Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it.

With this week came the start of the team splitting off into their specialisations; with Ellie, Hazel, and Carrie working on characters, and Liv, Jacob, and Chris working on the environment and the assets to populate it.

Ellie began to work on King Duncan, modelling from Carrie's concept as reference. In the end we chose to round out the shape of the concepted beard slightly as it was looking a bit too stylised otherwise when sculpted. A base sculpt was created in ZBrush to get the body proportions and the face right, then this was exported to Marvelous Designer to create the clothing. The clothes were then taken back into Zbrush for heavy polishing. The crown was created in 3DSMax, and detailed in ZBrush. Duncan's sculpt was around 90% completed this week, with just some polishing and another detail pass to go. She has also been tasked with creating Lady Macbeth's model, and will work on the two in tandem, taking them through each stage of model creation together.

This week Hazel worked on Macduff. She used a mix of Marvelous Designer, Zbrush and 3DS Max. We all checked up on each other's work to make sure we were keeping a similar style and level of detail while sharing brushes for things like pores.

Hazel also created a large asset list for the rest of the environment. It's quite a lot of work so handing out all the assets and making sure they're done on schedule will be important.


Carrie began work on Banquo - starting with the base mesh (which began as z-spheres), then working on the face.

Carrie also worked in marvellous designer to create the base for the clothing - there were various issues along the way so the result is incomplete.

With more research into tunic patterns and how to use Marvellous Designer, the clothing - tunic especially - may be completely redone. All in all, though, MD sped up the process tremendously despite the lacking knowledge of how to use it properly.


Jacob (written by himself):

So the terrain of the levelled was modified to something that is closer to being called finished. I made the terrain itself smaller, then more dense, and then I fixed a lot of the stretching before making it larger and less dense again. There is still some stretching but this might be a good thing as it may add some variety to the tileable cliff texture.

I then followed a tutorial and created a grass texture from scratch in Substance Designer which I feel would fit well into our level as it's a fairly realistic texture with some touches of stylisation. I also set up the texture to have modifiable parameters such as density, rotation, lengths and width.

I then put that texture (and a cliff texture I created in Bitmap 2 Material and Photoshop) into a terrain material that is ready to apply when I get the chance.

I applied some lighting to the corridor leading to the stage room just to make from progress with the lighting as a whole. The dreaded peach lighting has made a return which seems to be an inconsistent problem so hopefully we'll find a solution to that soon.

Due to the fact that we had light leaking through some of our level last week, I started to remodel the interior of the castle and theatre in 3ds Max as hopefully this will help the light leaking. Hopefully it will help with the texturing too.

This week Chris created some additional assets, such as a barrel, additional variants of books and a first pass at some apples for the banquet table. Some previous assets were also revisited, with additional detail being added to some such as the cupboard in the form of hinges, handles and metal detailing. He also took all the wooden assets he had created and introduced some consistency into the wood, giving the wooden assets intended to be outside a more de-saturated look, and those intended to be inside a more bright and saturated appearance.