Week 30; From Humble Beginings

  Well, I managed to reach the end of my first year at university (relatively) unscathed! It's been such a blast I can't believe it's over, I've thoroughly enjoyed every part of this year and have made sure I won't regret anything that I haven't done this year. I feel like it's the first time where I've really wanted to work for something, which has been completely alien to me in my past experiences. Enough of the sentimentality though, I may tear up. However, I will leave you with a comparison of what I started out the year with, and what I ended up with.

Week 4 Sci-Fi Crate

Week_30

  So, as you may well know this is the summation of all the work we've done for the past year - the zombie pick-up truck. It's been great fun to model, however sadly my free trials to nDo and substance designer had run out, so I couldn't complete the whole PBR look, however I tried hand-painting the different maps (even though I fully well know it's nowhere near the same). What I did find out though is that UE4 have updated their launcher in which their new version supports Metalic and Roughness maps! I wish I had known this before instead of fiddling around with them in the previous project! At least I know now and I can fully utilize this function, which is great! 

  Right, lets move onto my thoughts on the outcome of this project. I'm indifferent at the moment. Having just finished it and handed in, I'm not really quite sure what to think. I think under the circumstances of having no substance designer and trying to make the textures PBR I did quite well. However I just don't like the design. It's just too bland for my liking. I should have gone back into the diffuse of the truck and fiddled around with the map there, however it wouldn't look quite right as the metalic and roughness map wouldn't register the extra information and I didn't have access to substance designer or nDo, so fresh blood I add to the body work may seem really dull and rust, for example. I've also learned a good lesson in not adding extreme detail to areas which wont ever be seen, for example, for the gear stick in the interior, I made on the normal map the inscription on top of the gear stick, however no-one is ever going to see or notice that unless I tell them it's there, which rather defeats the object. All this being said, I'm happy with the aesthetics of the asset, it's just the design I really have a problem with. I'm impressed that I was able to push myself to try and learn this technique in time to submit a project with it, and it'll only help me in the future. 

  Now, what I'd do differently. Firstly I'd spend a larger time concepting until I was completely content with the final outcome (although this may be unrealistic as I will need to make the asset some time, we'll see). I would also pay closer attention to the allocation of space I set out in my UVW Templates, as sometimes I give too muck texture space to a small detail. For example, the barrel on the side of the model looks hideous and I'd make the texture larger and just change the amount of noise in it, it really doesn't fit the top of the barrel and sticks out like a sore thumb. Obviously, with the great news that UE4 now supports metalic and roughness texture maps, there had to be a cog in the works. For some reason when I export my truck as an OBJ and import it into engine, the spikes don't show up like they do in 3DS Max (see flatshader). So if I were to change anything, that'd probably be first on the list. In all honesty I think that's about it, other than what I've mentioned before about the bodywork, I will conclude I'm actually quite happy with the outcome, as opposed to what I wrote before. 

  That concludes my first year. I have a plan for the summer which I'll divulge. I plan on working with my Father, who happens to be a programmer, in creating small app games and keep working on my 3D. I'm also going to be setting myself certain drawing tasks from life since it's summer, and I should be going to some nice places around England in which I can draw. I also plan to save up for a wacom tablet so I can texture from home as well as model, which would help immensely over the summer as I wouldn't want to fall behind on that! Other than that I'm going to be looking at game engines and what they can do more closely. I really want to be able to fully utilize UE4's potential as I currently feel like it's being a bit wasted on my understanding of it. I also plan to make my own website for my blog and move all the posts onto there, as I feel that it'll enable me to design it exactly how I want it and accommodate my requirements. I will also keep blogging what I'm working on over the summer as well as I wan't to stay in a good habit of blogging.

Thanks for reading!

Week 29; The Penultimate Week

Hello! I'm very happy to join you again after a stress free Easter holidays! In all honesty the last project I did had me completely burned out as I was effectively trying to do double the work so the break was much appreciated and I can come back into the final two weeks fully rested.

So to start off the week we had our presentations on our plan for the Zombie apocalypse. I had prepared this over the Easter and had been practicing the recital, however that still didn't prepare me for the uncharacteristic nerves that set in. I'm usually completely fine with things like this, I guess it was the pressure of it being a formal assessed piece to count towards my final grade. With that being said I think it went quite well, I had some key points from my last presentation I wanted to work on, one being conveying evidence to back up a point. I hope I did this effectively as I reasoned my concepts satisfactorily in my opinion, even though they were actually quite silly. My whole plan was based on riding a motorcycle which I have no clue how to do then riding to a high security prison half way across the country, so I tried to give as much evidence for why a person who is not completely insane would do that. I also tried to project my voice well and capture the audience as much as I could, trying to throw a bit of humor in with the whole silly idea of my plan. Despite the nerves that had set in a few days before the presentation, like I expected, it was painless and over in a flash and I actually quite enjoyed it! I actually wished I had a bit more than three minutes up there! One of the things I could have definitely improved on was the aesthetic quality of the presentation; it wasn't the prettiest. However I also believe that to keep an audiences attention they shouldn't be sidetracked with the imagery, there does need to be a balance, however I do admit I didn't hit the balance.

So that was Tuesday over with. The rest of the week was dedicated to concepting my Zombie modifications! The project I've been waiting for! So I started out with (after the moodboard) sketching extremely roughly over my base truck I'd made previously and annotating my ideas, just to get them on paper. After this I could move onto the next stage which was bringing a few decent concepts forward and photobashing them up. In all honesty I wasn't too satisfied with my concepting, I think I could have done way more with it that what I chose (such as my hoover-leaf blower idea), however I chose the most practical out of some quite wacky designs.

The rest of the week was taken up mostly by writing my Extended Reflection essay which I hadn't got round to in the Easter. It wasn't that I was dreading it, I don't actually mind writing, it was just I did need a break or I'd completely burn out on the cusp of the year.

So, essay done, I'm now moving onto modelling my assets for the 'Zombified' pick-up truck. I'll join you next week with the finished asset and the end of the year! (Wow it's gone quick...)

Until then!

Week 25; It's the Final Countdown

Well, I didn't promise anything about song lyrics!

At least this weeks weak reference actually has some meaning behind it. Writing this blog now we've just broken up for the Easter holidays, meaning we only have 2 weeks left after this before our major hand-in. This includes the zombified pick-up truck, along with our extended writing piece, and a presentation due sometime when we get back from the Easter within the first week. The year is coming close do an end and it's getting really quite scary to think I've already completed my first year of teaching!

Anyhow, lets get onto what I did this week. For the most part; texturing. Lots and lots of it. So as I've covered before I have been using substance designer to create my PBR textures. I've been able to work out how to use the mesh to create maps like world space normals which essentially tell where the verts are pointing (from what I can understand from it), so it can apply wear and tear to certain parts of the mesh which would have more tear than others, or functions like bottom to top dirt.

Albedo

Normal

Metalic

I think this has gone quite well, I've really enjoyed the process of procedural generated textures and really believe this has got to be the way forward, since you can create a material and re-use it on a different mesh to have vastly different results. The interface did take a bit of getting used to but I did get there in the end and created my final asset!

The only problem I had was putting it into UE4 for the final beauty shots... UE4 as an engine doesn't support metallic or roughness maps, the format that Substance Designer uses. So I had to essentially faff around with trying to convert them into specular and gloss maps, which are still completely different to metallic and roughness maps. I'm going to be honest and I don't quite understand how I managed to make it work in UE4 but it does to a degree (apart from the chrome on the hub caps not showing up correctly).

I'll leave you with the beauty shots and I'll see you after Easter!

Week 24; Toyotally Awesome Progress!

OK, I promise this will be the last pun. Seriously.

I confess much of this week I've been a hermit. I've only really seen the outside when walking to lectures on Monday and back again. There is also an excellent reason for this!

I downloaded Substance Designer and a set of programs from the "Quixel Suite" (including nDo - normal maps, dDo - similar to Substance Designer from what I've deduced, finally 3Do - an extremely useful tool allowing to see your asset in PBR lighting scenarios). The whole of this week was really just testing the water with these programs and getting used to them. I've made a few test materials in Substance Designer but I'm saving that more for next week.

This week I've mostly been focusing on nDo and creating the normal maps for my truck. The reason I actually chose nDo as a program to work from is that I see a benefit from the way it creates normal maps. To create normals in nDo you draw and edit vector shapes straight into photoshop without having to model a high-poly version and bake the information onto the model. This is an incredible advantage to hard surface texturing, as i don't have to make a completely new model to bake my normals! But in all honesty that's pretty much all I've been able to do project-wise with this week.

However, I did also start my own project. I've decided to aid my knowledge of PBR texturing by making a petrol station. Hopefully this will familiarize myself with the programs better, alongside doing my Toyota Hilux project. I doubt I'll be able to finish off this petrol station but I managed to do most of the modelling rather swiftly (I'm really getting the hang of this modelling thing now!). Anyway, here are the updates from the past week:

Screenshot from 3Do

normal painted in nDo

Week 23; Keep Truckin' Along

Firstly, I'd like to address the well thought out title of this blog.

Okay, now to business.

This week we go straight into another project, and I do have to admit I'm still feeling the effects of the crunch time we had in the character project. Luckily though, we have a relatively straight forward project! This will be the first instalment of our Zombie Pick-up Truck final project.

We've been given 6k tris and three weeks to model and texture the exterior (and interior as a stretch goal) of a Toyota Hilux truck.

In all honesty, I think this actually too much time spent on this part of the project as we already have been provided with the blueprints of the truck and we can follow them quite strictly then when moving onto the interior (which I fully intend, given the time we have). Therefore I've made the decision, following an announcement of a talk coming up on normal maps by one of our third years, to fully PBR texture my truck.

So, what is PBR texturing? Well, PBR stands for Physically Based Rendering, in which the light directly and dynamically effects the textures of the model. This gives a somewhat realistic effect when done properly. So, how will I make these PBR textures? In preparation of this I've been following a series on youtube where (insert name) creates an asset for a level using a Photoshop plug-in – nDO – to create the nomal maps straight onto a photoshop document, wherein normally you'd have to create in 3DS Max or zBrush, a high-poly model and “bake” the information onto a low-poly model. I will be using these normals in conjunction with the normals that I'll get from a program called “Substance Designer” that I'll be using.

My ambition of using and learning a completely new program in 2 Weeks will be quite difficult to achieve but I'm up for the challenge and hopefully it'll make my model look quite pretty!

However, at the end of this week I've created fully the interior and exterior of the model and I'm ready to continue onto the texturing and unwrapping for next week.

Interior

Exterior

Until then!  

Post mortem

  So, as I've covered in previous blog posts, we had five weeks to complete the character project. Two weeks for concepting in which after the first we had feedback to improve on for our final concept to be approved. This was an individual project and we had two 1024x1024 texture sheets and a 6k tri limit. In hindsight, I'm quite happy with the whole process, the reasons I'll go over in the following paragraphs.

  What I think worked well:

  In all honesty I'm actually quite happy with the project overall. This is the first project I actually spent a considerable amount of time (2 weeks) concepting and managed to paint up a final concept of the model. I liked the overall aesthetic of the character, and how it turned out in the end. I'm particularly happy with the textures on the model, I think they have sufficient detail and readability and fit the project brief quite well.

  What didn't work well:

  My topology. I briefly covered this in my previous blog post but I got in a muddle with the topology of my model. I went against my own intuition and decided to model the folds into the model, which I am aware messed up the topology to make it hard to rig. I'm also not too keen on the pose I decided to model him in. I tried to get an elderly man ambiance for my character so I modelled him in a stoop, however he seems to come across more stunted than stooping. I also should have made it more obvious he was older with the use of greying hairs. I also should have allocated more time for texturing as towards the end of the project as I found that I had to rush the last refinements such as the shadows on the face.

  What I would do differently?:

  As I've said before, I would completely redo the topology of the model to fix the rig of the model and in turn the deformation of the model. I'd also fix the colour scheme of the model. In my opinion it has too much green for a fisherman which should have more of a blue tinge to the design in correlation to the theme of the sea. I would have spent more tris on the accessories and more time in texturing them as well as they come across rushed and also don't deform properly with the rest of the model.

  So, knowing all this now, I'll redo the character project but limit myself to around 2k tris. I may change the subject matter to what I want, reconcept over the summer or in downtime between projects and reflect on what I've learned and how long the new project has taken me.

Week 22; Coming to a close.

The Final week of Character project and along with getting feedback from my third year peers, brushing up textures and rigging, this week has been quite a busy one, unlike what I'd had expected.

So I spent the week brushing up on my textures after receiving some feedback from my third year mentor in which I was advised, for the face of the model, overlay a picture of my actual face then paint over onto the texture sheet. I also didn't have the correct shadows under the nose and the neck and forehead area so I had to change those as well. I was also informed that I should make the back of the poncho less detailed in order to mask better the fact that the texture is mirrored. Also I cleaned up the hair and hair line of the model.

Now the rigging part didn't go so well.

Due to the way that I had modelled my character (modelling in the folds) I now had to deal with best the bad topology I had made. This in turn meant that the character did not deform correctly when put through animations and took a lot of fiddling around with the weight of bones to fix. For the most part I went through Mike Pickton's tutorial on rigging a character (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpU1yqsT8_A) and following his instruction step by step. Even though I did this I still had my fair share of problems that ensued.

However at the end of this week I'm happier at the knowledge I've gained and I now have a proper appreciation of why topology is so important!

The End Result:

We were also asked within our review to do a post-mortem of our character project. In the next blog post I'll discuss my end feeling with my project, how it went and what I've learned more in depth, until then!