Reply To: COLLAB2021 – HQ – Stylized Fantasy Environment

📢 Announcement #3: Blog, Syncing Saga & More

Some inspiration / Food for thought

@andybegg shared a great video on Discord of an artist overviewing their modular game environment methods. The style and structure is very similar to our project. I wish the video was published when we started the Collab! But still it’s full of timely insight about this kind of work. NOTE: None of it is done with Blender but it’s the concepts we’re interested in here, all of which can be translated to Blender. I highly recommend watching for inspiration and to gain some bird’s-eye perspective:

Splat’s Blog is LIVE

Splat has launched his Blog to detail the Collab from the inside! Expect to see meaty content about what we’re learning from the project, interviews, tips, tricks, and spotlights on asset progression. Check it out regularly as he updates each week!

Google Drive Syncing (and a Revelation)

Google Drive has proven…cumbersome, right? Thankfully @blanchsb has recorded a fantastic tutorial video about getting synced to this project’s shared folder, including insight about working with the .blend’s organization. PLEASE WATCH THIS IF YOU’RE CONFUSED:

Also I finally understand how Google Drives storage works thanks to comments in the most recent stream! Each file submitted is only counted against the owner’s storage. So if everyone’s google drive storage has 10 GB available, technically this means our project has 890 GB or storage!

This is a huge revelation. This means that we can be far less restrictive with our storage. In short: If you have Google Drive storage available to save 20 WIP versions of your scene, you can do that. Whew I’m so glad I understand this now 😅

Week 3 Homework & Update to Texture Parameters

Week 3 is all about map baking and texture painting. In short the assignment is 4-fold:

1. Unwrap UVs for your LO-poly model(s)
2. Bake HI-poly details into two maps: Normal & Cavity
3. Hand-paint a Color Texture Map
4. Setup a material using these textures.

Here’s some parameters regarding Texture resolutions and file format. During the week 3 stream I said to keep texture resolutions small (1024, 512px). Ultimately I think the final version of these textures will need to be small like this, but 2 factors have changed my mind:

• Such small textures look hideous up close. This is really lame for individual beauty renders of individual assets, which I would 100% want if I were you. In fact I intend to make that a final homework assignment: rendering a beauty shot of your asset. To accomplish this we need bigger texture resolutions.
• Since we have more Google Drive storage than I originally thought, we can sync bigger textures! So long as you have available storage space.

Therefore I am raising the cap on texture resolutions. I recommend a minimum resolution of 1024 for small assets (vase, lantern, etc) and as high as 2K (2048×2048) for larger assets.

As for texture format, please save your NORMAL maps as 16 bit PNGs and your COLOR + CAVITY maps as 8bit PNGs.

Save your textures in the TEXTURES directory within the sub-folders, the same way you’ve been doing with you .blend files: SPICE-VENDORS-HOUSE/TEXTURES/

Please do your best to follow this naming convention: category_asset-name_username_TEXTURE

• EX: acc_lantern_monaloren_COLOR
• EX: acc_lantern_monaloren_NORMAL
• EX: acc_lantern_monaloren_CAVITY
• EX: nature_FG-tree-A_danitufi_LEAF-ALPHA

Most assets will only need color, normal, cavity, and leaf alpha textures. But the exceptions will be the creek, clouds, etc. For such exceptions you can save whatever you need in terms of textures, just change the suffix part of the file name.

** IF you saved textures in the TEXTURE directory before the stream yesterday, I placed those textures in the _OLD folder. Please move those into their proper folder before continuing.

Week 4 Buffer

Week 4 was always intended as extra time needed to catch up and polish your assets. So if you’re running behind on any of the home work do not worry! You’re welcome / expected to use the last week in April as time to catch up.

I’m grading based on the effort I see each week, relative to each artist. So long as you’re submitting work that you clearly attempted each week, you get points and feedback.