World of Warcraft The Travellers INN U70 LO2,3,4

For the world of Warcraft competition brief i started of by putting together a mood board of WOW environments to see what styles i would like to go for due to my inexperience with wow so i could be inspired to create a interesting scene.

I decided to keep it small and make a small scene of a hamlet/village with some kind of landmark in the background. i also decided on going for a medieval medieval and historic architecture party due to where i am from being surrounded by large variety of different types of buildings and structures 100's of years apart from each other sitting side by side.

i then put together a 2nd Moodboard this time of villages and hamlets in wow.

Once I decided to do that i then put together another Moodboard this time of medieval towns and building artwork I could find on the internet.

After this I started coming up with concepts and ideas for my scene and drawn a few different buildings.

After this I begun to get a idea of what my environment would be. it would be a scene with a river running down the middle with a small stone bridge 1 or 2 buildings a a intersection and a shrine or monument as a backdrop.

As I was sorting out my ideas I started to model the tavern to get used to working with blender.

I found modelling in blender a lot easier than I though it was going to be. Reason I was using blender is I'm trying to learn it due to the license for AutoDesk 3DStudio Max and not getting a lot with the package as much as I would like.

The tavern was my first proper model in blender and i feel it came out extremely well in the end and also found it surprisingly fast to model.

After this I started thinking of ideas of monuments to put in the scene I was at first thinking of having a statue of a knight but due to the complexity in modelling such a object I changed my mind and made a giant stone sword.

I then looked up world of Warcraft swords to find one that would fit my scene to find use as a base for the stone sword I would model.

After this I drew some more concepts and fingered out the final layout of the environment.

I then put together the model and UV maps for the sword in blender but did not texture it until later on in the project after I modelled and textured the bridge. while I'm not as happy with the outcome of the textures

I feel like they could be a lot better I was a little stumped as to how to improve them. But overall I'm happy with it since its more of a backdrop landmark than something you would normally get up close to see.

I then had ago at making trees and while iv made some before these are by far the best iv made and also lowest poly tree iv made. the branches I made by making a 2x2 face plane and slightly angled it. to make it look like a curved branch and I had a little help from a fellow student in terms of feedback and pointers which helped massively get the look I was going for. The image below was the image from wow I used as a reference for ground textures and for how the trees should look and be made.

I started of by painting the branch it self so I would have a guide for the leafs. I also used multiple shades of each colour to give depth and detail to each part.

The rest of the tree was just a cylinder that I shrank and bent to give its crooked pointy look. the texture for the stem I did not feel was as good as the leafs but still came out okay on the final tree.

Once the tree was out of the way I worked on the Bridge. I once again started by Googling for reference images of the internet that I could use as a guide for how i want my bridge to look.

My design ended being very similar to the image on the left hand side.

i once again modelled my design in blender and UV mapped it. but to keep texture quality high and to cut down on workload what I did was model only 1/4 of the bridge and used the mirror the remaining 3/4 and also did the same with the UV.

the texture work for it was the biggest challenge while I was able to come out with a good pattern for the stones I was stumped as to how to shade them to make it look nice but once again the student who gave me a hand early also helped me make a start on the shading which once again made a huge difference as at the end of the day i was very happy with the bridge texture.

Once I had done that I placed the textured version in unity I did make plenty of small changes to the texture until you get the the version you see here. it was a little tricky to figure out how the texture should rap around edges but it came out fairly well in the end.

Once that was mostly done I then begun to work on ground textures and after some tinkering I made 3 1 grass 1 gravel and 1 mossy/muddy grass.

I also used the gravel texture on the bridge .

Once that was out of the way I work on finishing the taverns textures which came out okay.

I did experiment with shaders and did kinda like how the cartoon lit shader looked sadly it did not work well with lighting and shadows so ended up manually the normal shaders settings on each object to get the effect I wanted. along side this I worked on the lighting to again add to atmosphere of the scene and to make it look more WOW like. I added emissive lights to the windows and tweaked the directional light by changing its brightness etc as well as turning of the global lighting it had to make the lighting look more natural and also mess about with bloom.

The next thing I worked on was trying to archive atmospheric effects for my environment by attempting to add low lying mist to the scene for 2 reasons 1 to give the environment more life but also to limit view distance of far away objects and to stop the player seeing the end of the world. to do this I used to Fog tool in the unity lighting settings as well as the sand storm particle effect that's part of the starting assets in unity and changed it colour to make it look more like mist/low lying fog than well a sand storm. I feel this came out well all though the particle effect only works in a plane so it dose not go up or is effected by hills.

after this i worked on the water and tried to get it animated with the help of a script that my tutor helped me with. the first water looked okay but nothing impressive but did its job you couldn't see though it and it was bright blue. but later on my fellow student who helped me earlier with the textures gave me a hand making the water better but instead of using a blue texture and scrolling animation script we used the FX/Water shader in unity with the basic water normal map that's part of the unity standard assets to do it. which came out a lot nicer and looked more natural in the environment.

once we had done the water the environment was almost complete and looked really good but the ground textures were bugging me so I made Greyscale normal maps for them and the bridge texture in Photoshop by taking the original textures and using the Greyscale tool in Photoshop to make them. this came out very well and I'm happy with the final result. the environment could use more buildings and details as well as my own made custom Skybox which i may add later as things go I'm very happy with this so far.