This week I have managed to create several props, the skybox, and a bulk of foliage alphas to dress the environment with. The props created this week include a lantern, a bucket, a lake side jetty, a wooden fence, a gateway, a rake and 3 variations of rock (all unwrapped and with collision made in 3ds max). They are not yet textured, but I plan to begin working on that in the following week.
Creating the skybox took a bit of time because I was having difficulty finding out how it was done, tutorials were either vague or outdated. I ended up asking one of my tutors for help and with their advice I was able to figure out the shape of the skybox its self and how to put it into our scene in Unreal. Once that was sorted I could paint the texture, which ended up taking less than a day to finish so at least after solving the problem it didn't take too long to have a finished sky in our level. To paint the texture I collected several images of autumn sunsets and tried to incorporate the colours, shapes and textures within those images in my own texture, e.g. the yellow-orange highlights around the edge of the purple/pink clouds. I chose to use 3DCoat to paint the texture, because then i wouldn't have to worry about making it seamless as I would in Photoshop. I did use 3DCoat's feature that allows you to work on a file in Photoshop and 3DCoat at the same time however, because I prefer some of Photoshop's brushes (specifically some of the cloud ones were useful).
I also made (in Photoshop) various types of foliage to be placed around the level, to bulk up the wooded areas and add interest to our more open, grassy areas. To save on texture space I ended up painting several different types of leaf or flower head, but only one or two stalk so that I could mix and match. I chose to paint individual strands of grass/leaf because I think it means we can have more control over how we dress the scene compared to using stripes of grass, because I can arrange the grass in clumps to cover larger areas, or leave it as strands for areas where we need to break up the bottom of an object (like a tent or fence). I was also able to combine types of grass, or grass with flowers or leaves, which gives the foliage more variation while also letting us repeat the same assets without it being obvious. There is still space on my alpha sheet, so more plants can be added if necessary.
While testing out the foliage in level I also re-imported my trees as their scaling was off, making them around half their intended size. The fixed trees now stand taller than the tents, and are large enough to break up the horizon line which in turn makes the skybox look better by not letting the player see where it ends.
Screenshot of my foliage alphas in max:
