BlackSmith Final Project
Week 6 (Blog Post written on May 11th, 2020)
This week was the last week of the project panic rushed into me and I proceeded to finish the rest of the UV's, all of the texturing, and built the scene in Unity. Let's start with the UV's, I had plenty of trouble on the sword rack. I spent a solid 3 hours on that alone because of the number of tiny pieces, I also had issues rearranging the UV sheet to fit another object in the 0-1, I played tetris with the UV's for a while until I got a layout that worked.
This UV sheet also gave me a ton of issues because no matter what I did this sheet would fatal error my maya. My solution to this was to take a screenshot and then move my UVs one by one based off that screenshot rather than moving pieces on the sheet above together.
Texturing was mostly a smooth process, once I got here I got into a groove and cranked out all of my UV sheets.
The images above are from my combination of a designer ground material and a picture of grass in alchemist.
Finally I moved the scene into Unity and here are the renders I got, the only trouble I had here was getting fog to work in my scene, but other then that here are my renders.
Overall this project was a fun experience that I don't mind doing again, but the amount of UV's is not very enjoyable to say the least. I wish I was able to tell a better story in this scene, there is not enough detail to convey the thought I wanted to get across, but there might be enough detail to make someone think of something else that I didn't think of.
Week 5 (Blog Post written on May 6th, 2020)
This week I still continued my UV work, I underestimated the amount of UV's in this project so I haven't been as aggressive as normal on this project. I'm still way behind, but I don't have any other assignments, so after this blog post, I'm going to solely focus on this project only until it is done. I realized this week after looking through the assignment instructions again and I noticed that we needed a glass object. I was going to settle with glass highlights on my main sword in the scene, but I then downloaded the extra objects for this scene, I grabbed the lantern on a hook, but I only used the lantern. I have two more UV sheets to make and then I can texture.
The pictures above are my 2K maps.
I organized all of my current UV's into sheets based off of what I thought was most important in terms of size, I even made a document to format what UV's are paired with what.
The picture above is my 1K map.
The picture above is my 500 map.
I'm going to make my project look the best it can with the time I have, but I'm confident I can make it look great.
Week 4 (Blog Post written on April 29th, 2020)
This week I continued my UV work, I'm still behind because I haven't finished all of my UV's. I did however UV the hardest objects in my scene, so the rest of the UV's shouldn't take long to finish unless I have a brain shutdown.
The UV sheets above are my anvil and the hammer on top, the anvil was mostly straightforward, with minor issues when it came to one seam on the upper part of the anvil, in the end, I fixed it through trial and error of placing seams in spots I thought worked until one did. The hammers UV's were straightforward with no issues.
The image on top is the grinder's UV's and the one on the bottom are the finished wagon UV's. The grinder was really straightforward, seemed really complicated based on the model, but it broke up into many easy pieces. The wagon, on the other hand, wasn't hard to UV, it was just extremely time-consuming because every single part was a rectangle so it was just repetition. I will finish the UV's this week and start the texturing process.
Week 3 (Blog Post written on April 22nd, 2020)
This week I grabbed my modular pieces and started my UV work, I UV'ed the furnace, the bucket, and part of the wagon.
On the first UV sheet is the bucket and furnace, on the second sheet is the wagon so far. I had many problems doing the UV's for the furnace and had to rethink where my seems were, it took me a few different attempts to get uniform checkers. I had way more problems on the bucket surprisingly, it was a ton of pieces,
and every time I tried to unwrap an object, it came out weird like a diamond or something, I had to redo the seems over and over until one set worked. On the bottom of the bucket, the circle didn't want to UV through cut and sew, so I thought of the solution to use a planer map. Here's an updated picture of my scene:
My goal for the next week is to finish the UV's, I tackled some of the harder objects in my scene first, so once I finish those, the rest should go by quickly.
Week 2 (Blog post written on April 15th, 2020)
This week I finished up the layout of what I want the blacksmith scene to look like.
Currently the object list that I'm using is:
Wagon,
Barrels,
Table,
Two kinds of Swords,
Sword racks,
A stand to hold up the anvil,
A hammer for the anvil, the forge,
The welder,
The fire pit,
and finally the fence.
In total, I'm using 13 objects, but if I do think of something later on that will contribute to the scene, then I'll add it in.
All of the objects in the scene are provided to us, I got nothing from online sources.
Objects that the player will get close too would be the forge itself, the anvil, the wagon, the barrels, the swords, and the table.
I'm a little behind because I haven't started the Uving process, but I will start that asap this week.
Week 1 (Blog post written on April 8th, 2020)
This week we were given the blacksmith models and were told to make a scene with these items. The first thing I did was I looked up reference, I first went to google and found a few scenes that I thought were going to be it, but then one of my friends shot me towards Artstation which gave me the type of scene I was going for.
After finding the reference, I took the models that were in the given scene and I arranged them in a way that is very close to the building in this scene.
The cube in the center of the scene is the camera angle that I'm looking to use to show off this scene, later on, the top is cut off, but the forge sticks up through the roof, also this forge has a back since I modeled that. Modeling the back of that forge was an issue I ran into because mesh -> fill hole didn't work the way I thought it would, so I instead used bridge and then I target welded every vertex I saw and filled in the gap, then I added edge loops to match the already established geometry.
Knife Retopology and Texturing
This week I still continued my UV work, I underestimated the amount of UV's in this project so I haven't been as aggressive as normal on this project. I'm still way behind, but I don't have any other assignments, so after this blog post, I'm going to solely focus on this project only until it is done. I realized this week after looking through the assignment instructions again and I noticed that we needed a glass object. I was going to settle with glass highlights on my main sword in the scene, but I then downloaded the extra objects for this scene, I grabbed the lantern on a hook, but I only used the lantern. I have two more UV sheets to make and then I can texture.
I organized all of my current UV's into sheets based off of what I thought was most important in terms of size, I even made a document to format what UV's are paired with what.
I'm going to make my project look the best it can with the time I have, but I'm confident I can make it look great.
Week 4 (Blog Post written on April 29th, 2020)
This week I continued my UV work, I'm still behind because I haven't finished all of my UV's. I did however UV the hardest objects in my scene, so the rest of the UV's shouldn't take long to finish unless I have a brain shutdown.
Week 3 (Blog Post written on April 22nd, 2020)
This week I grabbed my modular pieces and started my UV work, I UV'ed the furnace, the bucket, and part of the wagon.
and every time I tried to unwrap an object, it came out weird like a diamond or something, I had to redo the seems over and over until one set worked. On the bottom of the bucket, the circle didn't want to UV through cut and sew, so I thought of the solution to use a planer map. Here's an updated picture of my scene:
Week 2 (Blog post written on April 15th, 2020)
This week I finished up the layout of what I want the blacksmith scene to look like.
Wagon,
Barrels,
Table,
Two kinds of Swords,
Sword racks,
A stand to hold up the anvil,
A hammer for the anvil, the forge,
The welder,
The fire pit,
and finally the fence.
In total, I'm using 13 objects, but if I do think of something later on that will contribute to the scene, then I'll add it in.
All of the objects in the scene are provided to us, I got nothing from online sources.
Objects that the player will get close too would be the forge itself, the anvil, the wagon, the barrels, the swords, and the table.
I'm a little behind because I haven't started the Uving process, but I will start that asap this week.
Week 1 (Blog post written on April 8th, 2020)
This week we were given the blacksmith models and were told to make a scene with these items. The first thing I did was I looked up reference, I first went to google and found a few scenes that I thought were going to be it, but then one of my friends shot me towards Artstation which gave me the type of scene I was going for.
Knife Retopology and Texturing
The goal of this assignment was to learn how to use the quad draw tool in Maya, the goal was also to understand how to turn high detailed models into low detailed models for games. We were tasked with turning three high detailed knives into three low detailed knives that kept the detail from the high detailed models.
The first knife was the easiest of the three to make, it was perfectly smooth and had no bumps so it was easy to make, I finished it in one class period. I had no issues with this knife and it got me confident in retopology of models.
The second knife was pretty tricky and made me think really hard about how to approach it, this knife had many bumps and ridges that messed with the smoothness of the model. I fixed this by moving vertex points up and down to simulate the bumps and ridges, it isn't perfect but I liked how it turned out.
The third and final knife was the hardest knife for me to attempt, the face on the knife took a while to make well and even, thinking about it now while writing this, I should have done a symmetry on the model to make things easier when doing quad draw. I encountered many issues where edge loops were complete loops, and some edges led to the middle of other polygons which made me fix it with the multicut tool.
The main issue I had with all three of the knives were the problem of poly count, I would always model the model with way less than the 2k poly limit, so I solved this on all three by adding so many edgeloops to made the model more dense. I'm overall happy with the knives, I want to improve my skills of retopology for next time.
Substance Painter Tutorials
In this assignment we were tasked with following along with two tutorials for Substance Painter, these tutorials got us more familiar with the program. The first tutorial we watched was on the process of texturing a lantern, it was surprisingly longer than I thought it would be in terms of time.
I got impatient with this tutorial and started skipping to the end of most videos to see how much progress is made, then if significant progress is made then I rewind the video and watch through, otherwise, I move on ahead. I procrastinated this assignment so any video that wasn't progressing the texturing of this model was basically skipped, for time purposes, but I would have watched them realistically if I didn't procrastinate this assignment, they were interesting videos. Since I skipped some videos I missed out on a few minor changes that the person made, so my solution was to look very carefully on the current video to catch the changes that were made, and that usually worked, otherwise, I went back and rewatched the video.
In the end for this assignment, these were all of the maps I ended up with, I converted them into maps for unity so we didn't have a thirty map contact sheet.
The second tutorial we watched for substance painter was how to texture an Amp, this tutorial went over a fair bit of what the other tutorial covered, so I was free to fast forward through the videos. This tutorial was more direct in its way of showing you what things do in painter. The first tutorial I was mostly keeping pace with the video, but this video confused me, the part I struggled with was when he would add detail to the amp, but then remove the detail and say how this is ok, but it's better to do it this way. This made me waste a ton of time since I try to do everything he is doing, my solution to this problem was to wait until I know for sure that the guy is moving on to the next part to then do the work he just did.
Overall I feel I learned more about substance painter from this assignment and I am more confident in what I can do in the future.
Lantern Tutorial: https://academy.substance3d.com/courses/getting-started-with-substance-painter-2018/youtube-IGGQl9kVB1M
Amp Tutorial: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/substance-painter-2019-essential-training/introduction?u=57692737
Alchemist and Designer
The goal of this Alchemist assignment was to take a real-world photo of grass or rocks or whatever you found over the weekend and create a fully fleshed out texture in Alchemist that you can use in Unity.
A problem I ran into was that I mixed bark and pebbles, it wasn't going to look great from the get-go. A solution I tried was to put blending effects like snow and water over the bark to try and hide it, this solution worked, but I never figured out where the bark went. I hid the snow and water and adjusted some settings, but the bark wasn't as prominent as it was at the start of the mix.
The goal
of the substance assignment was to get used to the program by following
tutorials on four different materials. Our job was to make these
materials as close to the tutorial as possible while grasping the
workflow of substance designer.
Brick Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji45Nmc93Nk&feature=emb_title
Metal Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzKtubDsC9o&feature=emb_title
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGGL1lQ1Djs&feature=emb_title
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIAQQSCUy9o
MudTwigs Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0wXHrWAmCwWfVVurGIQO_tMVWCFhnqE
WoodPlanks Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98rn8MGIZjA&feature=emb_title
Differences between Alchemist and Designer that I noticed where that you were able to create a texture very quickly in Alchemist, but the tradeoff is that you can't use those textures in games, you can use them in animated shorts or films. Designer, on the other hand, is a long process of figuring out what detail you want in your own custom texture and how much time you want to put into this texture since the more time you put in the better the outcome.
The Advantages/Disadvantages of both that I found out. I kind of explained it above, but an advantage for Alchemist is being able to create high detailed textures really fast for use in film. An advantage for Designer is being able to do anything you want to your texture at any time, it has a cool layering system that allows change to any part of the designer graph at any time to modify the final texture. The disadvantage of Alchemist is that you don't have too many options to make the texture unique, you can add snow and water or moss, but it would be one or two types of moss compared to custom moss in Designer. The disadvantage of Designer is that the process to make a texture takes a while, you get faster with practice, but the process is long to make any texture compared to Alchemist.
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