Minecraft 3D Assignment

This assignment took us into the world of Minecraft, or more specifically cube-based composition.

I took my inspiration from the scene pictured above, which captures the Minecraft-ish aesthetic quite well. I also enjoy wintry scenery, having never experienced it firsthand.

I began with the aforementioned cube, the basic building block, in Maya, where all things begin.

After adding a nice bevel to those hard edges, it was time to manage the UVs.

Using various techniques, the UVs have been organized into six neat grid squares, from right to left, and top to bottom. This is the best arrangement for the pixelated textures that will be applied to the blocks.

To start with, I applied a different color to each side, to ensure the UVs were where they should be.

Everything seemed to be working correctly, so it was time to create my own textures in Photoshop.

This is what I cooked up for the grass cubes. The transparency will work well for the illusion of foliage.

Now, the most important aspect of any landscape, the ground.

Similarly to the Minecraft example above, it consists of a brown, earth-like substance with snow on top.

It gets the job done, and looks convincingly like snow-covered planes.

There are also pine trees.

The tree boughs, with their respective transparency.

And their trunks and stumps.

It was then time to plug all of these into the Unreal engine, and experiment. (The fun part.)

Bam, there it is. But it was not quite ready yet.

Dropped right out of Maya, the block was a bit too small in proportion to the Unreal world space, but that was easily fixed by adjusting its scale by ten.

With the properly-sized block, it was only a matter of selecting the original block multiple times to make many more blocks in space. Many more.

With the help of some materials, the landscape began to take shape.

Now, it is all a matter of stacking.

Something seemed off about this landscape at first glance. Upon closer inspection, the trees themselves are the culprits; I had the lack of foresight to add a layer of snow to them as well, but this was remedied.

Much better! But there is an additional element required.

So I whipped up a texture for the frozen river cutting through the scene.

This led to much more selecting and applying of the texture.

The material it spawned did not have the desired effect, however. It had to be much more shiny, and glowy. Those adjectives found realization in the Unreal Hypershade window (In Maya, that's what's it's called...)

Now that's more like it! With everything assembled, all that was left to do was fiddle with settings for the other materials, the snow, wood, foliage, etc.

 

The sun is setting, quick time to add the lights!

The "Christmas tree" was bedecked with some twinkle-light blocks, the emission amped-up so as to glow nicely.

Now that's it's all said and done, please enjoy the screenshot scenery.

Thank you!