Week 5 was the start of our production phase. Since we had the first draft of the style sheet for the environment done, we had to test whether our findings and inspirations would work in the case of our project DTC.
I, together with Quint from the art team decided to conduct the art tests in the following way:
Model an asset (building in our case) from start to finish
Create textures to apply to the created model
Import inside models and textures in Unreal 5 and preview results
Discussions and iterations.
We wanted to quickly test our ideas so the results were rather unpolished but the main focus was speed and quickly transferring ideas into 3D.
The initial result of my and Quint's buildings inside Unreal 5
Taking our models into Unreal 5 made us quickly realize one thing- we needed to overexaggerate both the details in the buildings and textures. Having the details real-life scale appeared to be too noisy when seen from afar, so we opted to exaggerate the shape of windows and doors for the models and increase the size of the shapes in our textures. This helped with readability from a distance while still looking good up-close.
Up-close view of the buildings with now up-scaled details
However, we came across another issue- the type of stylization that we wanted to go for. As there are numerous ways of 'stylizing' something and we still had different approaches to texturing with Quint. After a handful of discussions, we decided to go for something between the lines of realistic and stylized- the number of details would be kept to a minimum and we would favor bigger shapes for better readability. We could also fake in some additional information like lighting and shadow information into our textures if it proved useful. Finally, we decided on the colors to be not as vibrant as I had them in my brick texture but more desaturated and with more color variation, close to what Quint had.
Putting everything together at the end of week 5
Textures that I made for the building model
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