Horses are fun to make

It's been a little while since I've posted, I've been busy with the presentation for the FMP. I should be posting more up in that blog as well, but for now I'll do and update on the vehicle project

We had a presentation from James Roadly-Battin from codemasters. He set us our next project, which is a little bit different from the previous ones. It's to build a vehicle and its environment, but the focus is more on shaders and rendering. The vehicle has to look like it belongs in the environment. He has provided us with some shaders to use.

I wanted to make something a little different, so I chose to make a horse and carriage. I thought this would have a variety of different materials, for example, the carriage would highly glossy, where as the horse would be matt. This would show off the reflections we have to use and the different levels of specularity. Making a horse would also allow me to practice high poly sculpting, and the carriage would help me practice hard surface modelling. For the environment, I was thinking a big stable, like those seen in stately homes.

To start off with, I made a base mesh for the horse. I figured I would start here as there was not much design work needed with a horse, it was more anatomy based. I looked at a lot of reference, including muscle diagrams, but it was very difficult. I can see why people say horses are challenging! the next thing was to sculpt the high poly model, which I made in Z-brush.

At the same time as this, I was concepting the carriage. I thought this would take less time to build. Overall we had 4 weeks to complete this. It was recommended that we spend 2 weeks on modelling both the environment and the vehicle. For the concepts, I worked from silhouettes, then picked 4 of the shapes that worked the best. After drawing these shapes with more detail, I picked one and made a final concept.

After the horse had been retopologized and baked, I started painting some different horse colour ideas. I settled on the brown and tan as I wanted the final scene to be warm, and the two colours made it more interesting. Under the AO, I painted in the colours.

Finally this first week, I built and unwrapped the carriage. I didn't quite finish modelling and texturing the vehicle, so I'll be finishing that off as I build the environment next week.