Sea of Thieves "Master Copy"
Corner shot of bar and fire place
Full shot of bar
Barrels and rope
Corner shot of bar and fire place
About
This is a project that I worked on by four people of the span of two weeks. We were tasked with re-creating an modern day video game environment from our choosing. Our group chose Xbox One game "Sea of Thieves" as it was a title that would be releasing next month. We grabbed as many screen shots of Beta game play as possible and got to work to pump out the starting game bar in the span of fourteen days. With this being a school assignment, managing time to do this along with other classes would be prove to be difficult.
Responsibilities
One of the first things we did for this project was split up the work. I was responsible for modeling and texturing, while the others would take care of project management, lighting, and effects. Since this was to be a copy I wanted to make sure that I got the feeling right.
High Detail White Box
Reference
This being a master copy, our goal was to match a professionally made environment as close as possible. This includes scale, lighting, models, textures, etc... Within our first few days of group work we gathered pictures for to mimic models and placement first. This the game had not been out yet, so we gathered most of our reference from Beta build screen shots and youtube clips. This created a tedious challenge for the project, finding good reference was not easy as youtubers wont typically walk close to objects to closely examine them
Reference
Reference 2
In-Game: Round Table
In-Game: Long Table
Models and Textures
Going through what reference we had it was easy to see that a lot of the "Sea of Thieves" props were made to look a bit shanty. To recreate all of the beat up dents and chips that these props had I would do a lot of normal baking. However, going through and taking each model to Zbrush to chip away at for the bakes was very time consuming. Creating unique normal bakes for edge chips and metal dents for so many assets was a lot of one person to handle in the span of two weeks, so for the textures I would have to cut a few corners. Taking a close look at the references, I noticed a lot of the assets appeared to have a water color texture to them. So what I did was create a single modular texture to be placed on all the materials that had a wood surface. It isn't exactly a trim sheet but the method is quite similar and the results were passable for such a time crunch.
Base Model
Chipping edges in Zbrush
Baked Normal
End result
As stated before by the time I had finished baking maps for each of my props the deadline for the assignment was closing in. I didn't have time to create unique textures for each asset, nor would it be the smart thing to do. So below you will see how I used the same modular texture for multiple models within the scene.
Grog Barrel prop
Barrel Holder
Round Table
In Game Barrel With Decal
In Game Barrel Holder
In Game Round Table
These are the three maps responsible for all the the assets you see above. The Diffuse map was something I quickly painted up within Photoshop shop, I then generated a normal map using Photoshop as well, and lastly I created a packed texture. I stored the roughness map in the red channel, the metallic map in the green channel, the ambient occlusion map in the blue channel, and if I were to use a height map it would be stored in the alpha channel. For this a ordering of channels I like to use the acronym "RMAH."
Diffuse
Detail Normal
Packed RMAH (roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, height)
Conclusion
This was a heavy project with a small time frame to work with. What I was most happy with would have to be the overall feel of the scene. It's not perfect and there are a few tweaks I would make if I were to go back, one of which would be the lighting. However the end result turned out pretty nice, I'm pleased with the scene and I was pleased with my group. I'm glad I used the modular texture when I did as it did not only save time and headache but it saves on memory and load time of the entire project since most of the scene is the same material rehashed and reused. It was a great learning experience and I'm glad I got to work with such nice people I'm happy to have this group project on my portfolio moving forward