Week 1: Viking Tavern Asset Swap and PBR

Well it's the start of my second year of university, first week back and I've missed everything. 

I missed this week due to outstanding circumstances out of my control, so I couldn't attend any lectures. However I caught up the following week in the first 2 days so I could go back and make this blog post.

Our first warm up project was a group project and the brief was to make the assets for a viking tavern scene; a table, a barrel, a bench, a shield, some cutlery and a hog. It sounds pretty simple, however each assets had to be passed along to another team member at each stage of development. So each team member never fully developed an asset by themselves.

However, since I missed this week I had to fully develop an asset myself, luckily one group was missing a shield, so I took on the project and produced the following work in about a day and a half.

Sheild Mood Board

At each stage I had Freddy Canton from my group give me feedback on what ideas to ditch and which to push forward in place of having the asset being passed on. It was really valuable to have another person's input on each stage of development.

Shield Concepts

Final Concept

Shield Model

Shield Unwrap

I found everything up until this point fairly easy but the course had a big shakeup in the summer and I was thrown in the deep end and had a mini breakdown when I learned that there was a new way of texturing. Physically based rendering (PBR). It definitely took a while to get my head around but once I did things began to flow smoothly again.

Shield Texture Maps

Above are my final renders for my shield. I'm really proud of what I achieved in the little time I had to catch up, sure there are faults that I want to improve but for how I've done in the time I had, I'm proud.

I've learned two main things. The first is that feedback from your peers is invaluable, everyone wants to see each other improve and they can sometimes provide the insight you need because you've been looking at your work too long to notice whats wrong, what can be improved etc. 

Secondly, Unreal Engine is horrible.