Howdy!

This week I was able to make some progress on building my cabin based off of JiaYing Liang's Warlock Hut concept art! This project will involve making a short stylized horror video rendered in UE5 and I'm excited for what the future holds over the course of this semester. I've been able to secure a mentor with Michael Gayk, a designer from Plural Studios and my past professor here at TAMU. I'm excited to see how he can help me in modeling a stylized cabin, as Plural Studios does a lot of architectural and interior design work.

Anyways, here's my breakdown of Liang's art and how I'll be approaching the modeling process from here on out!

I've segmented his concept into easily digestible parts in order to ease myself into the process. I'm not very experienced with hard modeling in Maya, as I'm mostly proficient in VFX done in Unreal, but I like the challenge of learning more about other parts of the game dev pipeline.

Using the breakdown from before I was able to assemble this asset list below:

As a side note, it's looking like I'll have to switch around the process of making a model and THEN making a material for it for the foliage I'm planning on making, as the model will most likely just be planes in the rough shape of the final texture. However, since I need the texture to "carve" out the shape of the plane first, I'll have to see whether or not I can build materials for the loose foliage before starting to model.

HOWEVER (again), there's also the consideration of maybe just modeling in Houdini instead. That way, I can non-destructively change the shape of the individual planes I'll be using, unlike the way I'd have to do it in Maya (unless I use instances, but that can get messy pretty fast in my experience.) I'll have to see.

Here's the modeling progress on the cabin!

And here it is in Unreal (with a quick ground model made in Houdini (that's subject to change)):

For next week, my plan is to figure out how exactly I want to approach the problem of making foliage, finish the non-tree flora models, make changes to the ground model, make some more progress on the cabin model, and take some time to do a first pass on lighting the scene.

See ya next week! :)