While completing this task in class, my software seemed to be having some issues, for example, I was unable to assign a checker shader to my shapes, and so I had to find a manual workaround, and it took a while for me to understand which edges to cut in order to unfold each shape in the best way, but once I had that figured out, I was quite pleased with the result;
In our week 4 class, we were introduced to an adobe program called Substance Painter, which takes an imported model from Maya and allows the creator to assign realistic materials and textures to the model they have made. To help myself to become more comfortable with the new software, I started by following along with the war hammer tutorial file which was provided for us on Blackboard;
Using this software, I learned how to use an unwrapped set of UVs from Maya to assign textures to specific mesh chunks rather than painting the textures on to each polygon manually, which saved a lot of time and effort. The tutorial video we were given also covered using smart materials and textures, however, since I had grasped the basis of the software, I decided to go ahead and apply these techniques to my well model.
Since my last post, my well model has had several adjustments, after discussing it with my lecturer, I decided to add some more interesting features, including branches, flowers, stones and chips in the rim of the bowl and pail;
Thankfully, unwrapping the model wasn’t as difficult as I had feared, because most components began as cube primitives and sweep meshes, it was easier to lay them out in the UV editor rather than searching for each individual edge to cut on every shape. I also experimented using a material in Maya called ‘ocean shader’, which I thought had a cool effect on the water;
Unfortunately, I had to remove this material, because my laptop ran into an issue where only UVs which were assigned the material ‘Lambert’ in Maya would be visible in substance painter, but I still enjoyed exploring the different settings.
In Substance Painter, I used ‘wood walnut’ for the tree, ‘plastic gloss’ with increased metalness for the bowl and pail, and ‘concrete for. the stones surrounding the well. I actually used the material ‘calf skin’ on the flowers as I wanted to illustrate their soft texture on the petals;
Once I finished that, I baked the texture maps and exported them to Maya to render my model, which initially worked using an IPR render to see a rough view of how the model looked, but after all the textures were assigned and I tried to make a final render, I was unable to view one, and the Arnold Renderer froze at 7 seconds. I eventually closed the software and after troubleshooting the issue, it still wouldn’t generate a high resolution image, so I felt that my time would now be better spent by importing the model and textures to Sketchfab, which I will talk about in the next post.
