tHE PROCESS OF
AN AFTERNOON
TOGETHER
I was given the freedom to create something I had complete control over in the second term of my 2nd year. Since at that point I haven't had a lot of practice on creating stylized assets, I thought that taking inspiration from the game Ooblets (by Glumberland) would be a good direction for me to go.
I decided to base my project off of the things I enjoy doing the most as I am stuck at home in lockdown, and I went for creating my dog and myself relaxing in a park near my home, which I would make into a diorama.
The first thing I did was block out the biggest things included in the diorama. This included the main handful of trees and benches.
When done with sculpting my modular set of flowers, I UVed them and started scattering them across the scene.
As soon as I was finished with that I made highpoly sculpts to replace the blockout.
There were three unique trees and 2 of the same ones, with one being a little more squashed than the other. The shrubs were also the same asset, as were the benches.
Everything you see here was sculpted in Zbrush.
With UVs and topology done, I tested my textures in Maya to make sure I was happy with them.
When creating the environment I of course had to make sure that it was consistent with the style of Ooblets. Every asset in the scene was inspired by something that already existed in Ooblets apart from the benches, as I wanted those to match the ones that were in the park I was referencing for this diorama. As I didn't own the game itself, I would constantly look through the portfolio of Sander Verdickt - https://www.sanderverdickt.com/ooblets
The next stage were the characters. Once again, I constantly refenced other Ooblets characters to replicate their style and look, whilst making the model look like me. This was the case for my dog model. This was an extremely fun process, as it was quite interesting to see myself and my pet in 3D like this.
After that, of course came the retopology and UV process, and then the textures.
First render
Once everything was ready to go into engine and I could finally start building up the scene, I organized everything the way I wanted it. I also added cel-shading to the scene, as it was something very prominently used in the Ooblets game. Next, I moved on to rigging my characters in order to pose them. And then I was done!
final renders
modularity layout
ambient occlusion
normal world view
