Week 24

This week I went into the drop in session to get some clarification on how to convert a high poly in ZBrush to a low poly for baking as I got told how to do this by a friend but they made it out to be really easy, which I didn't believe was quiet true. I was correct there was a little more to it but nothing that couldn't be done during said session. During the time i was able to get both the Roman Pillar and Mayan Pillar down into low poly form. There was some clean up I had to do however, so with this in mind I decided to work  just on  the Roman Pillar to see just how difficult this will be as the more complicated Mayan Pillar was going to take a bit more work and concentration. I did a little bit of clean up that day with what little knowledge I had of the process.
         That following day we had a workshop that was solely on the process of re-topology. We worked on a practice piece during session. It was just a simple block which had been chipped away at, simple but exactly what I needed to get my head around the work. After the session I worked on my Roman Pillar re-working what I think would help with the unwrap and conscientiously thinking about getting that triangle figure down. However Chris said that if we're within budget which in this case was 10,000 triangles we were good and the re-topology was just then helping for unwrap later. Which was exactly what I focused on doing the following day, I was really happy with the outcome of my unwrap as I believe it was as well distributed as I personally was going to get it. A picture is below of what my unwrap looked like. I did however tweak it from this picture the following day to help with stretching underneath the pillar.
          After tweaking my UV unwrap I attended another workshop that Chris was hosting I spent the most of the session getting help with the baking process as the only time I'd done it before was with a simple square. So I first searched for N-Gons using the clean up tool as Chris suggested after it identified some problems which I then resolved, I made my cage and exported both the high-poly and low-poly as FBX files and then the Cage in the same format getting them ready to bake. I then put the meshes into XNormal to begin the process with Chris's help of course. After the bake Chris said it turned out really good for my first bake personally I still don't know what makes for a good bake and what doesn't but I'm sure with more practice I'll soon tell. I soon opened up UE4 and put all the assets into UE4 to see how it turned out and I was really impressed with what came out, it was really satisfying knowing I made it and how it looks is great I especially like the size.
            There was only a couple of problems with the bake, so there will be some tinkering with the asset still one very minuscule and the other one I believe wont take long to resolve. Below are some image of my first asset in game. After seeing this one in game I really wanted to get my Mayan pillar to this stage so I began re-topology on that unfortunately there was just too many problems with the intricate design what this has taught me is just to spend some more time inside ZBrush clearing up as it makes for less work in Maya. This week I've also been doing some painting one looking at colour as I know that is a week spot for me and the other a detailed black and white value image both I'm happy with where they are at.