Common Art: Final 'A' Stage

 This week I went back to work on the texturing of the characters. I added patches, stitches, and different colors to break up the pure black clothing that was previously on the killer. I also added a blood splatter effect because the killer is, in fact, a killer. I exported the packed textures this time and put them into our unreal scene.

 For the old man I made his pants and shoes different colors to once again break up the clothes being all the same. I added a gradient to draw the eye up to his face, and added wine stains to his sleeve and shirt as he is supposed to be too drunk to realize he is being sneaked up on. I packed the textures and added them to unreal as well.

Canon Week 6

This week I went back and added more geometry to the cylinders in my game res mesh. I made it just below 10k polys while also getting rid of the sharp edges in my model. I deleted a lot of unnecessary geometry to get there.

The next thing I did was unwrap my model properly this time. I learned a lot of new features about texel density, because in my first bake the projected texture was pixelated so I had to mess around with UV and bake settings. I ended up in a spot I'm happy with, but going forward I'm going to learn how to use bake groups. I also know I could have utilized the empty space in the UV square better, but it was also my first time putting a lot of time and consideration into the UVs, so I'll give myself a pass.

I then started texturing the metal parts of my canon by first masking out all the metal bits and adding different layers of wear and grunge on top. I used metal edgewear and grunge to make it look beat up, and then started looking at some of the SP smart materials to see what they did to look like proper, beat up metal. I noticed that a lot of the dirt layers used mask builders to build up realistic dirt, so I created one with my own bake map, as well as adding a light generator and a linear gradient to add color variation.

 I then started the wood texture by masking out the biggest chunks of wood as a lighter brown, and smaller pieces like axles as a bit darker to add more variation. As I felt I had already sculpted a lot of wood grain into the mesh, I focused more on adding grunge and dirt, as well as more color variation with a grunged brush fill layer and another light generator.

On top of all the material layers I added a low opacity light to dark green gradient to give a more weathered, sullen look to the canon. I pushed my AO shadows to be a bit warmer to balance out the cool tones of the subtle gradient. 

 I set up a pretty easy display in unreal for showing off the canon. Set up my material, imported the humble infinity wall, and set up a three point light system. You can see my first render at the top of this post and two more below.

 

Cannon Week 5

The first thing I did this week was apply poly-paint to my cannon while in ZBrush to help with ID texturing stuff in Substance Painter next week. I then decimated the model down to about 15% of the prior poly-count, and exported the pieces out.

I then pulled the high res pieces into Maya to make sure the poly-paint info carried over. It did, and I then set up a lighting scene with Arnold render (and a handy infinity wall) to take a nice product shot of the cannon. If it looks low res, I have no idea why! I cranked up the resolution and the HD format in render settings, but it keeps looking fuzzy on my end.

Then I started working on my game-res topology. The rings on the cannon were massively increasing my polycount so I deleted a bunch of edge loops of them to lower the number. My biggest issue is sharp edges, so I did a lot of beveling to fix that. The biggest issue I ran into that I couldnt figure out how to fix were the wheels. As you can see in the top picture, the wheels still have sharp edges that seemed to me like they would have needed more geometry to fix. I ended this week at 9040 polygons (just below the goal of under 10k) and I didn't know what to do to fix it. As a temporary solution, because part of this week's assignment was to bake in substance painter, I smoothed the wheels as they were so the bake errors would be more minimal. The bake looks okay in some areas but the biggest issue I need to tackle is sharp edges, as well as the wheels.

Common Art Week 4

 

This week I worked on texturing characters to match the Spider-verse aesthetic. One of the project's tech artist created screen-tone and line shaders, so my job was to make sure the textures on the characters are enhanced without them.

To do this I first gathered references of Spider-verse characters. The shading on the characters is noticeably softer than on objects, but they do occasionally have funky brush strokes that I tried to incorporate into the clothes on the characters. I used a rake brush and a dots brush to do this, and some hand-painted layers for shade and light to pop the contrast certain areas.

 All of the textures on both characters are baked onto the low-poly meshes in Substance Painter, and applied to one material each in engine. I set up the materials myself, and added a multiply to the base colors as our scene is inherently very dim. Below are some references I looked at for Spider-verse characters.

 

 

Cannon Week 4

 

The first thing I did this week was work to apply the given feedback from last week. My biggest critique is that I'm too soft-handed, so this week I went back to the metal portions of the cannon and added more noisy texture. During this step, as well as later when sculpting the wood, I did my best to carve harder into my model to make the textures more visible.

 After I felt the metal portions looked less subtle-y metal, I started on the wood. I used the clay tubes and dam standard brushes to carve the wood grain, and then the spiral brush to add knots. If I thought the wood grain looked to straight or boring I used the orbs pinch brush to thin some of the lines or make then a bit uneven. I then went over each wooden piece with a trim smooth brush to flatten out the drastic carvings. The morph target tool was very helpful for when one object had a metal trim that I had accidentally gone over when creating the wood.

Before I began I pulled some texture references (seen below), and tried to match my model display for this week like the original reference using Photoshop (seen above).

 

Common Art Interactive Experience Week 3

 This week I fixed topology errors in my old character meshes, sculpted high res models in ZBrush, and baked the high poly onto the low poly in substance painter to prepare to texture next week. All my new work for this week is visible in our level.

 

Cannon Week 3

 

This week I brought my high-res into Zbrush and worked on realistic texturing. Here are some close up pictures of the metal detail I worked on. I mostly focused on metal this week- the wooden textures need more work next week.