15/01/2023
3D Creation Pipeline for Film & Games Week 10 Onwards:
Hello, I am back with again an entire for the blog, in this blog I will be writing about the Production process for the hard surface model and the organic model which I will be working on.
First, I would like to begin with the hard surface model, for this I had collected various references for different types of models and then I had it narrowed down to what I was interested in and then chose the which I wanted to make. I chose to model the Automail arm of Edward Elric from the anime Full Metal Alchemist. So, I choose different blueprints of the model and references of it.
Getting references is distracting if we do not have a clear goal on what we are searching for as whenever I am searching for something in a general idea, I was like this is a good idea for everything I came across. So, a lesson from this is to have a clear vision of what you want to do, or at least have the theme down in what you want to do.
Next, I started working on the blocking of the arm using basic shapes and then went ahead to add details to it, later I stared to model the plates for the arm and then the fingers which count as secondary details for the arm. Up until now I am mostly done with the secondary details, I will be moving on to the tertiary and the final details by the end of this week or mid of next week.
I made the forearm using a cylinder for basic blocking and got it into shape by moving the vertices and then added the details using the extrude method and finally added and deleted some of the edges to get a minimal topology and then subdivided them to have a clean topology.
During the modelling of the hand I had a lot of help from my professor for creating it and also found about different ways of modelling it, since the 1st 2 times I tried to make the hand it did not come out the way I wanted or it was not matching with the rest of the arm, so my professor suggested that I use the quad draw tool to map out the basic shape and then make the details for it.
For the elbow I made use of the sphere and a cylinder and then extruded it and then shaped it to accommodate the sphere.
And for the modelling of the shoulder plates, I did the same thing like creating the basic shape with the the plane and then extruded it it to give depth and then I used the a non linear deformer tool to give it the shape I wanted. As for the shoulder itself I used a cylinder to get the basic shape and then added the details it it.
After finishing all this I started modelling the little details I needed for the model, like the bolts and the plates which I have used in the forearm of the model and also the cylinders which are used as the joints for the fingers.
As I have finished with the modelling of the arm, then cleaning it up and subdividing it to give it a better finish.
While cleaning the hard surface model I faced with a lot of cleaning for the model as I had lot of edge loops and some N-gons and vertices for the model, so I used the mesh clean up tool to find the N-gons and cleaned them.
Then I moved with the unwrapping of the UVs I had to unwrap every part of the model and then I had some problems with the seams which were coming in the substance painter, so I went to the old internal tutorials and found a way to come across it.
Since I was having trouble with UV mapping and baking the textures in substance painter, I changed the multiple undims tile flow for every single object in a different tile flow to 3 tile flow with different parts of the same object in the same tile for example like all the UVs of the hand including the fingers are in one single tile, the image is below.
Then I exported the model in an FBX format from Maya and imported it in substance painter, where we used the regular settings for the importing of the mesh.
Then I started with the texturing in substance painter, and baked the mesh maps for it, then I started using the fill layers and adding black mask to it to add different paint layers and manipulate it. for getting the metallic texture of the model I added the fill layer and then increased the metalness to maximum and decreased the roughness quite a bit, then I added another layer where I have added a generator for the rust effect and then a paint layer to create a little bit of dirt on the model.
Then after finishing with the texturing I have exported the mesh maps from substance to Maya, since I was having problem with applying textures manually to each of the attributes, so I used the substance painter plugin in Maya, where we can import the maps together using the select multiple maps feature, were it assigs a Aistandard surface material and we have to assign it to the relevant part of the model and then I changed the settings of the UV tiling mode to UDIM(Mari) and experimented with the scaling of the displacement.
Then after applying and checking the textures of the model and rendering it a few times to see if the textures are applied correctly or not. After this I proceeded with the lighting of the model where I not used too much lighting as I wanted to give it an old roman empire Armor effect and little bit of mysterious effect. So, I proceeded with adding area lights and Directional lights in all directions and a spotlight to obtain the desired effect.
The image below was the result after a lot of experimentation with the lights and I obtained the desired Effect I was looking for.
The next step was to create the turntable animation for the model, where I used the Maya's inbuilt feature for creating the turntable animation, I have created the animation for 240 frames which is about 8 secs and used the HD_1080 with 150 PPI for the resolution and used the tiff file format for the render settings and then rendered it.
After this I made another camera to create a close-up turntable animation for the model with the same number of frames.
Then I rendered the wireframe for the model using the Arnold wireframe material using the same render settings.
For the Organic model I had chosen a simple character to create which is done by another artist called Fen who is a 3D Artist at Ustwo Games.
I used this as a base reference for the creation of my model and below is the reference for it.
So i started with the basic blocking in Zbrush, where I used the basic shapes like sphere and cylinder and squares to create the head and the body, then i extracted the parts for arms and legs using mask tool.
After this i merged the Body with the head to make it into one sub tool and then I added the details to face using the clay build up, damstandred and move brushes.
Then for the dress extracted them using the mask tool and then shaped it accordingly to the shape I wanted. and then i started adding the details for the arms and legs using the brush tool.
As for the hat i used a cylinder and shaped it to the form i want, and for the cones of the had i used a cone and shaped it as I wanted and then merged them all together.
As for the leaf and stone I used the basic shapes and used the brush tool add the details for the stone and leaf. As for the tail I used a cylinder and shaped it and merged it with the body.
Then I exported the file in an FBX format, since it retains the layers as we have for importing it in Maya.
After this I imported it in Maya and retopologized the model according to the layers and renamed the layers according to the high poly mesh for the low poly one.
After this I made the UV maps for the model. since I was having trouble UV mapping the hat i retopologised it again like 3 times to get the proper shape of it and then UV unwrapped it. For this mode I used mainly the planar method of unwrapping I had to add many seams in different areas to Unfold the UVs.
Then I Exported the low Poly model which had the IDs for it (new materials were assigned and renamed according to parts of the body with different colours) and the high poly model as an FBX file to import it in substance Painter.
Then I imported the Low poly FBX file where we had assigned the IDs to substance painter and then baked it with my high poly mesh, to get a good result.
Then i started texturing the model using the fill layers with black masks and then paint layers, for the creation of the cloth and hat I used a paint layer with a fibre glass generator. and a cloth crease brush to get the creases of the cloth I also added some height to the paint layers where the designs were there.
Same was done with the texturing of the body, but with the use for the fur brushes and the height for it. This was also the way i textured the stone and the leaf and same goes with the eyes.
Below is an image from substance painter.
After importing it back into maya, I added the textures on the low poly model using the same way I had used for the hard surface model, because of this it saved me a lot of time. After this I added the lights in a way to adapt it to the turntable animation.
I have mostly used the directional and the aera lights to get the desired effect I was hoping for.
After this I did a few experimental renders to see if I am getting the desired effect and when i did this, I was having a lot of problems with the scale of the height maps and the bump maps as it was giving a wired look, so I had to adjust the displacement shader and experiment with it till I found the way I wanted it to look.
Then a did a few frames of experimental renders, where I found it okay, and then started rendering the textured model. The render settings I used over here was same as the hard surface model but with the increase in Resolution to 150 PPI to get the desired effect.
After rendering the textured model, I rendered a wireframe model and then compiled both into a form of video.
This was mainly the process of creating the 3D assets. After all this I took my renders to either photoshop where I took out the compiled video, where I imported the files in TIF sequence and rendered out a video of the hard surface renders and the organic model renders.
After that I took them to After effects and combined the videos with some intro and made 2 different videos for the 2 different models.
Self Reflection
The entire process of creating the assets was tedious and during this time I learnt a lot about different ways to solve problems with the help of my classmates, when I was stuck in a situation where I didn't know what to do. This also helped me to know my limitations and strengths for this particular module.
The one thing I enjoyed the most during this whole process was sculpting in Zbrush and texturing in substance painter where I could play with different things.
As a conclusion I can say that the whole module has been a great journey, where I learnt new things in each and every session of the classes, I can also say that I have improved in some aspects of the things which I have learnt during the term but there are a lot of places where I need to improve.
Well, this is all from me until my next blog entire.
Thanks for Reading!!
Until Next time!!!
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