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.

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.

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.

Week 18

This week was focused on looking at baking textures and how we would insert objects into the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). During the presentation we had lots of videos looking at baking trying to explain how hard and soft edges work, although hard and soft edges were explained well I didn't really realise until getting hands on the next day that the Normal textures are created artificially using a program called Xnormal. After this lecture I returned home looked and doing some more paintings using a new style of tablet I had acquired. I also started looking into some more information to do with our written task.
        The following day we looked at taking a simple cube with smoothing into UE4 using baking and the Xnormal's program. This process showed us also how exactly soft and hard edges work and to cement them, we also looked at how sometimes with a cylinder when extruded can extrude with hard edges which give of a more hexagon atheistic to the new extruded surface but this is easily sorted with the soft edge button that returns this to a more curved and cylinder effect. After cementing the new desired edges which made our cube look like a dice we then made the UV this time taking into account some bleeding and saved a snapshot.
         This was when we booted Xnormals up for the first time this program looks like something pulled straight out of the 1980's with awful icons but does exactly what you would want the program to do and is an industry standard. This program basically does everything for you and all you have to do is put in the mesh and its UV and it'll process and sort it out for you! After getting the normal maps we booted up UE4 for the first time and began looking at how to set up a low poly mesh in UE4 with its high poly maps. This was where the real fun began we started putting metal maps just tinkering within the texture UI making some plastic looking cubes and some metal crate looking cubes too. This really opened my eyes to the possibilities with just simple zeros and ones in the right place creating completely different object entirely.
          After the workshop I meet up with my group and went to the library to rent some books for our presentation and began delegating what we wanted to do who was doing what. We went through quiet a few ideas before coming to our conclusion. We then brainstormed everything we could with our idea and began making notes. This was a very productive session that ended with a good outcome that we hope everyone will like when we present. I then returned home and did some research on the part of the project I was handed and loved every second of it. Especially a book I rented because I have heard such good things 'Masters of Doom'. My research continued into the next day I also looked at some Zbrush tutorials to get brushed up on my hot keys and to get adjusted to the program to some degree, as Chris had mentioned we might be using the program soon.
         Another thing Chris showed us was a different technique which to me looked liked a productive and effective way of modelling from concept art. Which is too pull out a polygon flat square and to have a picture of the concept art in the background as you do so. Below are a few screenshots of the outcomes with some concept art that I admire done by Tyson Murphy a concept artist at Blizzard for 'World of Warcraft'. I really liked this method and could see myself doing this method with my own work.
         On Thursday I tided up some of my 3D work from the day before and we looked at some programing this was the first of our programing lectures and was my first interaction with the process, personally this isn't why I do art and didn't interest me much at all. Yet I see that this could be a great thing to have on a CV when looking to get a job so any extra lessons going I will be attending to broaden my CV and in turn the likely hood of me getting a job. After this lecture I went home and dug deeper into my written project and particularly looking at some of the requirements they have and any information or help on the portfolios.
          On my final day of the week i had a texture session where we looked at photo-manipulation using the RGB channels and blending options in Photoshop. This was an interesting lesson where we learnt how to paint using masks in a non-destructive fashion and the difference between a non-destructive affect and a destructive affect. I also got Kayleigh to help me with my pencil to digital problem which essentially is that I struggle to convert some of drawing style and skill into my digital work. She then proceeded to show me a new way in which to think about each brush and how by using F5 and opening the brush options I can make my brush react something closer to a pencil and how to get the smuggling affect I enjoy heavily in my drawings. I was really happy with the help I got as it really started clicking by the end of the lesson. Yet again this has been a productive week with some really good outcomes that I couldn't be happier with.