Finding Inspiration

Begining this modelling assignment was probably the hardest part of the process. From the word go, I knew I wanted to do a Witch/Wizard staff but I had no idea where to start or where to take it. So I opened up ArtStation and started looking at some professional work from concept art to sculpts to straight modelling to find inspiration for what I wanted to create.

 

When going through ArtStation, I noticed that a lot of the staffs I was being drawn to were more organic in nature. I loved the idea of making an organic kind of staff, something that looked like it was ripped straight from an old tree.

From there the idea started to form in my head for a kind of Voodoo witchcraft style staff.

I wanted to take a slightly different approach to my modelling assignment than normal, I wanted to essentially do all my design work organically in Maya rather than following a strict path of basing my model entirely off a reference. That being said, I needed more than just a general idea to get the shape down so I set myself to finding something that I could use as a basis.

This concept art piece I found by Darren Benton was almost the exact kind of shape I was looking for, the only issue was that it wasn’t as organic of a shape as I wanted, but it would be a good starting point for the model.

 

These were some other voodoo references I looked at initially to really nail down the idea in my head.

The Modelling Process

 

The Basic Shape

 

This was hard. I was used to modelling pretty much entirely hard surface stuff, but I really wanted to challenge myself to make something organic. Thus began my search to find some tutorials to help me along the way.

I found that, strangely enough, the techniques I needed would not be found in an “Organic Modelling Tutorial” but rather in tutorials focused on modelling trees. From these tutorials, I learned a lot more about the EP Curve tool and extruding along a curve which was the primary method that I planned to use for modelling the basis of my staff model.

I also had a look at some speed modelling in Maya to get a better understanding of the general workflow for creating this kind of project.

Based on what I learned, I began my modelling process by using the EP Curve Tool in the front camera view with the image I decided to use for a rough reference to block out the general shape of the staff that I was going for.

I then started playing around with the curve itself to make it more organic as I had seen demonstrated in the second tutorial above. This was a long process that I had to do for every branch I added to the model but I got there eventually.

From there, I wanted to extrude a cylinder I had prepared along the curve. To get a better understanding of how extruding along a curve worked, I watched this tutorial:

Bit of a different topic but uses the same principle. Here’s what I ended up with:

You might notice that I had the polycount up in the left of these images, this will be important later down the line but for now, let’s move on.

I was pretty happy with how these shapes were turning out, they were beginning to look like the organic staff I had in mind and I was having a lot of fun playing around with the curve tool and the control vertex tool in Maya to really push the shape.

When extruding the faces along the curve, I also made use of the taper attribute in the Channel Box/Layer Editor to get the more organic and flowing shape of the object, allowing me to increase and decrease the width of the extrusion until I was happy with the result.

I repeated this process for each of the branches and was left with this:

For each branch, I created an EP Curve and followed the same workflow as before, extruding a cylinder along the curve and using the taper attribute to get the shape I wanted. I initially wanted to extrude from the main surface itself but due to the twisting nature of my model (as well as the number of edges and edge loops I was working with), I was unable to cleanly create an extrusion point and so simply had to move the branches into place and ensure that they were inside the main branch, taking care to delete unseen faces along the way.

I put a lot of emphases on the silhouette of the model from the early stages of the production. As I wasn’t working directly from any particular reference, I wanted to really ensure that the design was strong and clear from a distance so that there wouldn’t be any visual confusion.

 

Adding Details

 

From this point, my plan was to start adding small details to the model to slowly build up its complexity until I was happy enough with it to begin to look at UV wrapping it and texturing it.

The first thing I wanted was to add some form of wrappings around the model. When looking at my references, I noticed a lot of them had bits of cloth wrapped around them rather than straight handles or more industrial looking parts.

For this, I looked at this YouTube tutorial to figure out a quick workflow for achieving this kind of effect:

This part of the model took a lot of trial and error. When making the wraps, I wanted them to look like they were wrapped more like bandages with overlap. I ended up creating several different wraps and scaling them until I had them generally in the place I wanted them before then using the soft selection tool to play around with the vertices until I got it right.

The handle was thankfully a lot easier, it was simply a process of duplicating the faces, separating them from the main mesh and scaling them up a bit until I was happy with them before using the fill hole tool to fill the gap, same process as the wraps but with a lot less of the headache. I also added in some extra edge loops to just make the shape of it flow a bit better.

I then went back to the wraps and fixed up the messy topology that I had left with each wrap and deleted the inner faces that wouldn’t be seen. I primarily wanted to do this to ensure I wouldn’t run into any issues with pinching textures when it came to UV wrapping and texturing the model.

Next, I wanted to add some details to the model, some simple props that would start to make it look like more of a staff.

The first thing I did was add a simple ground plane, nothing spectacular, just a polygon sphere that I deleted the bottom half of the faces of and scaled-down until it was nearly flat. I also messed around a little bit with the soft selection tool to pull some of the vertices to make it look a bit more organic.

From there I used some torus primitives to quickly create the rings on the branch as well as the little clasp on the bone and used the same method that I did when creating the main staff to create the bone shape. For the top of the bone, I used the same method I used to create the wraps around the staff.

To be honest, I wasn’t overly happy with this part of the model but at this point in the process, I just wanted to get stuff on there to see how it looked so I could come back and change it later to exactly what I wanted.

 

Playing With NCloth

 

During our Animated Narratives group project, I started playing around with NCloth simulations to create a basic wall break that can be seen below. I really wanted to learn more about this tool and thought it would be a really cool idea to try out using NCloth to create some detail on my model.

I was completely new to NCloth at the time and so I had to go back to the drawing board to figure out how I could use it to create some cloth simulation for my model rather than a door explosion.

For this, I watched these videos:

With some basic understanding of NCloth, I began working on creating cloth for my model. For this, I created a simple plane, set up the constraints, wind and gravity and just let the simulation play until I found a frame I really liked. Then I duplicated the object on that frame and just like that, I had a cloth flowing on my object.

I had to run about eleven simulations with different constraints, sizes of cloth, gravity and so on before I eventually settled on this but I was pretty happy with the end result. Finally I felt like the model was beginning to really come together.

 

Basic Texturing

 

I wanted to begin looking at texturing my objects and creating UVs for it, but first I wanted to separate out each section of the model so that I would have a basis for what I needed to UV wrap and create unique textures for before making the model more complex.

I began by watching this tutorial on the different types of materials in Maya:

In the end, I stuck with basic lamberts for now as I didn’t want to overcomplicate the process before I had started UV wrapping and texturing my model. We had also received word that we would be getting one-to-one critiques from an industry professional for our models so I wanted to have the different objects shaded so that he wouldn’t just be looking at a grey object for the critique.

This was the result:

 

The Downfall

 

The critique was amazing, I learned a lot of really interesting things about Maya and the modelling process, but I also learned that my model was far, far too high poly. Ideally, we wanted to keep the polycount as low as possible to make it easier to work with and to ensure Sketchfab wouldn’t have any issues processing it. My base model alone was far, far higher than the more realistic target.

My mistake was that I was smoothing the mesh as I went along, along with using far too many subdivisions for the basic shapes I was starting with. At this point, I thought I would have to completely restart my model, but first I wanted to do a little bit of research to see if I could find a solution.

 

Reducing The Polycount

 

I began looking into methods of reducing the polycount of a model and found these resources which helped me greatly:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-Modeling/files/GUID-227DC277-EB08-4038-932E-ED8B1BC73A0E-htm.html

The solution was Maya’s reduce tool. I began working on reducing everything in my model as much as I could without affecting the shape or topology too drastically and I managed to achieve this:

My poly count was cut drastically, yet the model still kept the shape I wanted. This tool saved this project for me as the thought of restarting had completely killed my enthusiasm for creating this specific shape of the model, it would have been back to the drawing board.

 

Back To The Drawing Board

 

Looking back on it, the critique taught me more than just to keep my polycounts low. Looking at my model, I realised just how bare and simple it was. I wanted to do something more complex, something that looked more organic and I was running out of things that were within my capabilities to model within the time frame remaining that would make it really stand out. I decided to take a step back and go back to ArtStation to see if I could find inspiration again.

While on ArtStation, I came across this image:

I really liked this concept art, there was something about it that just drew me to it and it gave me a spark of inspiration.

I didn’t want to just make a voodoo witch staff, I wanted to do something more unique like some of the examples from students before.

My staff needed a concept, it needed something that would make it stand out as a voodoo witch staff, and so I decided to try out making a spider witch staff instead.

 

Cobwebs, Cobwebs Everywhere

 

The first thing I had to do was get rid of everything in the model bar the base model itself. Or rather, take what I liked and duplicate it as I wanted to ensure I was working as non destructively as possible.

I also wanted to improve the general shape of the model, it was looking a bit plain so I thought that adding some extra branches and playing around with their shape and positioning would be a good starting point.

Here was the result:

During the process of fixing up the branches, I also decided that I wanted to have some form of ball in the middle of the top branches, something to draw the eye to and perhaps make the staff look more magical. To ensure I kept good topology, I used a cube and smoothed it until I got the shape I was looking for as spheres have a bit of an issue with triangles at the top and bottom of the sphere, which can cause pinching in the textures that I wanted to avoid.

Now that I had the basic shape, I wanted to play around with making cobwebs on the model. I knew that I could use EP Curves and live surfaces to stick them to the geometry, but I wanted to see if there was a better way of going about it and so I began researching.

My initial search turned up these:

But neither gave the result I was looking for and so I kept searching until I found these:

This plugin was looking really promising for getting the results I wanted, but as you may notice the only real tutorial for it was in Russian. I couldn’t really find anything else that suited what I was going for so I put on the subtitles and tried to understand what was going on the best I could.

In the end, I got the plugin and began working on the final cobwebs only to immediately run into a problem. The generator created a huge amount of individual curves that would be a nightmare to extrude along, and even if I did extrude along the curves, I would end up with an insane polygon count once again. The tutorial did show how to render the cobwebs, but it required Redshift Renderer which I didn’t have access to and wouldn’t work with Sketchfab anyway.

I tried many different solutions, trying to see if using NURBS would work, if there was a way of exporting curves in a .FBX format and many more but still came up empty-handed.

In the end, the solution I went with was to generate a stroke along the curves, then convert the stroke effects to polygons and use the reduce tool to begin to reduce the geometry. From there I went in and manually edited the geometry of each curve individually, removing unnecessary edge loops and adding in edge loops where the geometry was getting too sharp. In total, I had to do this over 100 times for each curve but it was worth it for the result in the end.

Sadly I didn’t take screenshots during the process but here is the final result:

I’m really happy with how this came out, it looks a lot more complicated and visually pleasing than my first pass with the model and yet somehow has a lower polycount!

 

UV Mapping

 

The next part of the process was to get the UV mapping of the model done and out of the way. I decided when doing the spider webs, it would be more efficient to use a Blinn Shader on the webs themselves and add some transparency to them as they didn’t require complex textures and so I quickly applied the Blinn and hid them while I began working on the rest of the model.

Before I began UV mapping though, I did some research on the process and the best ways to go about it:

 

I had a lot of difficulty with UV mapping and had to keep coming back to the tutorials but with a lot of trial and error, I began to slowly wrap my head around it.

I also recorded a quick demo on some of the UV processes I used to help out a couple of my Animation Project group’s members which helped me really begin to understand the process of UV mapping. They aren’t very good, but it certainly helped me understand more of what I was doing.

Starting with the Wood sections, I used simple planer maps and cut the big piece in two with the seam sitting under the wraps of the model so that it wouldn’t be noticed and so that I could keep a higher resolution by fitting more into the map. I then added seams to the edges and used the unwrap tool to get the flat map without distortion.

This was the result:

I then continued this process for all of the wood parts until I got this:

My process didn’t really change aside from using some different methods such as selecting the faces and UV mapping them separately for different pieces of the model.

One thing I should note is that I used a separate material for each section that I wanted to texture so that I would have a higher resolution and a bit of an easier time in Substance painter.

Here are the results:

UV Map for the handle.

UV Map for the ball.

 

UV Map for the Wraps.

 

I then applied a checkerboard texture to each separate material to check the UVs and to see how it looked before getting ready to texture the model in Substance Painter. Here’s the results:

Feedback From Henry

 

Before our original submission date of Friday the 5th, we had one-to-one feedback from one of our lecturers, mine was with Henry.

I got a lot of valuable feedback from this and as the deadline had been extended to Sunday the 7th, I decided that I wanted to go with Henry’s feedback and add some more stuff to my model before texturing.

 

Poison Bottles

 

The first thing I wanted to create was a potion bottle that could hang from one of the branches of my model.

I went and found some reference (as seen below) and created a very simple potion bottle using techniques I learned during my introduction to Maya vase modelling assignment.

Here is the final result:

I was pretty happy with this model, it’s relatively simple but I plan to add details in Substance, plus as a small part of the model I feel that adding too much complexity would almost ruin it.

 

Feather

 

This was an interesting task, I decided that I wanted to make some feathers for my model, but I didn’t want to simply model them the normal way of using planes and cubes to get the basic shape then adding cuts or details in substance painter, instead, I wanted to really push my knowledge of Maya and make something unique, so I got to researching.

In the end, I decided to go with using XGen, so I did some digging:

From this, I was able to learn enough about XGen’s tools to create a feather that I then duplicated and converted to polygons by using Maya’s “Convert XGen Primitives to Polygons” feature.

This is the final result:

 

The Finishing Touches

 

To end this modelling segment, I added my models to my final scene and modelled some rope following the tutorials below. Then I did my final UV maps using the techniques discussed above, and it was finally on to Substance Painter!

Here’s the final result:

Texturing

 

When texturing in substance painter, I used a mixture of smart materials, materials, generators, fill layers and smart masks. I also used high poly versions of my meshes to bake on the maps to ensure the textures would look clean in the final output.

To help me with learning substance painter, I used these tutorials:

In Substance Painter, I textured everything in 3 separate files. Let’s have a look at them now:

For the poison bottle, I was initially planning on having it transparent but I found that it looked a lot better when it seemed to be a kind of weird, messy bottle shape, almost as if it was carved out of something. I then added a hand-painted skull to it to make it clearly poison and added some green stains to the cork texture to imply that the bottle is old and has been used a lot.

Here’s the final poison bottle model with textures:

 

Next, I textured the feather model.

I didn’t have a specific bird in mind when texturing this feather, but with the overall colour palette I was going for I decided that this kind of reddish-brown colour looked really nice with the rest of the model, I added some white stains on it as well to make it seem more realistic and unique as well and textured the stem with a bone material to try and push the realism of it a little further.

Here’s the feather model with textures:

Finally, I began texturing the main part of the staff.

I went through several iterations as seen below before I reached the final version, I enjoyed playing around with different maps such as the normals and height maps to create really cool effects for the textures, making the staff look like it was made of real wood rather than just painted. In the end I found that by using a combination of materials, editing the attributes and adding fill layers and smart masks, I was able to achieve some really cool effects that can be seen in the final model.

Here are some of the WIPs that ended up scrapped:

 

And here is the final textured version, rendered in Sketchfab (which we’ll get to in a second):

 

Rendering In Sketchfab

 

At the beginning of this semester, I was pretty against Sketchfab as I thought we’d have to pay a lot of money for it, turns out I was wrong. Sketchfab allows users to upload one model per month that is not downloadable and unlimited models that are on a free account. That and its capabilities are amazing, I couldn’t imagine using anything else anymore.

When uploading to Sketchfab, I made sure to go over Alec’s tutorial a couple of times so that I had a good understanding of everything that I could do in Sketchfab and I also watched this:

In Sketchfab, I went through and added in all my textures and began applying them. As each part of my model was using a different shader, I was able to select the specific parts I wanted and add the maps.

For post-processing, I kept it pretty simple, I just added a small bit of grain, an even smaller bit of sharpness and a vignette to draw the eye to the model.

And finally, I added three-point lighting, a simple shadow, changed the lighting preset to studio and added a clean light image background to really pull it all together.

I didn’t want to go overboard in Sketchfab as I wanted to avoid messing up the textures and as I wanted the viewer to stay really focused on the model, I tried to make sure that whatever I was adding would draw the eye closer to the subject of the render.

 

Reflection

 

This was a long and difficult project but overall I’m pretty happy with the result.

I ran into a lot of issues along the way and ended up spending far more time than I would have liked focusing on trying to fix them from a technical perspective rather than an artistic perspective. Probably the best example of this would be with the cobwebs I used in the final render of my model.

If I had spent less time worrying about how I could get them to render and just brute forced it from the start, I’m sure I would have found some more creative ways to tackle the problem I had run into.

Near the end of the project, I was starting to think a lot more artistically and I think that really helped when it came to the texturing and even modelling the poison bottle and feathers as I worried a lot less about getting them good technically and a lot more on how they actually looked and affected the end product.

I’m pretty happy with this project overall. Before this semester, I had never even touched Maya’s modelling tools so I’m really happy with my progress over these past six weeks.