I wanted to focus on modelling my hard surface model after having it reviewed by Henry – who made some suggestions on how to proceed. I decided not to fully complete the activity by UV unwrapping the watering can etc. I uploaded my rendition of the hammer that Mike gave us a couple of weeks ago, just to confirm that I understood how to upload my materials to Sketchfab:
I understand how to do this, it’s a lot like importing the textures from Substance Painter back into Maya – the only issues that I can for-see is how I’m going to apply my emissive map.
My previously modelled staff was, unfortunately, not fit for purpose – I hadn’t considered that whilst it looked nice in preview smoothed mode, it would look awful in normal mode! I showed the staff to Henry but it was mostly unsalvageable, and I decided to start again.
Henry suggested that I stop trying to make the staff skull realistic, as it doesn’t suit hard surface modelling. Rather, that I should take a stylised approach. Immediately, Medieval – a PS1 game – came to my mind. I used Sketchfab – a system we will be using to show off our models – to look at other stylised skulls:
Once I’d thought about the general look, I decided to rework my concept slightly. A stylised skull didn’t fit with my original colour palette, which I felt wasn’t light hearted enough to go with a ‘cuter’ skull:
I decided to go with a brighter, more saturated look for my staff as I felt it fit together better with the new approach I was taking — I also would love to be able to have little bits of moss worked into the grains of the wood and the little nooks of the staff overall. After re-working the concept, I started to work on the staff itself – again! I modelled the staff and horns basically the same way as before, taking care to keep them in their low- poly forms when manipulating them instead of smooth previewing them. For the skull, I used the reference linked as an image plane as well as my own personal reference page provided above. I modelled the general shape by tracing the side and front view of the reference and my own drawings just to get variation – I took care when modelling the eyes, nose and teeth to make mine different from the reference and closer to the skull that I designed in my own concept.
I really loved how this came out, I’m so glad that I reworked it and am very grateful for the suggestion from Henry to go for a style more suited to hard-surface modelling rather than the more organic, sculpted look of my original design. The only thing that I want to change is to add a little bone trinket on the left antler.
Once I got the go ahead from Alec confirming that my model is good for UV mapping, I bevelled and smoothed the model, trying to make sure that I kept some of the sharpness from the original low poly pass!
I added a little bone trinket to the left antler:
I attended Alec’s extra class for UV mapping on Friday, and found this incredibly helpful. He looked at my design and said that it looked cool, and that it was suitable for UV mapping! He showed me how to do some of the UV mapping and I decided to do the entire thing myself – by doing this I have gained greater knowledge and confidence in UV mapping. I did it after paying attention to his demonstration in class, without revisiting the recording Alec made, and previously I would need to follow the step-by-step guide so I’m so pleased with my progress in this – I did the entire thing myself. I am still waiting for some feedback on how I did with this, but I think it looks good:
Hopefully this is all acceptable, and I can move it forward into Substance Painter to begin texturing.
This week was another bad week in terms of my confidence; after realising my huge mistakes with my first model I felt totally embarrassed and silly. I think I need to start giving myself a break, and realising that I am completely new to modelling and therefore cannot possibly know how to do everything immediately. I’ve been reading over my blog, and I have been incredibly hard on myself – but I need to bare in mind that every failure is a lesson and I’ve learned from all of them, the amount of progress I’ve made in a few short weeks is pretty compelling. I feel, overall, really pleased with my new model and am excited to continue with applying textures.
Above is screen shots my progress so far on my Hard Surface Model, which is a skull and bone necromancy staff that I designed a few weeks ago.
I went through a lot of different looks for this staff before I managed to get it to a place where I was happy. The first screenshot, where I felt in any way satisfied, is as follows:
The staff was, at this stage, starting to take shape, however I knew there was more to do in terms of attaching the back bones onto the main body of the staff. I also knew that I wanted the staff to look a little more a-symmetric at the point of the antlers, as they were looking terribly bumpy to me.
I added the base crystal to the bottom of the staff:
I also attached the back bones to the main body of the staff by manipulating the verts:
I remodelled the wooden antlers of the staff:
I was really happy with how snug I had managed to get the base of the skull sitting within the wood, so I simply duplicated the staff I had made already and I cut the existing antlers from the main body. From there, I extruded the edges of the staff into the antler shape, being sure to make them feel more random than my previous version:
I attempted to add a ‘string look’ to my original staff antlers, and had its trinkets dangling down, however I really did not like this look as it limited my ability to work knots into the body, and also it looked strange. I am going to try another approach to this:
Within my revised model, I worked knots into the main staff, just so that when it is textured it will have some actual wood grain worked into it as well as the shaders and textures:
They’re not perfect but I really wanted that knobbly look just to add to the feel of the staff’s warped wood.
Finally, I altered the trinkets of the starting model and the revised:
I made the bone a little more cartoonish, and I made an attempt at adding a feather to the trinkets just to add a difference rather than reusing all of the same. I also added some nose and eyebrow rings, made the skull look a little angrier! Finally, I fixed the skull’s teeth in these later models in comparison with previous, which were very flimsy and paper-like:
The current up to date staff is on the right, and the previous version on the left!
I’m pretty happy with my progress overall, and when I think back to the start of this module I’m pretty astounded that I’ve managed to model these! Even if they’re not right or need re-done, I think I’ve worked up a good and solid foundation for going forward. Next I would like to model some string, properly – not by extruding from the horns – and provided the model is looking good on advice of my teachers I will tackle UV mapping.
Edit:
I attempted another approach for the bandages at the bottom of the staff using the youtube guide below:
I’m not convinced of this method on my model to be honest, I don’t think I did a particularly good job but I can always try again after I get some advice from my teachers – if they think this is the preferable way to add wraps to the base then I’ll keep trying until I get it right!
This week we were tasked with continuing to UV unwrap models. This week was a little bit of a fail for me unfortunately, I did UV map the ship that I modelled, but it was not a successful attempt:
These are what the map’s ended up looking like, and they’re a bit of a mess. The ship itself is extruded from a single primative, and I believe that I will have an easier time in future if I try to expand on the amount of primatives I use. For some reason, I’ve gotten it into my head that I shouldn’t be using separate shapes – I guess I still need to learn when this is appropriate and when it is not.
This is the ship model itself:
Regardless of the UV maps being a huge flop, I’m still happy that I attempted this model and the UV mapping as I’ve learned a lot from it (I realised after taking these screenshots that the wings are a little small, and scaled them up)!
We were also tasked with importing a pre-modelled hammer into Substance painter and texturing it. I did this in class on Wednesday, however the file that I moved onto my USB from the school computers corrupted and I was unable to move the hammer from substance painter to maya so that I could then edit and render it. I plan on going back into campus early next Wednesday morning to do this before class. Here is a photo that I took of the hammer in class:
Unfortunately, the photo above was taken with my camera to send as a pic to my friends and it is not of great quality. As soon as I am able to update this, I will.
This past week has been a hugely frustrating one, to be honest. Everything has either gone wrong or I’ve not executed it properly. I’m left feeling a little defeated, but I am determined to push forward. I will begin modelling for this class’ assignment over the weekend. Hopefully this week will be a lot more fruitful for me this coming week than this past week. 🙂
Edit: I decided to rework the Substance Painter assignment at home, as it doesn’t take very long. I went for a more rusty, worn look with this one:
This week we were learning about UV mapping and UV maps. I had a lot of hardware issues during this exercise, which I honestly don’t think have fully resolved themselves. However, I managed to get it together enough to finish applying the textures we were given to the objects we were given in class today:
Honestly, aside the hardware issues I had today the most challenging part of this for me was photoshop. I have absolutely no idea how to use it, so it was quite fiddly at some stages.
In the afternoon, we were then advised to finish off the above models if we were not done with them, and then apply textures to one of the models we’d already completed. I chose to do this for the sword, as it seemed the least complicated:
The leather texture I chose wasn’t amazing, overall it looks a bit bad however I think the aim of the lesson was to create the UV map and understand how it reads in relation to the 3D model itself. From that point of view, I think I understood it for the most part, although I expect I’ll probably run into issues in the future.
UV mapping kind of reminds me of looking at a pattern for a garment before It’s sewn together – you have the pattern pieces that are applied to a material, and the material is then sewn to form the garment. I think this is what we’re essentially doing with UV mapping in a round about way.
3D modelling and all that involves still continues to be completely out of my comfort zone. I think I’m getting to grips with it the more I practice, but there are still parts here and there where I’m surprised with things I didn’t forsee. 🙂
The leather texture I chose wasn’t amazing, overall it looks a bit bad however I think the aim of the lesson was to create the UV map and understand how it reads in relation to the 3D model itself. From that point of view, I think I understood it for the most part, although I expect I’ll probably run into issues in the future.