Maya to Blender
14/11/23
At this stage, I wanted to try out the blender as I needed to sculpt the tree, and I also wanted to try setting the scene a bit more by adding the water and sky. I struggled to import my scene into Blender, as every time I tried to import it, it would come in all as one object. I got a friend to help me separate the objects, all I had to do was select all and separate the loose objects.
Going into blender was a bit difficult for the first time; the controls were different from those in Maya, so I often found myself having to look up how to do things in blender online. Luckily, blenders are quite popular, so there were many helpful guides and videos to help me settle into blenders. Once I got used to using blender keys, I found that it was a lot more user friendly than Maya, and I enjoyed using blender more than I thought I would.
I had some sort of idea of what my first camera angle would be, I set it up quickly with an estimate of my desired angle and kept it like that.
In Maya, I felt that I wasn’t able to figure out what type of ambience and lighting I wanted as all my objects were still the standard surface colour. I started adding the base colour to some of the objects of main focus, like the gazebo and tree.
I got started on sculpting the tree afterwards, and following this video, I started sculpting. I was a bit confused on how to actually sculpt before I watched the video, as I didn’t know about turning on Dyntopo with constant detail, so any edits I was making to the tree had little to no effect. There was also a bit of an issue with polys that was a bit difficult to deal with, even following the video. My computer kept crashing as I tried to remesh the tree to fewer polys, so I ended up having to remesh a few times before I got to what I wanted.
For the sculpting, I was mainly using the clay and smooth tool, the draw tool was a bit too sharp for what I needed, even though I decreased the strength to its lowest. Before trying the clay tool, I started off with the clay strips, as I had previously used them in Zbrush and quite liked them. It wasn’t the case for the tree, as it kept changing the entire shape of the tree no matter how much I changed the strength and size of the brush.
I also added two more branches using the snake hook tool. It was very easy to make branches using this method; the branch was very smooth and had a nice taper, so I didn’t have to do much with them.
I was very happy with the final result of the tree, but I was a bit worried before importing it into the blender that it looked unnatural and that I wouldn’t be able to fix it. I was also a bit hesitant about making the other branches in blender for the same reason, I didn’t know how it would turn out, and I didn’t really want to have to redo the process back in Maya and import it into blender again as it would’ve taken a lot longer than I wanted.
Next was to add the water, I had been wanting to add some water in for a while as I felt that the scene was missing quite a lot without it. For the material, I looked through a few videos on YouTube. This was the closest thing I wanted to make for my water material, which ended up being exactly what I needed. The video was very easy to follow compared to other ones that I looked at, so I was quite happy about it. In the beginning, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted the scene to be set on the sea or lake, so I had to play around with the scale, I ended up scaling it up as I felt a lake type material would be better. There were a few moments while playing around with the nodes that my computer crashed, which was quite annoying.
I was a bit sceptical about the scene being this bright, as I wanted a darker, more nightlike scene, but I hadn’t added the sky in yet, so I moved onto that next. I wasn’t really sure how to add in a sky at first, but after talking to a few others, they suggested I use the dynamic sky plugin, as it was very easy to use.
I started off by making the sky darker. Playing around with some different colours, I found a dark purple looked good. I settled with the rest by just playing with each setting and seeing what I thought looked good.
Now that both the sky and water were in, I felt a lot more satisfied with my scene as it came together even more. I wasn’t 100% sure about the lighting and ambience, but for now, I was happy with what I had. I knew that if I wanted to make any changes to the lighting, I could do it in Unreal.