Behind The Concept
I have always loved Greek mythology and when I was considering what type of environment I want to make, something in the realm of Greek Gods and Goddesses seemed like a good way to go. Apollo, Greek God of sun and light, is honored at a temple in Delphi. It is a glorious temple and served as great inspiration for me.
I knew I wanted to create a more stylized play on the concept though, as a game designer and developer I wanted to make an environment fit for a video game and that is something that I've considered throughout my entire design. I gave my environment multiple areas worth exploring and wanted to keep the arrangement of my scene whimsical and not restrictive. Since many of the building structures are made of hard lines and rigid geometric shapes, I wanted to go with a more rounded and organic environment.
Buildings ~
Temple of Apollo Progress
Greek Display Hall Progress
Warping
Here I added deformers to help wrap the hall against the side of the environment wall, I also added a deformer to cinch in toward the bottom of the model and expand the top portion.
Greek Treasury Progress
Environment ~
Small Environment Assets Progress
Base Environment Progress
Points of Interest ~
Style Mismatch
When assembling my scene I realized that my temple came across as too realistic and detailed and didn't quite match the environment. So I shortened my model, removing some of the length and columns, and scaled up the model until I felt it matched better.
Deformers
I also played around with warping the Greek treasury to better fit along the curved wall. This is something I'll play around with in all of my buildings to give them a little more character.
Initial Thoughts
Since I am still fairly new to UV editing, this step did take me a little while and I'm sure there are probably ways I could have done it better to make texturing easier for myself. This step also pointed out various issues with some of my models, the most major of which I was able to quickly fix.
Uniform Style
I used a grunge paintbrush texture on most of my models, this was to keep uniformity and because I like the somewhat painterly effect it gives the models.
Layered Materials
In order to get the texture to work with the cell shading I needed to create a layered material that could take an image for color output and the toon shader material for transparency.
Brick Texture
To create the brick texture on the outer walls I needed to first make a brick-like texture which I layered over a color layer and then I put the grunge layer over it. I played around with the colors and transparencies of each layer until I was satisfied with the result.
Test Run
Did my initial render test and found that the toon shading doesn't show in the Arnold renderer in Maya. Also there are some blurring issues.
Post-Mortem
My process for this project began with designing the concept, I was inspired by the Temple of Apollo in Delphi but wanted to create a stylized game-asset version. Designing the structure I decided to go with a circular, more organic shape to complement the hard geometry of the temples.
For modeling I worked in Maya where I began with the temples which were pretty strait-forward followed by the base and smaller assets. I originally had the temples more realistic, longer, and with more columns and shingles but I didn't think this matched the landscape or the playful feel I was going for so I decreased the scale of the temple, number of columns and shingles, and increased the scale of the shingles. I also added deformers to the temples to have them better fit the environment and to give them a more cartoony vibe. I added painterly/grunge style textures to the various elements to give the environment a more whimsical feel.
I created cell/toon shaders for the model, I really enjoyed the effect of these but found they were difficult to work with when transferring the model to different programs. I was able to successfully recreate the ramp shader and outline effect in both Maya and Unity but not in Sketchfab which I find to be the best resource for displaying 3D models. I also found that I was unable to use Maya's toon shader in the Arnold renderer which complicated things further. I maintain a version of the environment with the shader and one with just the textures.
