Thinking about how I will add the body décor. Since I want to be slightly protruding from the body as though he is wearing a suit and those parts are standing out as a piece of armour or alike. What it I duplicated the body. Then deleted faces I didn’t need and then moved the left-over vertices into the décor shapes and extruded back towards the body. Then, I would either combine, group, or attach the vertices back on to the body with
I think grouping is the best option. Firstly, since I will have an easier time adding material to the individual objects. It shouldn’t make a difference when exported into Unreal either way. Also, trying to attach appropriate vertices back onto the body will be a waste of time. The model will suffice as just by grouping. I should bevel the edges of the décor to make it look better.
After completing the hand and foot modelling separately from the body I used the bridge, multi-cut and target weld tools to combine the limbs together. The limb separations will be done after clean up the mesh in Maya.
While I used Maya’s grab tool a lot to readjust the mesh, I prefer to use Mudbox for the main detail/extras addition part. Plus I like to utilise Mudbox easy subdivision tool where I can quickly alternate between them.
I faced many issues with the software such as with Arnold and other plugins that wreaked havoc. It is due to these issues, however, that I have become more familiar with the system and the process of applying and importing plugins into Maya.
The hand UV’s are causing trouble. I think because of the extruded knuckles that side of the hand came out weird when I unfolded the UV. However, even after I tried this method, where I cut the top of the hand in half at the knuckles (UV made in the centre of the knuckles as I wanted to keep the finders together), this method still has weird outcomes when I unfold.
After I cut-and-sewed the UV’s, unfolding had almost no effect. As you can see in the image above, all the Uv’s look very strange and only the first click on ‘unfold’ had any effect. Many of the UV’s were overlapping or weird shapes. It was thanks to this that I learned more about the UV tools capabilities, leading me to realise that I knew next to nothing before. I learned more about the grab and smooth UV tools, and this helped me make sense of the messy UVs that wouldn’t cooperate (all of them). I also tried using the Symmetrize tool, but error messages kept coming up before I could.
I decided not to put too much effort into making the UV’s appearance to look pretty and perfect, with the trouble I have been going through because of the abnormalities, doing that would take too long. Also, I am not hand painting the UV’s in photoshop, so in Substance painter it shouldn’t matter too much at all if they look like this. Just as long as I have made sure none of the UV’s overlap.