AAA Asset Production

As one of our projects to have completed before Christmas we have to model and texture a realistic asset which is to be rendered in the Unreal 4 engine.

For my project I decided to model a 19th century naval cannon complete with carriage. As with anything ever a moodboard came first.

I looked at many different types and shapes of cannons, from the real deals to contemporary scale models.

The first thing I started to model was the side of the carriage, the wooden frame with attached trucks (wheels) which holds the cannon. The semicircular notch at the top for one of the cannon trunnions was made using a cylinder and subtracting it away from the side of the carriage. This produced edges that needed to be connected and looped around the model.  

Inside of the carriage. When completed it will be mirrored over so some faced needed to be deleted.

Forming the fore support of the cannon.

The trucks. These are separate objects from the rest of the carriage.

Modeling the main cannon. It's simply a cylinder with edge loops added to created the appropriate tapering shape with a flared muzzle.  

The trunnion clamps were modeled separate from the carriage on which they sit from a cube that was shaped and extruded before being cut in half and mirrored a achieve the symmetry required. 

The cannon sitting in the carriage. Note trunnions added to the barrel.

A progress pic of the cannon showing detail on the trucks and rivets on the sides.

A side view of the cannon with the barrel at a more realistic angle.

Top view of the cannon.

A back three quarter view.

The high poly model subdivided with creased edges showing. These creased edges are not permanent.

  A top view showing the same.

Adding in wood grain textures using alphas in ZBrush to give the cannon's carriage a more realistic finnish. This was achieved with a selection of alphas made from simple Google images and stamping them on with the brush's drag feature enable whilst the surface was masked appropriately.

The carriage all wooded up.

The full cannon detailed in ZBrush. The untouched surfaces are all the cannon's metal parts which do not need any detail added ZBrush. The detail will be added in Quixel SUITE.

A three quarter view of the cannon in Zbrush.

The "low-poly" version of the cannon's Maya model ( I use the term "low poly" loosely, It could be much lower but it isn't necessary for it to be so). Note the slightly highlighted areas where the UVs have been cut. 

The UV sheet. Poor use of space but practical. The somewhat crude layout should not interfere with the processes to come. Next time I would be good to take the time to arrange the UVs more efficiently, which, of course, is expected of you in the industry.
From here I went back to my ZBrush model to add colour using Polypaint which is to be extracted later to form the objects colour map.

The result was a rather funky-looking green and purple cannon. The green for old, battered wood and the purple for a sea-beaten cast iron look.

Using XNormals I created the colour and normal maps to place on my cannon in Quixel Suite.

A bit rough. Given more time I would have been able to neaten it up.

Some neatening out was required for the colour maps but as can be seen I got it mostly under control. I, in fact, had to produce three of each maps, six in total, for the cannon's carriage, trucks and (naturally) cannon. These were all combined in Photoshop to produce final, all encompassing maps.

The penultimate stage is to place the object in Quixel Suite. To make sure the maps operated smoothly I did a few tests before hand.

The carriage as it appears in Quixel. The normal maps appear to work fine. The colour  is, of course, not final.

The trucks showing both normal map detail and some wood and metal texturing thanks to the colour maps.

Tilt shift blurring (so artistic).

Shiny lens flare (wow). 

Top view with no camera nonsense (boo!).

These shots show the cannon in Quixel's 3DO viewer. With the textures and materials established it was time to take the model into Unity 4.

I could have done with better seam placement along the cannon.

A series of screen shots of the cannon in Unreal, sitting on top of a quickly pieced-together pier overlooking the sea. Fitting, perhaps, for a naval cannon.

To get the cannon into Unreal the Quixel textures are exported so that they can be applied in engine. These textures are then placed on to a material which is then thrown on to a .fbx export of my low poly Maya model.

The model is, however, not without it's flaws (of course, I made it what else was to be expected).

As can be seen, because of the nature of my colour mapping metal "shadows" can be seen on the wooden surfaces near this rope loop. In retrospect I should have payed more attention to the details on the normal map. I would be pressed for time to fix it now so I feel that, in future models, carefully surveying the normal map for flaws should be done straight after baking.

The same can be seen here on this loop on the side of the carriage.

ZBrush Stuff- Head Sculpt

This year we started practicing with ZBrush, the 3-D sculpting program. When getting to grips with the software we were given the task of sculpting a head, using a pre-made base render and modeling and deforming it to make our own.

I began by warping the base mesh here and there with the move tool.

Here I moved the eyes farther apart and made his cheekbones and jaw stronger.

Softening the jaw ever so slightly, I made the dips in the temples more prominent.

Here I added another level of subdivisions.

After adding yet more subdivisions I flattened the bridge of the nose more and made the lines coming down from his cheekbones more severe. I also made a conscious effort to make his features more asymmetric and therefore more realistic. This can be seen in the placement of his eyes, nostrils, ears and on his jaw, chin and cheekbones.  

A three-quarter-ish view.

At a profile he looks slightly more ordinary and less chiseled and powerful than the image that is betrayed by the front view.

Another three-quarter view after a while of sculpting. I added hair (sort of) and pulled his cheekbones up higher so they didn't look as "off" as I think they did earlier. 

Not the happiest looking chap...

Another front view featuring stronger temples and forehead bone-star-ridge-thing.  

That's Not an Unimaginative Popular Culture Reference! That's an Unimaginative Popular Culture Reference!!!

The title makes it quite self-evident that this post is going to be about a knife. Doesn't it? Last week our homework given to us by Phil out Maya tutor-technician (tutnician or technitor, if you will) was to finish modeling the combat knife we started in class, at least to a certain point.

The base image (duh).

We were given a base image to place onto a plane with which to use as reference. With the image in place we began by using the quad draw tool to create planes which were to become the handle.

The plane was then extruded to create half the handle (the knife will be mirrored and stitched together later) and the knife's button was added.

Knife handle with button visable.

Afterwards more edgeloops were added so that the screws could be added into the handle.

The inner faces of the handle were also extruded and beveled to add more depth and detail to the grip.

The screws (highlighted for your convenience).

Next was the knife blade. It was much the same as the handle in regards to all the quad drawing but made slightly more complicated but the blade's serration.

Knife blade with more edgeloops than sense.

With that done all that was in order was adding a cylinder for the round thing that can be seen in the upper right hand of the above picture. Also added was some detail on the blade near the handle which was extruded and beveled.

Next was to mirror the handle and buttons.

Moving on from there I had to mirror the knife's blade.

The Tassle That Never Was and extras

When I first began my project I came up with ideas for Tassle that were a little different than what I finally chose to do.

I did quite like number 6's armour-dress-thing but it probably wouldn't have worked for the main character of a game.

These were the first set of thumbnails I did for Tassle. I combined aspects of the second and third sketches to create a more finalised concept. 

This was the result, note the silvery and strongly geometric designs.

There were two reasons why, already into the project, I chose to redesign my character. 

The first reason is that I though that the complicated geometric armour would be too difficult to model. Of course you could just call it "challenging" but I had no interest riving myself insane with difficult and demanding geometry.

The second is that I just go a bit bored of it. I don't know why I did but now even looking back at it I recall thinking that I could just do something different, something that wasn't along the lines of the first thing that popped into my head.

Now some extras.

This is a screen shot of one of my models of Tassle. I had to abandon it and start again because of geometry problems way above my pay grade, which was a shame because it didn't turn out too badly.

Gold and shiny! This design was done with a gold foil texture to make you think wealth.
which the Edwards certainly have

This one was toned down a bit more.

These are the designs I drew up as the symbol/logo for the Edwards Corporation who de jure own Tassle. It's just a circle with some liney nonsense and a barcode design beneath it and it can be seen as the background for the synopses write ups.

Summer Project

I can't remember the last time I posted something on here but I'm quite sure it was close a thousand years ago. Over the course of our summer holiday we were given the task to design, model and render a character for a (nonexistent) sci-fi game. The character had to be a cyborg and have at least two arms and legs. Simple enough. I thought.

 I looked at different designs for different types of cyborgy and mechanical things by many different artists. I had it already in my head that I wanted to do a human cyborg but one that was not a built-like-a-tank killing machine or a multi-appendaged mechanical spider queen. What I wanted to go for was something with less glamour like a servant type or ship pilot or someone part of a ship's bridge crew. I eventually went with the latter.

For our project we had to do a little bit of world building to set the scene for our characters. We had to devise a synopsis of the narrative as well as develop the appearance and traits of our character.

 

With the stage set set it was time to thumbnail Tassle, the name of all names I chose for my character. Personally I think it's a sweet, simple and endearing name and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I chose the name whilst looking around my room trying to conjure up something suitable and spying the tassels on my bedroom blinds. Nothing whatsoever.

Taking inspiration from my first and fourth thumbnails I set about to paint my character.

Now that I have my nice painty-uppy picture of Tassle I had to get to work on the back and side view to use as reference when modeling him.

These are said designs. I took the best side of my front painting and mirrored it for use to model the front view. Trying to get things to line up on the side view is not worth the time it takes and can break even the strongest willed individual. 

Next, of course, was the modeling done in Maya 2015.

Some perhaps not so hi-rez pictures of the low-poly model. 3D modeling is not my strong point point so it took me a good few tries to get the armour on right and I made a few alterations on the fly to the look of it keeping in mind the some of the detail was to be added on later with Mudbox, such as the eyes.