S2 WEEK 8-12
I’m switching to having multiple weeks of work contained in one blog post for my ease of work while I focus on getting the animaton done.
After previously UV-unwrapping the room in the previous week I started adding textures to the models I made in Substance Painter, I went ahead and textured the rug, table, bookshelf and walls.
I’m very happy with how to table turned out, I think it looks very natural give for a little bit of a strange texture on the sides of the table legs, although I’m not too sure how to fix that yet at my level of skill — probably need to rotate it, but I am happy with it so I’ll leave it be. The same thing happened with the bookshelf to a lesser degree.
The walls were wooden planks that stretched over the whole walls in the concept art — and in doing this I didn’t have any good wooden plank textures by default on Substance Painter so I used the website SubstanceShare to get some new materials to work with on this:
https://share.substance3d.com/
A few days later I realised the windows for the animations final room needed to be changed — mainly one of them needed to be open for the slime to jump through and enter. I changed the groups for the windows and remodelled it to be open. I then added the seperate windows to their own groups again.
I then proceeded to UV unwrap the new window model. There were quite a few things I realised I did wrong after this though.
After editing and unwrapping the new window model, I realised for the slime to be able to jump through the window I needed to get rid of the back panel and the wall behind it, and I only got around to realising that then.
To edit it I fiddled around with the wall and figured out how to carve out a square shape using a shape and messing with the booleans. I got this done but then ran into another problem — the textures.
Since I carved the shape for the hole behind the windows, but had previously textured the walls and previewed them in Maya, they got skewed when I made a change. So I needed to retexture it in Substance painter to fix it — which I did below.
These are the settings I used for my new walls.
A few days later I used the discord server my group made to ask my other group members who were working on modelling the assets and props in the room to send the files over to me. Joseph and Una were the other ones in my group helping with the room assets and props. I did the main room, Joseph did the assets like the scrolls, mortar and pestle, and misc jars. Una doing the main jars that will be used in the final animation that the slime will interact with. They also both textured the props they worked on which was a big help for me as it meant I didn’t need to take everything myself into Substance Painter and texture it for them. Joseph textured the scrolls and mortal and pestle in Substance and textured the jars in Maya. Una textured their potion bottles in Maya as well, and the models that were textured in Maya loaded up automatically when I opened them in the project.
Once I got their files over I added all the textures into the Maya file and started to lay out the final room. Once I got these all done I did a few 720p test renders and added some lights to get a general feel of what the final outcome out look like.
To add these textures in Maya and for them to look good in Arnold Renderview I needed to add them to the scene in a specifc way to look best in Arnold, so once I figured that out the room was completely textured and looking great in the render tests!
There were also texture issues with the files when we tried to share them for everyone in preparation for animation. When we put the main room file that I’d laid out for the animation on OneDrive and everyone downloaded them, when they opened it the textures didn’t load. We were group calling when we realised this and it look 2 hours and a LOT of troubleshooting before we realised that it was that way because we’d organised the textures for the different areas in the room into folders in the sourceimage file.
So in the sourceimages folder there were 4 other folders, one for the main room, assets, props, and character models.
We fixed this by putting all the texture files into the sourceimage folder without putting them into seperate folders, it meant I had more files to sift through when I was texturing, but it meant that when everyone else updated their folders once I updated them the textures loaded for everyone.
Here are some of the final room renders, showing basically what the room is meant to look like in the final outcome.
Luckily, with some help from Alec regarding the previous issue with the cat model, he fixed it quickly for us after showing us what the problem was, and I could finally start animating.
I was modelling the cat segment of the animation – which entailed the basic slime transforming into the cat slime, and the cat slime jumping over to where the next potion bottle is on the table to take a sip. This was made quite difficult due to giving the cat emotion and presonality — especially when it came to the tail. I had to make it swish and emote like a cats naturally does. I think I did a pretty good job overall though, and it looks quite expressive in my outcome. My group now only needs to complete the final render and we’ll have our final animation.
