Alright, week 2 of production has passed and we noticed it was a lot more difficult to work efficiently this week. As you may know, due to the covid-19 virus, we were all working from home. We needed to find a new way to communicate and resorted to using Discord. This brought some difficulties along, because not seeing each other physically makes it a lot harder to discuss, brainstorm and give feedback. Also, some people might be online while others are not, so when you needed somebodies help while that person is offline, you couldn't really continue working.  

Nonetheless, we managed to get work done. 

For the art, we focussed purely on the ground plane level this week. We re-made some of the rock planes to make them look more natural. We tried to find the best ways to texture our planes, because we needed a nice gradient between grass-rock-dirt, without using harsh edges. Our first idea was to make seperate 3d meshes for the grass and unwrap them onto a grass texture. In stead, we chose to use a vertex painting technique to get those nice gradients. 

We made 4 hand-painted tileable textures for grass, rock and 2 types of dirt. We wanted the style of the textures to look stylized and colorful to fit the design of our world. The textures were painted within photoshop and can still be edited, in case we want to change the color. 

Above was our first try at vertex painting, but we figured out we wanted to make the rock more detailed in shape.

These are our re-done rocks. We think the shape looks much better and the textures pop out a lot more too. There are still some edits to be made. The size of the textures is still off and the stretching needs to be fixed. 

Aside from the rocks and textures, we also got started on the vegetation to dress up the level. We tried some different techiniques to make trees. We made a few in zbrush and retopologized them, but we also made some from scratch in 3DS max. We figured out that a combination of both worked the best.  The leaves are handpainted in the same style as the grass, but with an opacity mask so we don't have to model each leaf individually.