Weekly Summary: 12

Specialism

This week I carried on work for the specialism unit.

I finished the high poly, below you can see a few images of close-up details. I started kit-bashing, adding all of the small objects to a separate file that I can use to store loads of different nuts and bolts and other items.

The grips on the handle suit the purpose of enabling the grip to be comfortable, similarly to how it would be designed IRL. I used curved splines to create the cables, simply extruding along the desired path.

Next I created the low poly mesh, ensuring that I stuck to under 5k polys (8k Tris) The goal here was to retain as much shape as possible, as the asset will be seen up close and will be a hero asset (an asset that is of high quality and importance)

Certain areas of the asset will be more detailed than others, depending on it's size and visibility. With the wheels I ensure each part maintained the same amount of sides, but the inside of the wheel has a lot less polys due to it being mostly behind the wheel.

Below is an image of the (almost) finished low poly exported into unreal 4. As you can see below the wheels are far too low res compared to the rest of the model. I also need to sort out the smoothing groups.

After finishing the low poly model I UV mapped it, ensuring there were seams wherever 45 degree angles occurred. to quickly UV the cables I unitized them and then unfolded the UV's to create a straight UV set.

Next I baked the high poly model onto the low poly using XNormal, due to not knowing XNormal I had to learn to use it. I decided to bake out the normal map at 4098 x 4098 so that I can start high res, and go down if need be.

After sorting out the smoothing groups I exploded the model so that I could edit the envelope of each model separately, ensuring a precise bake of the normal map.

The cage of the mesh was difficult, due to the object being made up of multiple objects the preset cage didn't work completely, I overcame this by importing certain parts of the model, editing the cage and then composting the normal into the normal map for the entire object. You can see below that I changed the wheels detail and then composited it on to the Normal Map.

After finishing the baking stage I moved on to texturing. Quixel recently released the new version of their Quixel suite, which I am eager to learn, so I will be using Quixel Ddo to texture the lawn mower.

First of all I made sure the file was set up for Unreal 4 purposes. The software has a UE4 preset that makes sure you are creating a roughness and metalness map, opposed to gloss and specular

To start I created an ID map for the lawn mower, giving each different material a colour and a mask. I also included my pre-baked normal map. Using this the software created an object space, and a curvature map, which will come in handy when trying to balance out the weathering based on the which ways parts of the model are facing. This helps as it ensures weathering and damage is where it would actually be in real life.

After creating the project I started the texture by creating base materials for each type of material on the asset. Below is an image of the different materials.

I started to detail the wheels. The lawn mower is very warn and used, in my mood board it shows grass being stuck in-between the crevices of the wheel. The rust on the object seemed to accumulate around certain areas opposed to being all over the texture, I imitated this by painting directly onto the model in Quixel, which is a new feature in Quixel 2.0