Week 25

After getting a reasonably nice bake first time on my pillar last week, I asked Chris what I could do to improve some issues that were appearing on this bake of my normal maps. For example on one of the corners by the base of the statue their appeared to be a black spot appearing, which he explained was an issue with the cage not reaching that corner quiet correctly. I also had some weird lines appearing on the rear of the statue that were due to some poor topology which he said was something that would take some time but isn't impossible to fix. So I looked at what time I had left before we moved on to the next task, the time machine, I really wanted to have a go at unwrapping and baking the low-poly of the Mayan statue I posted on here last week. Yet I assessed what I believed I could get done within the time period we had left for this task and decided it was best to take something I knew was possible and make it the best possible iteration I could. So I spent the next day re-working the topology until I was happy that this was the best I could make it, also going back and seeing these issue's really helped me to get an understanding of how to miss these issues in the future.
              After working all the issues out with the topology and re-aligning the cage I ran this script that essentially hardens all the edges that surround an UV island and soften the inside. After running my first bake for normal maps I soon saw that this was going to cause some issues in places and needed a little bit of adjustment for example where I had run cut down the main the section of the pillar to unwrap it correctly the harden edge was causing it too look like a crease running down this section of the pillar. It was a simple fix, all I had to do was change this particular part of the edge of the UV island to a soften edge to compensate for the issue. After I done this all over the normal maps were coming out really well I couldn't be happier with the outcome of them. I also then ran my ambient occlusion maps through and this just helped emphasis all the details that were somewhat being lost, this really helped my Roman pillar to look realistic. I generally don't think I could have made this particular pillar any better without starting again. Looking back at the amount of time I had left for this part of the project I believe that this was by far the best option. As I think the Mayan pillar would have caused some real issues due to the inspection of the geometry I did before making my decision. After last week's attempt at painting a landscape In colour I've also been giving my characters ago trying to become more diverse with the styles I can do, so below is the beginning of a painting of a Disney inspired character.