Getting the Ball Rolling

With the drawbacks of my laptop, as previously mentioned in earlier blog posts, and the limitations of time, I had to make a few changes to my desert environment. I intended for it to be as photo-realistic as possible, but aside from the time it would take to model and texture to that standard, it would take far too long to render on my fragile, broken system. I had to settle to aim for a video game style, and gave up on the idea of including my model lizard.

A still taken from World of Warcraft

So, with two weeks to go, I began modelling the assets for my environment. I began with my tumbleweed - unsurprisingly, I couldn't find any resources online on how to model one, so I had to create my own way of doing so. This involved extruding long, thin cubes, lots of duplicating, and eventually taking it into ZBrush to gain more control over how the branches curled around into themselves.

Once I was happy with the results, I started rendering and testing different light sources:

I then started on the large piece of driftwood - like always, starting out the rough 'sketch' in Maya, then taking it into ZBrush for a more precise sculpt.

 

I took my texture maps into Photoshop for a quick edit - the maps looked almost like silk! I made a number of different versions so I could experiment to see what I liked most.

Edit: I've since added some wood grain to the textures for a subtle add of realism.