Odin Sleep
About
This project started as a couple of sculpts that I was just doing for fun and realizing that maybe I could do something more with them. Rather than just having stand-alone pieces I started to brainstorm on how I could come up with a scene using the style of sculpting I had been using lately. The "Odin Sleep" is a product of my own imagination and tries to tell the story of the mythos surrounding Norse god Odin, and how Odin must sleep for a period of time to regain his power.
Inspiration
The inspiration surrounding this environment largely came from when I was messing around in Zbrush sculpting tools. I wanted to create something a bit high fantasy and heavily stylized which kind of fits my own style when I'm just having fun anyway. I had been watching a lot of youtube videos of a creator named 3DEX (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnGROMH0jM) create these really nice stylized sculpts which initially made me want to create some of my own.
My Asset
3DEX asset
Blocking out
With this one, the blocking out was done differently. Because I had already had some assets that I was making for fun some of the white boxing was already textured while other parts were not. I also ended up changing the camera for the final hero shots as well because the initial camera shot I had was just crowded and all out bad.
Modeling and Sculpting
So a lot of the models in this scene were done just for fun and then later compiled when I felt I might be able to do something with them. The first models I sculpted were a Treasure box, Hands, and a Helmet along with a few rocks. The sculpts were done mainly in zbrush
Since a lot of the models were sculpted for fun they then had to be converted down into something usable afterward. So a lot of re-typology was needed which I used Maya for. Some things that just needed a simple mesh reduce function or a zRemesher depending on the complexity of the sculpt. I ended up with a total of scene count of 140,976 triangles excluding landscape masses. The highest model triangle count, excluding things like water planes, would be the main alter which sits at 16,486 triangles.
Performance
The scene runs between 90fps at the lowest and 120fps at the highest. There are some optimizations I could make in the effects, but not being an effects artist some effects were purchased from the Unreal Engine store such as the water, vine blueprints, and fire effects. I noticed whenever these effects are together in one shot I drop quite a few frames. With the vines BP in particular, unfortunately, I was not able to find a way to set them to be a non-movable asset so that they would have baked shadows. Upon checking what was tanking render time in my screen space, I found that it was taking 7-9ms to render shadow depth in areas where the vines took up the majority of the screen space. Removing the vines brings my fps up about 20fps. I suppose this is one of the challenges one can face when purchasing online effects. The reason for downloading the vines was for an auto wrap effect to save time on modeling.
Conclusion
This was the most fun I've had with a project in a long time. High fantasy lore is probably one of my favorite things in video games which is a driving point behind this scene. I was just having fun with creating and sculpting a few random assets and decided what if I could combine these into their own cohesive world. I'm glad to have found content creation channels like 3DEX to motivate me to create things like this. I'm happy with the outcome, the only thing I would like to change about this scene would be, a bit more variation with the skyline as well as fixing the performance with the vines. I learned a lot with this scene and I really enjoy the color scheme.