FMP 10- Clutter Props

This post will be covering the previous two weeks due to massive technical difficulties in the final level. The lighting was completely broken, with strange pixelated shadows and areas of bright light everywhere, but I eventually fixed this by turning shadow casting off on the skylight and the cubes the rooms are built around. There were also several problems with the tool being reimported, which was mainly fixed by tweaks to various settings. 

After taking a break to recover from that frustrating experience, I began making clutter props. 

Again, the process is similar to my previous props, with the high poly models mostly coming from chamfered, turbo-smoothed low polys. The props are separated into three materials, due to their different material setting requirements. There are opaque props, translucent props and subsurface surfaces. The modelling involved more splines than usual, which I quite enjoyed. Lofts and lathes are quick and easy to work with, and conveniently less destructive. I had to go back and add smaller elements such as a candlewick and lamp handle, but luckily this did not interfere with what was already unwrapped. 

The heart was the most difficult prop to model, and it took a few hours to sculpt in ZBrush. The top section required frequent random brush strokes, and there possibly could be a better way to get the same effect, but the manual way worked well enough I think.

The heart was also quite difficult to texture, as it took a while to get the transition between fat and muscle, but curvature masks, subtle height variation and faint veins gave it a nice meaty look. The table legs also reminded me of something I hadn't been doing previously, which was adding a subtle gradient to the wood. I then went back to add this to other props. The book pages are separated to stop strange baking artifacts, and to stop bleeding textures. These textures will need to be further developed in Unreal, specifically the subsurface and translucent ones.