While I put a lot of effort into altering the materials appropriately in Maya instead of with Substance Painter, as soon as I exported the models and materials into Unreal Engine there were issues. The materials did not transfer as they should have and were completely different colours. At this point I was running out of time, so I had to just change the colours in Unreal in order to complete the animation in time. Due to this I lost much quality appearance and the outcome is not my initial intention at all. I adjusted quickly and worked with what was available to meat the time. If I still have time I will try to make some simple UV’s in Substance Painter and redo the rendered video. Not only this, I realised that Maya’s lights would not imported into Unreal, so I also had to restart my lighting set-up with what Unreal had available.
Category: Element 3
Maya Character Model
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.
Environment Model
I decided to expand on the environment design to enhance the theme of science-fiction. I intend to lean more towards a futuristic building that suits the style of the objects.
Mood board
Working out the new design:
Here you can see a very high-walled building with three levels and a walkway on the ‘second story’ (or the equivalent). The centre-most parts of the walls on each level have the wall design, as you can see above. I was thinking of adding mesh lights in-between all of these as well as the lighting that you can see above. The tall walls and walkway will only be added if I have the time spare, otherwise, I shall remain with the single story building and wall patterns. The main source of lighting from bulbs hanging from the ceiling will also be altered for the theme. The light from the windows above will be minimal, just enough to have some natural lighting present.
Wall blocks. Corridor between levels. Used Boolean to create windows in ceiling. Lighting tests.
Thinking about having natural lighting from the ceiling windows being from low-key night lights rather than daylight. With these Light renders, I think I like having a low-key lit scene to set the mood.
After a test I realised that the mesh lights can’t be imported into Unreal Engine, which puts a major halt to the lighting plan.
Maya Object Models
Sickle Model
I have found that I can visualise the materials of each part on the sickle better when looking at the model itself rather than just my 2D concept of it. Had to restart the sickle once.
1.Blade top. most reflective part.
2. Main Blade material: carbon steel (typical for knives).
3. Cover/skin of darker colour. Muddy reflectiveness.
4. Ivory-like or white wood. Nothing too hard like metal. Nothing too feeble like plastic.
5. (Strong hard area to be used for hitting with the back of the sickle) Carbon steel. Hard but not brittle, this metal is generally implemented in buildings and bridges, gears, pipelines and couplings, cars, cutting tools (such as chisels) etc.
High carbon steel has a much better tensile strength, used to make cutting tools, blades, punches, dies, springs and high-strength wire (Rogers, 2016).
6. Red rubber grip.
7. Strap/ wrap. Either brown leather or some sort of red fabric.
8. Metal rim encircling the handle.
9. Same material as no. 4 but with some decorative carvings on the knife butt. These will be made with the Mudbox sculpting tool. Either indent or outdent- test to see which looks better.
Grenade Model
Had to restart once because I kept getting an error message: “Mesh has non-manifold UVs. Clean up the mesh before using unfold”. I attempted to correct it somehow but nothing worked. Once I restarted, I only seemed to avoid the problem as long as I didn’t extrude the shapes on the front of the grenade’s body. So, I abandoned this section of my design, in the hoped that I’d be able to alter the model in Mudbox later.
References
Rogers, A., 2016. About carbon steel and its uses. [online] Metalex. Available at: <https://www.metalex.co.uk/carbon-steel-uses/> [Accessed 19 March 2021].