Week 05 – Sketchfab – Archie McConachie

This week, I began to work on my staff for my final assignment. Overall, this assignment went well and for the most part, I found it easy to create my final model. However, there were a few things that proved challenging whilst I was creating my model. For example, I originally had created separate objects for the mouth of my dragon head and despite all my efforts, I couldn’t get these objects to look as though they were all connected. In order to attempt to fix this, I asked my tutor Alec if he knew any solutions, who advised that I redo the mouth on the head by extruding and sculpting. I tried this out, and after a while, was able to achieve the desired appearance I was striving for. Another issue occurred with my poly amount as I didn’t realize that I exceeded this. My other tutor Henry told me that I could use ‘mesh reduce’ in order to minimize the number of polys per object. He also advised that I could make a copy of my high poly model and further bake it onto Substance Painter. From this, I took his advice and attempted it, shown below. The first time I tried baking both models, it failed. This was due to how I moved the duplicate in Maya, which seems to affect it greatly because they are meant to match with their co-ordinates. When this was finally sorted, I then ran into more issues such as the horns acting strange and overlapping as they were baked. To overcome this, I thought that removing some ridges from the horns would work… It didn’t. Instead, I ended up having to bake all my model excluding the horns. For some reason, this seemed to work and I finally was able to start adding colour and texture to my staff!

Below are screenshots of this process!

adding in a plane for the reference image

Importing image onto the plane

Blocking out basic polys to get a rough form

Tweaking and improving blocked shapes

Further tweaks…

Here, I began to take off the blocked shapes around the face and extruded from the original head base

I then began extruding further to create the staff itselfAfter that, I started to make the dragon’s face more detailed by sculpting

↕unwrapped the head but this failed because I forgot to cut the head from the staff base↕

Here, I went back and unparented all my objects. I also fixed the unwrapping with the head
Selected all objects after unwrapping & sorted them using layout

After I did this, I duplicated the model and lowered the number of polys in the duplicate.

I classified the original as high poly and the dupe as low poly and exported them separately.

I baked the high poly over the low one on Substance Painter

Baking in progress…

I changed the horns completely as they initially had issues when baking. This didn’t change anything.

To fix this, I baked everything separately, excluding the horns

Beginning to colour my model and added some materials
Once I finished this, I started to experiment with backgrounds and decided

on one that was sky-based as this fit the theme of my staff

When done, I started to export these textures to begin the upload to sketchfab.

Uploading my model to Sketchfab

During this week, we also learned how to export both our Maya models and texture files onto Sketchfab. This was taught by our tutor, Alec in a two-part tutorial with a pre-prepared model for us to experiment with. At first, I thought that this task would be relatively easy however, it was partially confusing at first. This is due to how we were required to add the textures separately, and sorting them into their own categories.

Here is my method of application…