Week 6 - The tree roots

I decided it was time to start on the centre piece of the room, the tree roots. After thinking about which method would be best, I decided that I wanted to accurately imitate the stylised tree and I began to trace the tree in Maya on a plane using the cutting tool.

After finishing a section, I made sure to use cleanup to show me where the errors were, so I could manually fix them. Then I extruded the roots out to start forming a 3D shape.

After finishing the base I exported the model into Zbrush, I also brought in the floor piece to measure up how it would fit with it. I realised at this point that the roots weren't going to fit inside of the pond. But I had also realised at this point that the reference pictures were not accurate in terms of sizing and positioning. In one image, the roots seem to fit entirely in the water and the pool is almost the size of the room, however in the floor layout, which my positioning is mostly based on, the pool is smaller and the roots come out over the edge.

The tree is also very flat and 2D looking so I was okay with my tree looking a little odd, so long as the silhouette matched up. I used the clay tool to flesh out the tree to look less blocky and used the rake tool to make the bark look more interesting:

After decimating the high poly, I took it into Maya and began to quad draw it, I almost finished quad drawing it , but I realised that the bottom of the roots would be too complicated so I Zremeshed it instead, I then began to UV manually, and after a couple of hours, I realised it would take far too long so I automatically UVed it instead.

Neat Quad draw auto-retopologised mesh.

After I took it into substance, the high poly unsurprisingly didn't bake, however as I realised it would take a while to remedy this, I decided to make do with using tree bark textures with a black mask, height, fill layer to create a similar effect, it didn't work quite as I wanted, but it was alright. The substance version looked far more detailed than when it went into unreal, so I purposefully went overboard in substance so as much detail as possible would come through into unreal.

Note: (The tree was made in parts over many weeks, but for readability I put the whole process together.)