project and piece it together so that I can see where I'm at in the project and evaluate an actionable path to move forward after feeling a little behind.

I have been trying to apply my tileable textures, my trim sheet and through this I have found issues with my trim sheet in particular as I felt the textures didn't quite match up and complement each other as I'd like. I'm yet to successfully get my new and improved trim sheet onto an asset properly and working this out is a key area I'll be focusing on in the coming weeks.

I readjusted the map as I felt the pathways around the outside were too wide and didn't give a feel for a large enough 'drop off space' between the central structure which will eventually feature my shrine. After taking away a 400x400 on some of the sides it also balanced up the overall shape of the octagon to be more symmetrical and consistent.

Stone wall texture

I wanted to make a cornish stonewall inspired texture so in zbrush created rocks and duplicated them around following a tutorial for tileable textures and did this stone by stone.

All the rocks prior to mortar added

Cliff rock

I have made a 'master rock' a cliff rock that I have made in zbrush and then retypologised and added my wall texture to it and then duplicated this around my scene to create a background cliff face.

Zbrush>maya>unreal

I've found this flow seems to be most appealing for me with more natural flowing forms like making the rock felt quite simple.

For more hard surface I'll stick with maya for now then into substance to add additional texture detail (skipping out the zbrush transition and adding height info in substance).

retypo

Adding cliff rocks in. I had to scale them up massivly as the original asset I created was too small, so I'm possibly losing a lot of detail with this, however they are only background elements so hopefully it shouldn't detract from the overall environment.

On the left is the previous structure (already with some blocks cut out). In the centre is my almost completed new and improved structure. And in the bottom right you can see the group shape I used to duplicate the sides of the structure with floor tiles and pillars.

Improved structure as seen from above. You can see now I've started to conside the bridge element. I'm measuring out how many tiles it is so that I can rebuild this in maya.

Forward plan

Bridge

I felt that my blockin shapes for the bridge rails didn't feel very diablo and felt a lot more kiddies playpark railings. I have now thought that instead of having railing I may have a thinner (harder to traverse across) stone bridge. Keeping consistent with the stone from the cliff this dungeon is built around. I'd also like to have some kind of lantern structures on either sides of the bridge to frame it as you walk on and possibly off as well.

Wooden plank edging

Around the octagon I'm going to make some wooden beams that wrap around the dungeon floor and act as a support for the drop off. With the distances I'm going to build planks which cover 2 tiles of 400 (800) in length or 1 diagonal tile (566) in length.

The wooden planks will be 3 identically modelled simple planks joined together.

Corner plank metalwork piece

At the corners I'd like to create some metal work which wraps and holds the wooden planks in place. this will be at a 225degree angle and I'll build it as a solid shape that can go through the wooden planks.

Additional metalwork pieces

In the middle of connecting planks I'll have a smaller shape that breaks up the structure and adds interest and contrast to the burnt wood.

Tileable textures & Trimsheet integration+

I'm going to seek out some tutorials and look through the mural content to see if I can figure out what's going on with my textures.

Textures to fix:

Wall tillable stonewall texture - ready to apply but comes into unreal and warps around the wall. - I will attempt a solution to add geometry to see if this helps smooth out the texture.

Light experimentation

I started to play with lights in unreal to get a sense of the space, I enjoy the purple hazy light coming from below and would like to explore that later on in the project when I have more of the structure complete.

Unreal 5.4 vs 5.5 - oops

Unfortunately I completed this work in unreal 5.5 so had to revert to an old version on fork and rebuild this in a new repo, I decided to create a totally new repo to avoid any chances of 5.5 coming back into my project and deleted 5.5 off my system at home and downloaded 5.4.