Brave New World

[Razc (RazKun)]

Hello everyone! My progress on my project has been slowing down exponentially as i came closer to finishing up my WIP on creating more toon like styled characters.
I’m hoping to make a little bit of a web series based on a story i’m writing. The story has inspiration from numerous things i enjoy but the strongest influence comes from an old game i played that was really important to me. The world in my story i think will look the most like it, or at least the beginning it will.

So as my characters aren’t 100% finished i think i would greatly benefit from creating the world about them to allow myself to figure out how things will work and what else i need to add to the characters.

So as of this moment i havn’t started on it yet but i needed to post this to help push myself along into getting started. some… life events have been keeping me down lately and i really need to get back into the groove of things.

So for the first little town that the characters will be seen in i went and found a picture of the town from that game to show you. I do not want to replicate it exactly, rather use the image as a reference to capture the same feel or style of the town.

Things appear to be wooden and naturally looking with the use of metal as more of a decoration added onto things.
The town was quite small so things wern’t overly pretty. The stone floor looked kinda dusty, the fences wern’t straight, it had an decent wooden bridge over a river and the city was divided into North, central, and east.

So i will start giving it a go soon but questions i have right off the bat are:

• anyone know of a skybox like that i could use? it’s incredible.
• if the world is quite large (say this town is on a large island and there’s another island they can get to) should i make both islands in the same file?
• I hear that you can make a high detailed version of an object for rendering but have it view a low detailed version in the 3D view. Anyone know more about how to do that?
• How high poly do you think textured landscape has needs to be?
• Would water simulations be too much effort for a calm river that isn’t often seen?

Thank you ^-^

oh and if you want to see the characters, my favorite test of them is a lip sync test i did.

[WarLoc3D]

Can not let this one be unnoticed. Can’t help you with your questions. I like your approach though. Hope you keep getting progress.

[Modron]

pretty cool. one thing though…brave new world is the title of a very famous sci-fi novel.

[Razc (RazKun)]

I’m glad you’re excited ^-^

I think i was thinking of a song when i wrote Brave new world, I don’t really have any intentions of naming anything to do with that. I actually don’t have a name for the project yet but i feel like it described the atmosphere very well (:
Alot of people i know that try projects always get stuck on what to name it first thing and never get around to it because they can’t think of a name. So i’ve just been completely uncaring of the name through the whole process, but i could probably start giving it some thought.

I have tried to make the ground a few times now but i think i have everything scaled wrong. So with how large i wanted the island to be, It gets a little weird in blender where the 3D view’s render distance isn’t far enough. I’m assuming that means i need to take everything in my project and make it smaller? i mean, maybe that’s going to far. i should look through some settings first. If i take one of my characters and lay them on their side they pretty much take up the grid floor s:

So what i ended up spending some time on lately was thinking about the objects that would go in the first town and try and create sort of an “append Library” of a bunch of things. I made a list but i think i should still extend it further.
And for the objects i have made already i need to do some texuring on.

The keyhole shaped thing is a low poly reference of the size of my characters. well… the male ones since they are a bit taller.

[Razc (RazKun)]

So i feel terrible that i’ve been away from this for so long. Often times i’ll make a post to try and pressure myself into getting the work done. But at about the same time i posted this, some…life events… have been hitting me…
I hope that’s understandable.

Anyway it got me down for a while and i havn;t been doing much blending since. But this entire time i’ve really really really really wanted to get back into it all. And i use the childish repeating "really"s on purpose to express a more true desire in that sentence.

So moving on to the progress,

I have discovered that creating land in the way that you want it to is… very difficult. I tried a few times using several methods to create land masses in the way i was imagining them. I was leaning very strongly on making the first landmass to the story be close to the origins of my inspiration (that video game)

As much as i want to be different than the things i’m inspired by i can’t help but feel like i want to follow them so that there is less confusion and trouble along the process.

I tried taking a plane and sculpting it. There’s probably a good way to do that but it didn’t work for me. looking back on it now maybe dynamic sculpting would have been better.
I also tried modeling a base shape of the island from a reference image. Also did not work well.

And so finally i went looking for some tutorials on making islands. I found one on CG cookie, i can’t quite recall who was voicing it but i know i’m going to have to go back and find it again later. They used the ANT Landscape add-on. I was familiar with it but felt like it was too limited. However, after watching someone else use it again i learned alot more about the settings and found an interest in it again.

If i have to force myself to be creative… well… i wont ever get anything good. all my creativity in my life has been by serendipity, or paradollia.

So i thought i should at least take a shot at finding a landscape seed that i like for the story. Or, get creative with something randomly generated i should say rather than stick to my roots.

I saw a crescent moon like shaped island after a while and i thought it looked really neat but kept looking. After a hundred or so seeds the crescent shape really grew on me but i had messed with too many settings to retrieve the one from earlier. So i started a new file to get the default settings back and tried to make another crescent shape island and eventually found success.

The idea of the first season of my story is for characters to use a newbie like area of monsters to begin their training for what they will do later on. And so the island has to be set up in a way that they have a more or less straight path to follow as the monsters get tougher the further they venture out. I really liked the crescent for that reason. It’s a straight path but still has a style to it and could lead to some insight in the story aswell being able to see the end of the path off in the distance from the starting area and all.

So i need to sculpt the land a bit to allow for specific areas i want to be focused on but i need to plan it out first.

here’s a picture of what i’ve started.

The (1) that i have circled is where i would like to place the starting village. I hope to make some mountains around it with some steep cliffs to the water though. The overall feel in the story is sort of a “to the sky” feeling, and i don’t think a beach is very good for that.

The (2) circled is where i’m planning to put an entrance to a cave at the end of their training journey. The cave is not meant to be apart of their training but is a sort of accidental adventure that erupts within their training. I like where i placed it because that side of the crescent slowly dips down into the water and i think that covering the top with alot of trees gives could give it a mysterious feel and help give the idea that the cave actually extends under the ocean.

So what’s next is to make a list of the monsters the characters will fight, imagine an area for them and sculpt them into the land along the way (:
I have an idea for alot of the monsters already but there’s still a few gaps and if needed i have back up plans that i could get around them with. I’ve learned from other stories that involve a step by step adventure that not all the steps need to be seen if they are too repetitive.

So anyway, those are the thoughts i’ve been having on this project.
I’ve learned a bit about texture painting and i’m excited for that aswell for once.
and as for modeling the first village like i think i was mostly focusing on in the first post of this, i am very excited to start there after the planning is in place. It’s going to be fun texture painting a bunch of wood pieces and stuff for the little houses. I just need to loosen up a bit and try not to get caught up with the extreme details of copying my inspiration out of fear that my ideas are no good.

My little sister was in tears the other day trying to learn to draw. She would make 3 lines and crumple it up and throw it away.
I told her not to give up just because she made a mistake. And that if she would at least complete the drawing once she would feel so much better about a completed drawing with mistakes, than a bunch of crumpled up papers of her giving up.
And then i looked at my own projects and had a nice smack in the face that i should listen to my own advice.
I just need something completed for once.

[Razc (RazKun)]

So for an update here, i did some sculpting to give he island more detail in places i felt it needed to have for the story that takes place. Then i hit a wall when it came to texturing the island because it is somewhat high poly and for some odd reason, some faces in the mesh refused to be painted on. It was like they were going on strike or something. But thanks to some help here on the forums i was able to get past the wall by being shown how to do UV Sculpting, as well as learn about a different shading mode? called GLSL i think? that allowed the strikers to go back to work.

And so i’ve begun some basic texturing to give myself an idea of where the beaches are, the rocks, and grass.

I think my next step is to learn texture stamping. I’ve seen it once before some time ago but i need to remember how to do it so that i can stamp rocks onto the rock faces and some details into the grass to save hours of paint staking painting of rocks. cause, there will be quite a few.

then maybe i’ll make some trees, mesh rocks, a bridge or two and finally feel ready to get back to making the town area (:

[Razc (RazKun)]

So i hit ctrl s every 2 seconds but i made the same mistake that i always do in that ctrl s doesn’t save the texture that your painting… So even if i give it a fake user 3 i seem to go away from the project and the image is there but all the paint is gone.

I was a little upset at first but i decided to take what i learned from the first try and apply it to my 2nd try.
There’s nothing i hate doing more than doing something over again that i didn’t like the first time xD

But i jumped straight into it without putting it off, and i must say it came out better than if i would have kept going on the original.

and if you wanna see me crash all over the place in the flying mode… lol xD

I think it looks great but at the same time i’m worried about the size of the characters. I’m worried that some areas i sculpted are smaller than others when it comes to the image on my head. so i may have to scale characters or other things between episodes.

but i gotta take my own advise i gave my sister the other day when she was trying to draw “Don’t give up when it doesn’t look good, at least get something complete because you’ll like a complete anything more than a bunch of crumpled up papers”

So i gatta let go a bit and just get these first episodes goin d:

[juca_rios]

Amazing job! for the question 3, I think you’re looking for a “real-time render” , if you’re using cycles you can tell blender to display in the viewport a real-time not so detail render, just go into the viewport shading menu and click on “rendered”, it depends on how many RAM / GPU power you have on your computer, I hope this can be helpful. Really a nice work I’m looking to see it finished!