Week 14 - Shop Sign and Unreal Camera (28/04/2024)

Before modelling I sketched out a few potential ideas for the shop sign as well as brand names. In the end, I went with Susan's Sew Shop due to its fun tongue twister name and alliteration, as well as the more swirly sign frame design that I felt all came together to fit with the aesthetic of Diagon Alley.

Due to the complex shape of the shop sign, I wanted to have another crack at the low poly to high poly texture bake workflow, this time doing it in that aforementioned order as opposed to the reversed like beforehand. The swirls were easy enough to do with extruding and rotating each extrude to eventually form a swirl, then it was just a case of UV mapping after mirroring it after doing one quarter of the sign. After smoothing a copy of the low poly model to make the high poly one, the baking process went much smoother and produced a more polished result thanks to using the same base model.

As for texturing, I designed the shop logo in Adobe Photoshop using the Bartex font by FG Studios (Accessed at https://www.dafont.com/bartex.font on 24/04/2024). After some adjustments to the layout so that it fitted into the ratio of the sign, I then made it a texture in Adobe Sampler (which helped give it the 3D bumpiness it needed) before applying it to the model in Adobe Painter like all the other textures.

Once the sign was installed and more lights were added to the Unreal Engine scene, I began making a start on animating a cinematic camera to showcase the shop. It might be worth creating a little camera shoot plan first to pinpoint what I want to show-off in the 1 minute 30 second submission video.

Life Art - GAM190 game opening cutscene concept art