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 23

I began this week by making a silhouette of a Roman Pillar inside Maya this is the most basic form that the pillar can take. I then cut this pillar up into equal quads so that inside of ZBrush the pillar will deform correctly to come out with the correct out come. I then had problems when bringing this object in however as for some reason ZBrush was telling me my object had a face with more than four sides and for the life of me I couldn't see what it was. I then showed Chris the problem the following day and he two couldn't see the problem and said not to worry as when I import it it would have fixed the problem. I then watched some YouTube videos on how to make a good rock texture and what works best. After doing my research I began the destruction of the pillar crafting the rock texture and moving some of the pillar work around inside ZBrush. Once I'd got the work to a place i was happy with I then looked into Alphas for my brushes as I remembered Chris saying how they could really help with the texturing. Once I'd had a play with some cracks I then called It finished.
        After finishing my Roman Pillar I decided I wanted to have a go at a slightly more detailed and complicated design within ZBrush as I now seemed to have a slightly better grasp of what all the functions do within the program. So to start this I made a little collage of Mayan pillars as this was the route I wanted to take I then quickly made up a silhouette of the pillar and divided it equal into quads, i then put this into Zbrush, this time without any problems and began sculpting. For this design I turned on mirroring a lot as most of the Mayan pillar were basically mirrored down with only a few exceptions. I then spent the next couple of days detailing out all the damage working from big to small trying to get as much detail in as possible without it looking over done. After our lecture with Merlin on Thursday I began to think about what would interest me and is something i can relate to make the essay just a little bit more interesting. I decided that the essay I want to do will be based on the desensitization of video games and how that might be related to the real world. In my opinion this ridiculous but I've began looking into articles and gathering research and can see with some of the tests that have been carried out how they could relate to such things. On the final day of the week we had a texture session where we did digital life drawings which was refreshing from the normal life drawing sessions we have as it meant we could experiment with colour as you can see below. After the session I finished up my Mayan pillar with some crack Alphas and called this one done too. I really felt like my progress inside ZBrush has come a long way and can be seen below.

Week 22

After a couple weeks off due to the presentation week and reading week we're back, jumping straight back into it. I started this week with my second programming session where we had a re-cap on the last session where i made a version of pong. This weeks programming session looked at how to use programming with in a 3D programming, the one we looked at was Maya. The programming inside Maya is done using a language called Python an old but very versatile language. Personally I haven't really enjoyed the programming sessions but this is just down to the fact i don't enjoy programming all that much. Yet i can see how impressive the knowledge can inside a program like Maya.
      Tuesday was our first workshop since coming back. This is where we were given the "Pillar Project". Which i basically we can do what ever type of pillar we want we just need to model it and texture it. Chris showed us how to make some basic texture's within ZBrush and how to correctly divide up an polygon so that when in ZBrush the polys are smooth when adding and taking away details. This is fairly daunting to me as I'm not particular great with ZBrush and still don't really understand the program in all honesty. During the session I had a go at making a simple block as shown by Chris with some very simple re-bar which in the long run worked out well. After the session i decided to have a think of some really creative solutions to the task at hand one i came up which I really liked is the quick painting below, the idea being the pillar would be a vintage ticket booth. I really liked the idea but having never really used ZBrush extensively I decided it's probably best to practice and try something a little easier.
       That was exactly what I did I started with some easy squares dividing them up so they sculpt correctly in ZBrush and did some research on YouTube on what brushes give the best results. The next day I then tried something a little more pillar like too see if i could divide that up correctly which seemed to work okay I then tried out this feature within ZBrush where it divides up any separate poly shapes so you can work on one and not all of them. For example with my work I used this feature to separate the re-bar from the concrete outside of the pillar. This is how i got my work to look so broken and decrepit below are some pictures of this pillar this is my first pillar I'm looking to do another and see how that turns out with a more artistic flair over the car park pillar like design below. This week has been fairly productive as I haven't really worked with ZBrush and was another program this unit I have had to learn and get to grips with. When considering where else I wanted to take this project I created the image below of the old fashioned ticket booth, I created this very quickly using my knowledge of Maya and applying it to Photoshop. I quickly made silhouettes using objects created in Maya screen capped the objects silhouette and opened the image in Photoshop and got to work. This was really simple and easy to do and will come in very helpful in the future.