Modelling The Environment

My role in the group after the pre-production stage, was to model the environment which is based in a forest with a cave. In the environment, there are going to be trees, rocks and in the cave, some tree vines to give it a feeling that of being spooky.

This role gives me the chance to improve my modelling skills a bit more since we have also recently been learning to model a biped type of model, even though the environment is an organic type.

For tips on modelling the environment such as the cave, since I have not done before I looked at different videos not necessarily on modelling a cave but about understanding geometry and it was also good to look at different people working process and how they go about solving problems.

In front of the cave is a big stony arch acting as the entrance to it, so as you can see in the images below where it is going to be positioned.
Following our first draft of a floor plan the cave has an opening at the top which is going to be a light source for the cave. It is going to be wide at the sides and but quite short in length.

When it came to modelling the inside of the cave, I could not figure out how to model it because when backface culling is turned on in Maya, it shows you how your model could look when placed in a game engine and if your model has an inside face to it.

So I asked my tutor and looked at videos to understand the extrude tool better because it was suggested that extruding the faces inwards was better than duplicating the model and decreasing the scale as then I would have to reverse it.

Below are screenshots as to how it looks when backface culling is turned on and as you can see there is an inside and outside to the cave. So far, there aren't any problems with the model in terms of hidden vertexes or geometry that is not working properly.

This is the inside of the cave, spikes are being added at the top, resembles some of the caves I have shown in my moodboards and research. Then I made some rocks on the floor of the cave and walls, it is hard modelling a cave and giving it character to help set the story  and atmosphere.

The trees in the image below are being placed outside the cave and acts as a barrier. I followed the tutorials given in first year on modelling a tree but this type instead of just having one type of tree in the environment which is duplicated, I thought it would be better to create at least different trees so it does not become repetitive, so I modelled a tall big tree, a smaller tree and a stump.

The only complication I had was modelling the branches at the bottom because I did not understand how it would be created when the faces at the bottom had been deleted, but this is where understanding more about the extrude tool helped.

Trees modelled and UV mapped

In the cave, there needs to be vines and though it might seem easy to model a vine since I had already modelled some trees, however it was because I wanted to make the vines look scary like the image below.

So I looked at this video which was very helpful even though it was short, but that was not a problem because the basic tips were given. The video reminded me of how effective vertexes can be and the rotate tool, which were the features I mostly used to create a vine. I think there is room for improvement but the vine I modelled was going to be duplicated so I only needed to make one and change the size or rotate to make it look different in the cave.

Finished vine