Over my spring break, I went on a week long trip to the Southwest. Seeing so many unique rock formations was enlightening and a great source of inspiration and reference. This past week I've been revisiting my project with some newfound perspective.
Here are several things I've worked on this week, or will be working on in the near future:
Here are several things I've worked on this week, or will be working on in the near future:
- Populating the environment. Although minimalism can sometimes feel dream-like, the map I've been working with has primarily been a test scene. I'd like to give this shoreline area a sense of space and add more rocks to accompany the main rock arch I've been testing with.
- Pushing the painted visual style to be even more loose and expressive. I've started to do that this week just a bit with the rock, but I'll be continuing to work on this for the ground, the ocean waves, and the boat.
Recently I was looking at some of JMW Turner's paintings. His ability to effectively capture and communicate a scene or a moment with such expressive brush strokes and colors is something that's really inspiring to me, and my vision for this piece. I admire the way solid objects seem to dematerialize into atmosphere -- that fluidity of matter is something I'd like to achieve in my work as well. With all of his seaside themed paintings, it's a wonder I haven't been looking to these paintings all along! But it's never too late for some fresh inspiration.
Here's a test I did with flow maps for the wax melting. This setup involves a normal and height map's UVs panning by a 2D flow map I've painted. It is revealed by a linear gradient mask being pushed down. The mask is blended with the flow mapped height map and a noise to break up the linear quality. What works pretty simply on a cylinder is a little bit more difficult on a complex model. So I've been spending some time trying to work out a method to get the wax flowing along the surface angle of the rock arch model seamlessly. I've painted a world space flow map using Mari's Vector Brush tool, and I'm using that as a flow map to modify the projected UVs of my flow texture. |
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- Procedural spline tree system, animated to enable growing trees. I hadn't worked with it in a while, but last semester I spent quite a bit of my time developing a procedural spline tree system, which is based around Unreal Engine 4's spline and spline mesh actors and uses a recursive method in a Blueprint for generating branches. The idea that motivated me to develop this was to enable trees to grow around you dynamically.
This works well for the trunk so far. The issue with the primary branches and all of the following tiers will be maintaining the relative position of the child branch on its parent branch as they both animate. Additionally, a custom set motion path for every single branch would be a ridiculous amount of setup and user control, so I hope to automate the motion paths for the recursive, procedurally generated branches.
Here are some lower priority, but still important tasks I've been considering:
- A character. I've been imagining this environment being explored in third-person, perhaps by a flying light orb character with a ribbon-like light trail.
- Music. An ambient soundscape would set a nice, quiet mood for this environment.