What's up Dock?

For those of you that read my Gone Fishing blog post, welcome to part two of three. For anyone that is new to my blog, Welcome! Please feel free to stay and I'll try my best to explain what's going on here.

This is where I write about any game design and 3D Modelling projects. I'm currently breaking down how I made a small diorama for a university project. The project consisted of three models. A boat, a dock and a lantern. I've explained the process of making the boat model in an earlier post and this is a story about how I made a small dock. Being a typical student, I left the last two models for as long as I possibly could. Instead I went touristing in Liverpool, where I was staying at the time. I remember taking a stroll through the Beatles Museum on the Albert Dock (I didn't use this experience as inspiration for dock I made, but I highly recommend going if you're ever over that way). Where I had spent this time touristing instead of working, I needed to make two models with a write-up in the space of two days. Today this task would be easy. Back then, it was a bit of a challenge. I wanted to show that I was using new techniques that I had researched in my own time. What took the most time was the write up of every detail... Now wooden docks are made using pretty simple materials and shapes. Rectangles for the boards and cylinders for the posts. To make things more technical, I thought about the safety aspects you might find on a small scale dock. I came up with a chain or thick rope barrier concept and I found a few tutorials online for extruding four circular planes into a 3D shape, adding subdivisions and rotating the tubes around eachother to create a twisted rope.

This is an over-simplification, given that it took me a while to get the hang of it.

I actually added too many subdivisions for the Unreal Engine to handle on my first attempt. I had to go back and find a sweet spot where it still looked effective as a rope and would be allowed by the game engine I was using to render the diorama.

Once I had done this, I needed to take the model over to Adobe Substance 3D Painter. Substance Painter is brilliant. I love how quickly you can throw something together and then go over it again to add scratches, dents, dirt and grime.

I wanted to use two different wood colours to easily differentiate between the posts and planks. With the plan being to use a low lit environment to show off the lantern model, I wanted to know the examiners saw a clear separation between the two wood textures on the dock model. No blurred lines or questioning when it came to marking was my main concern in doing that.

For the bottom of the posts, I wanted to show that the water and mud at the bottom of the water had created this murky, algae like substance that is clinging to the posts. However, at the time, I didn't know how the surrounding terrain would look underneath the water. I was half thinking that the best thing to do would be to have the ground level rise up to meet the land that the dock would lead to.

Doing this would mean that I won't know where the ground and water levels need to be for it to look natural.

My half-baked solution was to have the algae rise about half way up the posts. This way, if I needed to sink the dock into the ground or if the mud rises in certain areas - the algae will still be seen and provide more information about the environment.

It worked well enough to get me the grades I needed.

At this point, I wanted to try something new. I hadn't experimented with water / weather effects before this project. So I tried a few things to try and create realistic puddles of water.

My thinking was that it almost goes without saying that boat docks are found near water. So why wouldn't this dock have splashes and puddles?

I eventually realised that I could use a grunge map on a fill layer and play around with the roughness and metallic properties to create a scattered reflective layer. Using the height map, I could then create a really fine bubble in the texture. So if you look at the model using the Sketchfab 3D presentation, as you rotate the model you'll see that the water appears to be a skin that's sat on top of the planks, rather than making each board look flat.

I then repeated this method to create a dried water patches or splodges underneath the water layer. This added to the material's roughness and variety, providing a more photorealistic feel.

At least that's my opinion.

Thanks for reading this far, I really do appreciate it.

Feel free to look at another blog post or even explore some of my works.