I found UV mapping my staff to be very daunting, at first and was absolutely dreading it – but towards the end, I became much more comfortable with it.

To create the UV map for my staff, I took each piece and created a camera based image.

I then cut it along areas I thought would be appropriate.

Then I unfolded after cutting.

And then layout.

For this part of the staff in particular, I realised I would need to make more cuts, So I started it again and added some more cuts. This time, I ended up with some strange overlap, which I could easily fix by adjusting the vertices.

I pretty much just repeated this process for every part of my staff. For some more complex objects I was unsure how to go about, I made an automatic UV map to see what the computer would do. I found the automatic ones always had too many cuts and little pieces, but were a good guide for more complex shapes such as the bat wings for when I got stuck.

My UVS ended up looking something similar to this. (I made some minor adjustments later.)

Next, I moved my staff into Substance painter.

For the rod of the staff, I used a metallic purple texture.

I was struggling a bit texturing the gemstones to actually look like gemstones and not just shiny, low poly bits of metal. After some experimentation, I found that making them more reflective and lowering the opacity achieved this look.

I gave the bat wings a dark purple textured look, and for the gold accents I simply used the gold texture available in Substance and adjusted the colour. After this, my textures were ready to export.

I first uploaded my model to my sketchfab account. The first time I uploaded it, the rod came out black. I had no idea why.

I still don’t know why it happened, because I didn’t really change anything the second time I uploaded it.

It just works

I then loaded my textures into Maya.

Because Arnold would not work on my PC, I loaded in my textures by exporting them as 2D in Substance attaching each texture to its respective object manually.

I’ll be adjusting the textures once again in Arnold once I have some time on the college PCs. But for the most part, that’s my staff finally done!!

Here is the sketchfab link to my final 3D rendered model.

Reflection

Overall I learned a lot from making this staff. I really put into practice some of the techniques I learned in class and from homework exercises – I found sweep meshes in particular to be really useful for my model, given all the small curvy ornaments I had. I also learned a lot of new techniques, such as symmetry and the use of instances. The fact that I can make objects live in order to snap vertices and objects to them was another great thing I learned while making this – while I didn’t end up using this technique for the orb in the end, I still used the techniques to snap some of the other objects to the staff and adjust their placement.

I also (mostly) got over my fear of UV mapping – once I got into the rhythm of unwrapping my objects and laying them out, it didn’t seem so bad. I’ll probably take that back in the future though. I also learned some new little tricks for painting textures, such as the use of transparency for the outer orb and reflection for the gems. If I were to go back and do things differently, I would probably adjust the wings slightly. I’d like to make them curve a bit, or add golden bones/joints to make them look more like natural wings.

Overall though, I was happy with how my witch’s staff came out – It really came together after adding all the textures and find it hard to believe it’s something I actually made. I’d like to try challenge myself to make one of the other staffs I designed if I ever have the time.