Week 31

Hand in week. So I attended a drop in session with Chris on Monday to just double check somethings with the metal map and roughness map (if they're black and white). I was able to make the metal map rather quick due to the fact that its very binary in the sense it's either on or off and the only thing that wasn't metal on my piece was the carbon fibre that surrounded the mount for the limb to go in. The roughness map took a bit longer with Chris showing a good technique to produce over spray and to lift the paint up. For example the infinity logo on the top, I used a dark grey underneath that part on the roughness map that really brought that logo up and makes it look as if its sitting on top of the rest of the paint. I was also able to make the finger tips look warn down with the roughness map and on the wrist I was able to make it look as if oil had been dropped on the surface of it. I can really see the potential of a program like substance painter that allows you to paint directly on to the surface of an object because it ends up giving a more cohesive look to the piece. Where as doing it the old fashion way like I did it can be hard to match up the exact amount of ware on each piece. I've also ended up putting my pillar into Marmoset to get some cleaner more professional shots as you can see below. I'm really happy with the way they look and how they've come together.

Week 30

After completing my low poly last week it was for me to begin baking the normal maps for the robotic hand. I attended the drop in session on the Monday to do this due to the fact that I hadn't baked multiple objects before, as with my pillar I merged the three objects and baked them as one. Chris said it basically exactly the same except each item has its own cage and when you produce the normal's you need to make sure they're set to save as PNG's so you can then open them all up in Photoshop and bring them all on to one normal map.
       I began with one of the finger tips to my hand i put the required parts into the XNormal program, I then opened up marmoset as we'd been shown that morning how to use it to create turntables for hand in and it works as a quick way to view work without having to open up UE4. As soon as I put the normal maps on to the low poly instantly it looked bizarre the best way to explain is that it looked as if the normal was too big for the low poly. The other issue was that because of how many items i was trying to fit on a 2k texture was causing some pixelation around the object and losing a lot of the detail I was trying to retain from the high poly. I asked Chris and we came to the same conclusion that to reach the required poly count I had removed too much of the geometry and there wasn't a lot I could do about this issue. Chris said to just complete the baking process at home and see what it looks like. I was rather annoyed as I'd spent a lot of time and effort designing the high poly and it just wasn't coming out remotely nice. This was when I came up with a solution, hopefully, to the issue it was to take the low poly that has the geometry that has been changed to far and start adding in edge loops to create a "low high poly". This was an attempt to try and bring back this project and have my final piece look nicer than what was being presented to me at that time.
        I then spent the next couple of days making such a piece, of course I tested one piece, a finger tip and compared it to the old work which Chris and I agreed looked much better. Although I'm disappointed I couldn't use the high poly I am happy that I was able to come up with a creative solution to the problem. I encountered some issues that I had to overcome with the typology due to the fact that I'd been trying to reduce the amount of polygons some edges were causing my edge loops to band together causing pulls in the mesh which I had to fix manually. In the end however I'm happy with overall outcome of the piece as you can see below, I also was able to get the ambient occlusion done this week and worked over the weekend to get an albedo done. My inspiration for the albedo was a gritty Borderlands and overall I don't think it looks too bad, unfortunately however this has put me behind a little as I still have the metal map and roughness map to complete. Thankfully however the week I've left for getting things ready for hand in has allowed me the time to do this work.