I really left this to last minute so I can feel the stress piling up but there’s only one way to go and that’s to finish this off.
This week I interchanged between the animated narratives hand in and this assignment as well. I had requested an extension to which I was granted so I’ll need to manage my time well to finish this off.
This week I finished of the model, the final assets being the lettuce and ang pao hanging done over the lion dog. I did this by sculpting one leaf and then duplicating it and arranging it into the shape of a lettuce. This was quite tedious but, in the end, it looked like a lettuce so I was happy enough.
I then used some Bezier curves to make the strings attached to the lettuce which was simple enough after extruding the point to bend it into a dynamic pose. I also tapered it at the end so that it looked like tassels. For the string attached to the lettuce, I used a Torus shaped to mold around the lettuce so that it would look like it was holding it up.
Finally, the Ang Pao. Ang Pao, also know as red envolopes/lucky money are given out during special occasions and for lion dances, they are offerings to the lion, along with lettuce. I did this pretty simply, using a cube and the sculpting an envelope fold with a UV sphere. I combined, remeshed and duplicated so that I had two. As an extra detail, I also added tape to the string and Ang Pao so that they weren’t just floating.
I then attempted to automatically apply the retopology as manually would have taken me to long, but my home computer kept crashing. I told Henry and he granted me a few days extra extension to come onto campus to complete this assignment.
I came in on Sunday and tried to set up the auto retopo, but I think I was doing something wrong as it didn’t work for me. Henry was kind enough to do the automatic retopo for me on his laptop so that I could continue. Unfortunately, since it was an automatic retopo, a lot of the definition/detail was lost in my work but if I work fast enough, I may be able to create a higher mesh for my textures.
Posed model:
My UVs turned out to be a nightmare. I got quite confused and forgot most of what I had learned on the pervious assignment, so I needed a lot of help from Henry. He was very patient with me and gave looks of guidance and help to get it sorted. In the end, I had to manually auto UV all my assets and then sew, cut, and unfold. This was incredibly tedious and time consuming, but Henry was kind enough to help me out a lot. I had to make sure that all my UVs were blue to show that they were usable.
After this I create lamberts for each asset that would share a texture, being sure to name all of them accordingly. Once I did this, selected each asset by type and laid them out by selecting auto layout. After this was done, deleted history type and froze all transformations, then combined my model into one mesh. I exported my model as and FBX file and opened it into Substance Painter. At this stage I had forgotten to bake all my meshes so didn’t notice the overlapping UVs on some parts of my model. I found this out whenever, I tried to apply texture to my model and it only showed a block colour.
It was getting late at this point, so I left it at this today.
Today I came back into campus and Henry helped me figure out the issue. At some point during my UV stage, I had somehow managed to create two separate UV maps, which was causing my model to show up dark grey during its bake and not allowing textures to be applied properly. We fixed this by deleting the unwanted UV map. We tried to bake the new file but there were still parts not baking correctly and after some more investigating, Henry figured out that it was because some of the UVs in the same quadrant were overlapping. I had to go back into Maya and layout the issue areas again and reapply my textures from before.
Once my model baked correctly, I started to texture my model. This was a really enjoyable part as it was one of the final touches I had to do as well as it coming together visually. I took a lot of time deciding what textures to use and how to apply it. I primarily used black masked to apply different textures onto to one asset. From my last assignment on 3D literacy, I also had a lot of fun with texturing. I used both emission and opacity channels to apply to the drool and then the flames. This really added to my model and Love how it turned out.
Once I was happy I uploaded on to Sketchfab and had to apply all of my textures manually as my file was too large to directly apply. After apply everything, I added a background and some lighting as well as some extra effects like bloom to give my flames the glowing look I wanted.