I went for the 3D environment artist and for this term's assignment I want to try and do a Naughty Dog environment art test and put it in a snowy environment.
So, as usual I started by gathering reference. Started with how the Naughty Dog environments art test look like and what makes them interesting, what I would like to include in mine and, of course, snow.
Started to do a quick sketch of how I imagine the environment. Did a quick block out but as you can see in the images below it did not look that interesting, so I decided to change it a bit. Is still not the final layout but it is an improvement.
Started to model and do the Normal Map and the AO Map for some parts that I new for sure that I would use them later on and I new how I would like them to look like.
I was really hard at first because it is the first time I do this and good videos that can explain what I needed to know were hard to find.
After searching for couple of hours on YouTube and on other websites I managed to find some tutorials that could help me.
The first one explains how to get from a clean mesh to a more damaged one.
The process was easy, fast and enjoyably so I had used it to create almost all of my assets to this point.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMVeXv4bv9A
I also went and did some rocks and tried to do some snow with some tracks using only a displacement map for the snow.
For the rocks I found a very well done tutorial which explains how to do them, step by step.
That process was used to create all the rocks from my scene as well as other objects.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtuKo2Tp1V0
For the snow, I had to go on other websites which have tutorials for Blender. So I had to watch them and try and adapt them to Maya.
The best one that I could find was on Blender Guru, but I could not replicate everything that he was doing, so I had to ask by tutors for help and try and improvise other solutions.
I do not know if I will use that snow in my final work but it was fun making it and I had the chance to learn some new stuff.
Link: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/make-snow/
