3D Art: Portfolio Three Week Four

 My Suffering Is Over

I finished sculpting the transformer for now. I would've liked to get into the really fine details but I couldn't swing it within 2-3 days, so the legs are a little simplified.

After wrestling with Zremesher, I ended up still getting errors when I went to unwrap my UVs, so I had to export my mid-res into Maya and automatically unwrap my UVs there. When I did a test bake with the torso last week, the textures were really low-res when everything was sharing a 4096x4096 texture, so I split everything up into eight texture sets.

It seemed to work and the textures turned out better this time. Because the sculpting took me so long the textures totally have the "Substance Painter" look since I didn't have time to tweak with them too much beyond making ID maps.

It is cool to be able to have this 3.4 million tri model in engine and it run fine, although it did take a minute for it to process the fbx.

My biggest hurdle and takeaway from the process has been how much planning needs to go into the UVs, because if you kind of wing it (like I did) it creates a lot more work towards the end of the process.

3D Art: Portfolio Three Week Three

 New Tactic + Getting Pieces in Engine

I'm still behind, but at least wanted something textured and in engine by today. The torso is mostly done, the biggest problem being the UVs. I scrapped what I had originally because I hated how it was turning out, and using the Draw Polygon tool to draw each individual face was soul-sucking, and made adding depth to each piece kind of a challenge.

My new plan was to make a relatively simple mesh that got the proportions and general silhouette of the robot, bring that into ZBrush, and extract the pieces I needed for the panels. I felt like I could get cleaner shapes this way.

My plan was to zRemesh these, using the polygroups to preserve the edges. The problem I ran into was that there were errors in the mesh that stopped zRemesher from working. This meant that I had to decimate the mesh before I could move forward, which means the topology isn't great and neither are the UVs. My mid-res mesh sits at 1.2 million polys.

I essentially have a little less than three days to get this ready for industry review. Since capstone and common art are ending tomorrow, I'm hopeful that if I dedicate all my time to finishing the legs and forearms I can have a more-or-less finished robot.

What I do have is in engine as nanite and seems to be working pretty well for being 1.2 million polys. I looked up the average height of a transformer, which was about 30 feet, so that's what scale I was basing this model off of.

3D Art III: Portfolio Three Week Two

Modeling Continued

I'm still pretty far behind, since my goal was to have the box modeling in Maya done. I also still need to come up with what the back looks like, which I didn't consider enough when starting this project.

Hopefully this coming week I'll be able to dedicate more time to this project.

3D Art III: Portfolio Three Week One

 Research and Beginning Modeling

Since the plan for this was to have my research component be the nanite meshes in UE5, I looked into it beginning this week. I wanted to make sure that anything that needed to be done to the mesh, I was keeping in mind during the entire process.

I read the documentation and watched several videos on nanites, the most helpful one being the talk that Epic gave about it themselves. I wanted to be able to texture it and wasn't sure how that would happen if I wasn't doing retopology. Their workflow is to use Quixel Mixer, which can handle the one million+ polygon models. I've also used Mari before which is used more in film pipelines, and read that that software can also handle more dense models, so that would be another option. The programs support vertex color, but I couldn't find if UE5 did, so I'm going to need UVs too. My plan is to get the smooth mesh preview to polygons in Maya, then auto-unwrap that, and then just not use dynamesh or decimate the model so that I can keep the UVs on the high-poly.

I've started on the torso and hope to have the base mesh done by next week. I've been using the polygon tool to make these different parts but I'm not sure if I need them to be one continuous surface or if I can get away with having tons of little pieces.

I tend to underestimate hard-surface stuff and I'm already a little behind because I wanted to have the torso done by this week.