To begin with I wanted to finish off the last asset as part of my three assets task. I gathered some reference materials and started thinking about how I wanted the chair to look, I decided on a tall, floating back-engraved chair. I started from a cube to get the basic shape of the cushion. Slowly working around adding arms and legs, I decided to make the front legs of the chair more curved for better structure while keeping the back legs completely static. This breaks up the chairs design and makes it look more unique. After creating the base of the model I needed to texture it and add details using height maps. I took the model into substance painter where I used height maps to create details in the arms and engravings into the wooden parts. I also used it to give the cushion a more used feeling. I then used the stitch brush on Substance painter to create a sewn effect on the cushion.
After Finishing my three assets I decided to get stuck into my environment. I needed to create some foliage that I could dress around my environment when I get everything into engine. I started gathering some reference for different types of desert foliage and plants. I decided to start with cacti as I had a pretty clear idea of how I was going to achieve this. I decided that I would block out the cactus in Maya using extruded cylinders shaped to look like a cactus. After completing this stage I took it into Zbrush where I used dynamesh to turn the separate objects into one, then using the Zremesher I got a retopologised version of the cactus. While in Zbrush I duplicated the re-meshed version of the model and created a high poly being sure to include the small track lines that are on cacti. After using Zbrush to create a high poly and a low poly, I took the low poly back into Maya to unwrap ready for texturing in Substance Painter.
In substance Painter I used a plant base normal. Then using colours sampled from actual cactus reference I got the base colour I was looking for, I then highlighted the parts that stick out the most and added Ambient Occlusion where I felt it was necessary. I found a prickle shaped brush that I wanted to use for the spikes on the cacti. To achieve the look I wanted I had to adjust the height on the spikes and increase the spacing so the prickles were evenly spaced across the model.