Month: May 2021

With my cow model all textured and ready to go, i now had to set up a small scene to ft him into. My initial plan was to set him in a paddock with two hay bales and a bucket with a fence to his left, but the hay bale was a bit too complicated to try and make. I looked for tutorials on YouTube for blender and Maya but i couldn’t find any that suited my project since if i used xgen or particles in blender, it’d create too many polygons and i could risk going over the limit for the assignment. This doesn’t mean i didn’t have a go though, i tried out both and found out blenders particle system is a lot easier to use than Mayas xgen as you can “comb” the hair instead of just “posing” it. The result in blender did look like hay but i couldn’t find a way to export it and i was scared of converted it to polygons for the reason stated above so i just deleted it and made a cube in Maya, slapping a hay texture onto it.

(i forgot to take a screenshot of the finished hair combed)

For the grass, i did want to try and model some 3d grass instead of just using a plane, but i felt like that could take too long as this is my last day to do anything before handing my work in. For this reason after following up until the curved blade of grass in this video (which i also couldn’t find out how to do so i was already lost at the beginning steps) i decided to just make a plane in Maya and put a texture on it after extruding it to make a cube (should’ve just replaced it with a cube but i wasn’t thinking apparently) and then smoothing it and cutting the edge in the UV editor to make sure the texture sat properly. I decided not to even put the texture on it and just use a flat colour in sketchfab as it looked better anyways.

The fence actually took some modelling and sculpt mode editing in blender to create. I found a tutorial for a stylised fence on YouTube and followed along with it https://youtu.be/SYHWWLYXo2E. I’ve not used blender to model something before as i always use Maya so this was a nice fresh opportunity and change of environment. I started with a cube and scaled it up to the height i wanted, scaling it in on the sides to make it thinner. I then duplicated this shape and pulled it to the right of my other fence post. Going into edit mode, i gave both of these shapes bevels and loop cuts before switching to sculpt mode to fix up the shape and make them more unique and stylised. Once this was done, i went back into object mode and created a cube, scaling it up along the x axis to make it longer, placing it in-between the two existing fence posts, this would be my pallet. I added a bevel to this shape and gave it some loop cuts using the scroll wheel on my mouse to control how many i gave it, then duplicated this object and moved it down below my previous one to make a fence. Using sculpt mode again, I deformed these wooden planks until i was happy with my fence and exported it as an FBX.

I took my fence into Maya to UV it, allowing me to later and texture in substance painter. I cut around the loops on the outside of each object before freezing their transforms and unfolding them, using the layout tool to then straighten up the UVs and pack them neatly in a singular tile. Opening the material editor, i gave each object a separate aistandardsurface material and named them appropriately. Once i had this done, i then exported this as a new FBX and took it into substance painter.

In substance painter, since i had a material for each object all i had to do was select the name of the object i wanted to paint from the top right hand corner and add either a fill or a paint layer. Starting off i added a paint layer to each object and coloured it brown manually which looking back now is a bit stupid because i could’ve just used the fill layer to save time but its fine. Adding a new fill layer, i found out how to add grunge (using this video https://youtu.be/-7F5evcCdyE) and used one i thought suited the fence, slotting it into the greyscale area of the fill layer in my black mask, adjusting the balance slider until i was happy. I copied this effect and pasted it onto my other objects, meaning they’d all have the exact same effect applied with all the value in tact so i didn’t have to keep hopping back and forth.

Adding a paint layer to each object on a low opacity, i took a dark brown and used the soft brush then started painting random dark blotches onto the wood so it didn’t look so stale and flat. It helped to use the grunge effectively here and paint the dark brown in the areas where the grunge was tight together and very visible.

After doing this, i added another paint layer to each object on a low opacity and took another dark, almost black brown and painted shadow onto my fence where the wood planks joined together and round the back and bottom where i thought no light would hit. To follow this up, i made another paint layer with a darker colour again and enhanced the shadows closer to the wood where there’d be harsh shadows using a hard brush.

My last paint layers were highlight the difference in colour on the bevels from the wooden fence itself, as usually seen in real life as the wood on the corners are usually sanded down therefor shiny and smooth. I took a light cream colour and used the soft brush again, painting along the bevel seams of the fence. Once done, i lowered the opacity of the layer until it looked good and saved my file then exported my textures back into Maya.

In Maya, i placed everything in the scene and saved it, making a few adjustments to position and scale before adding textures to everything and adjusting the specular values so they weren’t too shiny. Selecting everything i then exported my selection as an FBX and uploaded my work to sketch fab.

Fun fact: I was going to call my cow Falafel because it sounded cute but after speaking to my boyfriend he called him Moomi and I thought it was adorable as well as relating to the character so i kept it 🙂

Importing my FBX model into substance painter, i went into texture settings and clicked a button which opened bake settings where i then selected my high poly sculpt from blender and baked the textures onto my low poly model in substance painter. This meant the small details from sculpting were baked onto my low poly model, making it closely resemble my sculpt.

To start painting my textures on i created a fill layer and set the colour to a pale pink then created a new paint layer, selecting the fine smooth fur brush and colour dropping from my reference image for the pink spots, which i then painted on my cow model carefully so they looked natural and weren’t jammed onto my model in a mess. I made a little heart shaped spot on its head too because I thought it added to the cuteness and I love those simple little Easter eggs on things like this, it makes it feel more special.

I added three new paint layers and chose a light pink/magenta colour and started painting on a light dusting of blush on the nose bridge, cheeks, ears and horns. I changed to the above layer and made my colour a little darker then made my brush a little smaller, painting on a darker layer on blush before adding one last layer of a darker blush. I figured the horns didn’t suit the colour of the blush as they were too dark and made them a lighter grey, erasing some of the blush colours with a low opacity on my eraser.

Adding another new paint layer, i chose a pale red and painted a strawberry on the cheek of my cow using the hard stroke brush, choosing a paler pink and adding on the strawberry seeds followed by a light green on a new layer for the leaves. To go along with the strawberry I thought it’d be cute to try show my cow as being fluffy by taking a dark pink and drawing on fluff on the fur brush to make it look soft. I added a shadow below the fluff layer so it appeared as if it were sitting off his body like real fluff.

I still had to paint all the light pink areas now such as his nose, chest, stomach, hooves, inner ears and his tail tuft so I added a layer and moved it down to just above the base colour and started painting “shadows” in with a dark pink on a low layer opacity. I thought this gave my model more depth and believability. I also added nostrils and  mouth at this point.

Lastly I took a muted purple colour and went over the hooves to make them stand out a little bit more as if they were another material on the cow. This looked alright on the front feet but unfortunately the texture on the back feet was a little warped and kept appearing on the bottom of my model, which i obviously didn’t want so I erased what I could from under the leg and drew on the little hoof separation line on the front legs. I was pretty happy with how everything came out except for the fact I had a more fluffy detailed cow in mind but I didn’t have enough time to add individual fur strokes to all the spots, I tried and it was taking far too long so I gave up.

Overall, I’m pretty happy i got here in the end with a finished model as i was really doubting myself and struggling earlier in the assignment. I’ve learned to have a bit more confidence in myself and acquired new skills such as sculpting and retopology, even if they aren’t perfect I can work on them until they are. All that’s left now is to make the field scene and upload my model to sketch fab.

This was quite difficult for me to achieve and i had to get quite a lot of help off my tutor Henry, as i couldn’t figure out how to sort all types of errors that kept arising with my mesh, as well as having hardware issues when trying to unfold my UVs.

Bringing in my FBX model from blender to maya, i had to make the surface live and use the “quad draw” tool to manually draw on polygons to make my high poly blender sculpt a low poly mesh which was then suitable for UV unwrapping and texturing in substance painter. To make things easier for myself, i turned on the symmetry on “object x”, this meant whenever i made a quad on one side of the model, as long as it had a symmetrical mirror of the model on the other side of my symmetry line, it’d mirror what i was doing on the other side including when i placed quads or made adjustments to my mesh y relaxing my polygons and edges. This tool really cut down a lot of modelling time which I’m thankful for, but when it came to the ears of my model i was very confused on how to place my quads as the polygons id placed previously didn’t match up with the ones i placed around the base of the ears. My base from blender was also messing up my polygons, as i didn’t smooth everything down correctly which was causing my quads to sit awkwardly, trying to place themselves on all the bumps and corners of the base.

Going back into blender, i used the smooth brush to smooth the areas on my model that were causing me trouble, using different perspectives to ensure i did it properly then exported it as an FBX, over righting my previous model. From here, i deleted my mesh and asked my tutor Alec for help in a 1 to 1 tutorial on blackboard.  He showed me how to start my mesh, by drawing quads on the nose of my cow and working up to the eyes, placing a rough circle for the eye as i was using a flat sphere placed on top of my model for the eyes. I asked him a couple of questions about how to do the ears and the tufts of hair on top of my characters head, both of which i got a detailed answer to so i went off after this tutorial and used my newly gained knowledge to create my retopology.

Even following the tutorials on blackboard, i had some issues when it came to creating loops for my retopology, and my mesh came out a little messed up around the ears which i tried a few times to fix as there were problems with non-manifold geometry, floating vertexes and other strange happenings. I ignored it for now and moved on with the rest of my retopology, creating quads that ran down the back and into the legs i had placed quads around as to frame the foot where after a few tries, i managed to get a loop around the curves of the thighs, but the quads leading down the legs still didn’t look correct and made awkward loops going from the bottom of my model to a new loop on the thigh. This was quite infuriating as it meant i wouldn’t have a clean cut for my UVs later, but i was running out of time at this point so i just left it and continued on with the rest of my model, relaxing the polygons as i went and holding down control to check if the loops were circular. Around the face area, my polygons were perfect, but when i came to the chest, horns and ears, i started struggling as they went off on their own path instead of in loops. So from this, i know that over the summer I’m going to work on my retopology and teach myself how to do it correctly with loops.

Now came the awkward part of trying to get the stomach of my model to line up with the legs and bottom. Since the symmetry tool was active, i couldn’t create extra dots in the middle to try add more polygons, so when i created quads down the stomach and chest, i took the vertexes and merged them together so they were sharing an edge and created two polygons running down the centre, which i then used to create quads leading off of to the legs, tying everything together. From these quads, i added more dots and used the shift button to place a quad from these dots continuing on down the legs to create a bottom. There were some weird shapes along the way, but i know triangles if in a small quantity wont ruin a mesh and the other shapes were just oddly shaped quads so that was also fine. It wasn’t until  i got to the legs that i realised the shapes weren’t even with the rest of my mesh and i had to start removing edges and replacing quads, even deleting whole chunks of my meh to try rebuild it in a neater form but i was getting stressed and confused so i had to take a break and come back with a new perspective.

Relaxing the polygons around the bottom and thighs of my model as much as appropriate, i started creating the bottoms of the feet for the hooves of my cow by following the loop of quads and placing new loops until it was too small to go any further where i then just capped it off with whatever shapes would fit inside the hole. I went around the foot and leg relaxing the polygons again as i wanted to make sure my mesh fit nicely with the shape of my base as well as trying to evenly space my quads to give a somewhat neat presentation for my mesh.

Now comes the tail again. Tuning off symmetry as there was nothing symmetrical about this part of my model, i started by creating a ring of quads around the base of the tail, not really realising this later would cause problems as it didn’t match up with the rest of my polygons. The only reason i made this many small quads was because i was concentrating on getting the smooth curve around the base and i couldn’t capture that with big chunky quads. A few rings in, i tried to connect them to my main quads by creating another quad or two between them and relaxing them a little to let them sit more tightly to the base. I continued around the base of the tail with this method until i had to start creating extra quads and edges to accommodate the curve of the tail, additionally creating problems for me where i had to try figure out how to join polygons together with quads and in some places triangle so i could get the whole way round my base sculpt. Admittedly, it did result in a bit of a mess but it worked so with my limited knowledge, I figured after spending so much time on it, it was time to move on a to meet the deadline, it also meant i wouldn’t create new issues in case i messed with too many polygons and edges and made it worse.

Starting from a thin place on the tail, I created quads in a ring around the shape trying to make them small yet long enough to capture the curve but also so I didn’t have to overload the tail with quads. I continued up the tail to the tuft of fur on the tip and placed big quads around this as i wanted to emphasise it was a tuft of fur and not just a weird point on the end of the tail. I had to readjust and relax these polygons quite a bit until i was happy with it and moved on to the rest of the tail. I made the quads longer as i worked my way down the tail, relaxing and readjusting as I went. These quads fit pretty alright with the quads at the base of the tail so I relaxed the polygons some more going up the tail and manually dragging any vertexes or edges into place where the relax tool wasn’t helping.

Closing up the whole back of the model was a bit of a pain as there were a lot of edges that had to be removed and at the start i was getting a lot of oddly shaped and awkwardly stretched out quads, so i decided to do another two loops around the tail base to make the quads join a bit easier, which took a while but after settling for a couple of triangular shapes and not so perfect squares, I’d finished my retopology for now.

This is where I started really having problems and had to consult my tutor Henry, where we tried for a good 15 minutes to try solving a problem which in the end we found was most likely caused by my processor being an AMD Ryzen.

Going through and making a cut in my model around the neck and to the forehead, following a blackboard tutorial on how to manage UVs, I tried to use the unfold tool in the UV editor and kept getting errors such as “Unfold3D process error” and non-manifold geometry being found in my mesh so to go clean it up first. Getting help from Henry, we managed to locate the non-manifold geometry and fix it, he sent me a YouTube video and tried going over a few other solutions with me but after i tried them I still couldn’t fix the problem. I sent the file to him and he sent me back a recording of how to fix it, which was as easy as pressing 3 to smooth preview my mesh and viewing it in different perspectives to try find anything that looked off. I didn’t see this when i tried it but it probably was in connection to my lack of sleep and the stress i was under with having so many errors, nevertheless I went in and fixed it on my file and tried to unfold my UVs again, but still got an error.

Going back to Henry, he got me to take screenshots, read articles, go into the plug-in manager and check for Unfold3D and to enable it, but even after all this we still couldn’t find an answer to my problem. He was very helpful and in the end we found a workaround which was to unfold using the legacy algorithm instead of unfold3D as my laptop had no problem running that, but the Unfold3D error still remains a mystery. He offered to unfold all my UVs and send them to me before i told him about the legacy unfold method though which I really appreciated. He had made a few edits to my model and sent me the files to help me take examples from so I could better understand what to look for if my model was going wrong as I went back to my fixed version and continued to work on it.

Selecting all of my UVs, I used the legacy unfold and unfolded all my UVs after freezing their transforms, clicking the layout tool button to neatly arrange all my UVs on a single tile. Now that the cow was UVed, i created a cube and scaled it down, pulling it in on the x axis and pulling it up on the y axis to make a thin oval shape for the eyes. Holding shift down and dragging on the arrow, i duplicated this shape for the other eye and put them in place on the cows face so they had the cute chibi vibe i was going for with the small simple eyes. Going back into the UV editor with my eyes selected, i used planar mapping on them and cut the edge loop along the side of each eye, taking the UVs and spreading them out before unfolding them and using the layout tool to make everything tidy and presentable. My model was now ready to export as an FBX and take into substance painter.

 

Importing my character reference into Blender, I started sculpting with metaballs by placing 5 around the one in the middle, bringing them close together so that they’d merge into one shape. For this star model, this is as far as i got as i was confused and once i received help from Michael, he advised me that my character was too simple and there wasn’t much to sculpt so if i was aiming for a higher grade, to change it to something a bit more complicated.

I sat in class, brainstorming again for a while as everyone was taking their turn sharing their screen and getting help with their sculpts. I was just quickly drawing out sketches of ideas on my iPad, trying to follow the star idea but making it more complex and interesting. Star fruits came to mind and i thought about designing a star shaped fruit with eye catching leaves and small textures made from clay to make the fruit seem spikey coated. After sketching out a few variations of leaves and fruits, my mind just very suddenly jumped to a cow and i started sketching. I’d been interested in something called a “strawberry cow” for quite a while as I like how they’re very closely related to the real life animals but with a small twist on their colour pallet and sometimes appearance, with strawberries either as horns or on the tuft of the tail. For this reason, i then decided I’d make a strawberry cow instead of a normal cow, giving it a pale pink for the main colour and a nice deeper shade for its spots and other stand out areas such as its tail tuft and its hooves. Since i wanted it to be simplistic, centring its design on its colours more than features, i didn’t give it any distinguishing features of strawberries and put it in a plain paddock setting. This meant the scene wasn’t crowded and everything fit together nicely, framing the cow and making it easy and pleasing to look at.

Now i had my remade design, i started a new file in blender and placed my reference image on a pureref window down at the bottom left of my screen, as this would help me to get the overall shape and pose of my character with the metaballs.  I got some help from Henry after class in a 1-1 tutorial on Blackboard, as i still wasn’t sure how to sculpt correctly and it was starting to stress me out. He took about an hour explaining things to me and letting me follow along step-by-step in my own blender file, stopping to look over my sculpt every now and then, helping me correct any mistakes or catch me up if I’ve missed anything.  It was a very helpful session as I got to understand more about sculpting and how to use the metaballs as well as gain more knowledge about the tools and learned that the sculpting tools all have a “falloff” which helps me get a better understanding of how they’re going to effect my model.

To make the model, I took the earlier model as a guide and looked back over the video Henry recorded from our tutorial, using spheres and ellipses from metaballs to shape my base mesh. Once i had this done, i sent it to henry to see if it was alright and he gave me the go ahead but i wasn’t happy as i thought it looked more like a monkey so i restarted for the third time and when i finished with this base mesh, i was pretty happy and proud of myself because i just did it from my own judgement this time. Before i got to my final basemesh, my friend Rhys tried to help me create a basemesh from mesh shapes relating to the character but i wasn’t happy with how that turned out either, though I’m still thankful for his help.

(the above image is close to but not exact of my new basemesh as i forgot to take screenshots, so i used a more developed and smoothed version from later on to show the differences.)

With this new basemesh, i went into the sculpting tab and started to shape my cow with the sculpting tools. I found myself mainly using the inflate, clay strips, hard draw and smooth brushes throughout this process. To start with, I had to use the dyntopo option to give me more geometry to work with which was done by turning dyntopo on, changing the detail to constant detail, turning on smooth shading then hitting the “detail flood fill” button. I now had something to enable me to get finer details onto my cow model, which going in with the grab brush i started to sculpt by pulling certain vertexes out after turning on the x symmetry. Having created the ears with the grab tool, i smoothed them out by using the smooth brush on a low strength as this was a brush that could very easily become destructive if the strength was set too high.

I used the grab tool on the sprouts of the horns to pull them up to be a little more pronounced than stubs and used the snake hook brush to give them the point that horns have, aiming to curl it inwards. The horns changed a lot throughout the process of my model as at first i wanted them to be big and easily noticeable, curving inwards, then decided this made him look unbalanced and tried to curve the horns outwards, making them smaller, changing the distance between both horns and a whole lot of other stuff just trying to figure out what suited my model until i eventually settled on a simple horn shape where they were cartoonish and just pricked up, kind of like the “story of seasons: friends of mineral town” cows and some chibi drawings which you can find an image of below.

art link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pixtastock.com%2Fillustration%2F62767130&psig=AOvVaw3bPNuzKOX7WcS4B8juf_Z4&ust=1621447383805000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCOjRkInC1vACFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

Smoothing out the shape of my cow after using the inflate brush to make his limbs a bit chunkier, i went in with the crease brush to set apart the legs from the stomach of my cow, making it look more believable that he was sitting down.

By this point i felt my model looked more like a pig than a cow and wanted to restart, so I saved my progress on this model and hit “new file” using my base mesh from the last model, making some adjustments where i thought needed such as the whole model was too spread out, so i rotated the legs to better face the viewer and positioned them more believably at the back, as well as moving the head a bit more upwards facing, thinning the metaballs at the neck and shoulders and picking up his back end slightly to look more balanced, though i couldn’t move it as much as id like because then it messed up the rest of my base mesh. Going back into the sculpting tab, i used dyntopo again then smoothed out my model with the smooth brush. This let me see the places on my model where i needed to sculpt detail into and what parts i could just make small adjustments to.

I started adding in the details such as using the snake hook brush to pull the horns into points and taking the grab tool and moving them slightly to be shaped more like horns with thickness. Keeping with the grab brush, I took the small starts of the ears and used a big sized falloff brush as seen in the image to pull them out to the side to better represent ears. For all the creases and fold in my model, i took the smooth brush and smoothed out the surfaces such as in-between the front legs at the chest, the skin between the back legs and stomach and the nose of the cow. This meant i had a better area to work with when adding in finer details such as deeper and more accurate creases.

Next i used the draw sharp brush and made two dents in the nose for the cows nostrils, using the smooth brush later to smooth it out but not too much as this would fill the holes in and get rid of the nostrils, so i had to be careful and moderate how far i smoothed them. I took the same brush and moved onto the ears, with the symmetry still on i only had to work on one ear and it would copy to the other. I smoothed the ear down after making the insides where the fluff would sit later and smoother the horns out  little after pulling them up again. For the tail you will realise that i made more changes to it with the snake hook brush to make it look more pointy like a tuft of fur.

Yet again, i changed the horns slightly as i was very indecisive about them and wanted them to suit my sculpt. In this stage i smoothed everything out after doing another run over with dyntopo as this adds more geometry to work with meaning it gets rid of all the smoothing you’ve done previously. Using the grab tool again, i started pulling and puffing out the cheeks of my cow to make it look less flat as well as giving the nose more character.

Using a UV sphere and scaling it down, i created a new pair of eyes and tried my best to “attach” them to my character, more so just getting a placement idea for now as i was no where near done to even add the yes. Upon inspection i realised my cow looked a bit too unnatural still so i decided to use the inflate brush and give him a bit more meat around the shoulders so they looked more like muscles then thin skin and bones.

Lastly. i used clay strips along the back to make a spine by smoothing and using the draw sharp brush until i was happy with it, moving on to create a little neck skin that cows have using the same technique. Before finishing and exporting my model as an FBX, i smoothed everything and used the flatten brush to create a smooth bottom for my cow to be sat on a piece of ground later and flattened the soles of his feet to make smooth hooves.

For our first assignment working with sculpting in blender, we were given creative freedom with making a sculpt themed around a “cute character”, immediately a star shape popped into my head and i got to sketching out my concept. I wasn’t sure if my idea was too simple so i then started adding to it, i gave it a ._. face as i thought that was really cute and I’m usually drawn to poker face characters so i wanted to take this opportunity to create my own, i then added an orange on top of its head and honestly this was completely random and i was thinking of my among us character at the time which i always have a little leaf on the head of, so i thought that’d make a nice hat decoration for my model. After looking at my design for a little while, it reminded me of these little resin toys i see a lot when scrolling through Ali Express as well as resin keychains I often look at made by Oops Cry Creations on Instagram and thought it’d look interesting and be fun to try and sculpt, so i added a layer of transparency to my star and gave it smaller glitter stars to fit inside. I had planned to animate my character a little to give it life and seem more interesting, but I didn’t realise how unrealistic that was with the kind of work we were set out to do in blender.

Below are two examples of the keychains made by Oops that inspired my design, followed by the Yuki figure series.