Weapons and Armour

Introduction

After all of the pre-production work, which included sorting out the themes and designs, now comes the time to create the scene itself.  As the designer of the weapons and armour during the pre-production stages, I will be in charge of creating them in Maya and texturing in Substances Painter.

The Theory

The Theory of the weapons design has changed a little since the start to the project, the shapes of the weapons an armour has been adjusted to make it a lot easier to create in 3D with my skill level,  but they will still stay within my original fantasy design conception, with the ends of war hammers being oversized and all weapons having ornate design.  I really liked the references to elements like the ‘Darksiders’ and ‘Warcraft’ franchise, we cut back on detail due to time constraints and later on issues we had with the UV process.  We still kept it stylized, and decided to create multiple weapon and armour types for each individual for two reasons.  Firstly, it added both variety and class type to each it individual eg: spears for soldiers, a black helmet to represent a captain and arm-blades for the assassins.  Secondly if one model was lost or I was unhappy with I had a ready alternative with which to replace it.

The objects I have created are listed below:

• •  1 Arm Mounted Blade
  • 1 Axe
  • 1 Hammer
  • 1 Mace
  • 2 Shields (1 square, 1 round)
  • 1 Spear
  • 2 Swords (but the 2nd one could be repurpose as a dagger) (1N)
  • 3 Helmets
  • 1 Pair of Boots (N)
  • 1 Body Armor
• Modals with a (N) beside their names did not make it to the final product.

 

Maya

• Modeling

All of my 3D objects were modelled in Maya due to me being more familiar with the program than Render. Each of my models had their own file and were created from scratch based of my inspirations and rough sketches. The reason for this was because I wanted to go with the flow of the program working off its strengths avoiding my over ambitious design styles that might get in the way of the finished product.  Objects were created out of newly generated meshes using the extrude tool to shape them and keep the block type look.  For any cylindrical shapes such as the horns on the helmet, they were made out of their own meshes and then combined on the base model. Once the basic shape was achieved I would adjust the edges and vertices to refine the shape and delete any unnecessary faces.  Due to quality control issues involving broken faces I had to cut one of my swords and a pair of boots out of the final project.

Out of all the equipment I designed, the helmets were the objects that caused me the most problems during the 3D creation.  On my own, I kept running into problems with the inside of the helmet, where it was showing the textures on the outside.  Creating new mesh on the inside took a while to construct and I was not pleased with the result.  Thanks to the my one on one session with Henry, I learned how to use thickness to create the inside mesh that keeps to the shape of the helmet, while allowing me to give the inside of the helmets their own texture.

 

• Texturing

 

Before I scaled my models to size or manage my UV, I assigned the texture to all of them.   Each of the textures are named after their respective material (such as fabric, metal, gold, etc.)  The colours as named are not related to the final colour of the project, as they only are here to show which elements of the models I have textured so far and the final texture would be created in Substance Painter.  During this stage I did not use the accurate colours to decorate the textures, as they would be replaced in Substance Painter and they were only there to tell me that the area required texturing and which texture I had assigned.  A good example was the final colour gold I had represented by purple, but this was only to show the areas of the model I had designated for that texture.

• Scaling

 

Before I went on to manage my UVs I would go ahead and scale each of my assets to the right size.  In doing this I want to give a special thanks to Najib Magee  for helping me with this.  As if had I carried out the UVs at the wrong time, the scaling process would alter them, meaning  would have to carry out the operation again.  In order to scale my assets to the correct size I temporarily inserted Maya’s Inbuilt premade models which made then to the correct size.  I would also use a variety of these pre-made models like Werewolf and Cyclops as well as male and female models in order the create the variety of sizes required in a fantasy world.

 

• UV Management

 

Out of all the job roles related to £D UV management and creation is my least favourite as I find it hard to remember all the tools that are available in the program and it is such a delicately connected that I could spend a long time fixing one of the problems.  While you can make a basic UV for just pure colours, if the final textures had running lines or markings, I would have to create a very thorough UV map.  This took me a lot longer for certain models than I would have liked, however with the help of Henry, I was able to get the essential UVs carried out to a decent degree, making any markings or printings on them translate correctly..

Once a model was primed and ready I saved them as a fbx. file ready to imported into Substance Painter.

Substance Painter

• Pre-Made

With the exception of wood I did not use too many unaltered pre-made substance painter smart materials.  There are two reasons for this, firstly I needed to create new materials which I felt could demonstrate my skills.  Additionally, the fact that the range of pre-made materials were not suited to those I needed for the project without further alteration.

• Constructed New

When I was creating new material for my weapons, helmets and body armour I started off by using a pre-made texture that was the closest to what I was looking for, eg: brown rough fabric.  I would then alter the colour of the fabric to red match what I had in mind, which was to suit a more prestigious appearance. I then went further and added small scratches to the fabric, making it look as if was workshop as opposed to factory made.  Once I was satisfied  with the appearance of the texture I would group it with others and save t as a smart material.  This would allow me to duplicate the same process easily over all my models, not only tang weight off my workload but also keeping the colour scheme uniform. I would repeat a similar process for each of my materials from creating a ‘new gold’ by adjusting the brightness and roughness of a pre-made smart material to refine the metal on my model so that it was not too reflective.  Each newly created smart material was given its own name so I could easily find it in the future.

 

 

Baking the maps

During this creation process my tutor Henry reminded me that I needed to actually bake my model’s textures in Substance Painter, because if the model is created in Maya its format is not fully adapted to Substance Painter and the textures might look differently from my design.  An example would be some of the effects such as an indent, looking more 2D than 3D, i.e: a hemisphere might turn out looking like a circle.  This issue is resolved by baking each model and adjusting the already added textures afterwards.

 

Adding the markings

To add more influences of Irish culture to my work, I decided during pre-production that as well as the colours of green and gold I would also add Celtic Symbols.  This would add more feeling and expression.   Initially I thought I would have to convert PNGs online into stamps in Substance Painter however I found that the program already had a selection in its library that I was able to utilise. I used the colour White for the markings as it bounced quite nicely off my smart materials of Emerald Green, Black and Gold, giving it a hand-painted look.  I would free-handedly paint on a mark that I had created to each of the weapons to represent the Forge-Makers distinctive insignia, to demonstrate he personally made each item.

   

Once I looked over each model and was satisfied with the outcome I would export all textures from Substance Painter, saving each respective one into their own folder beside their accompanying model’s FBX files, ready for the Unreal Engine.

 

What I liked

I like how Substance Painter handles those textures and colours through its material systems, even if  am using pre-made smart materials they always exhibit really high quality looks.  It is also a very easy system to apply the materials and edit elements like their colours, metallic sheen and roughness.  It is one of those programs where it is fun an liberating to work with as you go through its systems making it a relaxing process in the more difficult elements of 3D modelling.

What I need to Improve

The biggest area that I need to improve on is not related to Substance Painter, but what is effected by it.  Substance Painter is heavily effected by how a model is UV mapped and there were some elements on my models where you can see the stretching of the textures because of my UV maps.  In future I need to work harder at creating my UV maps to make them better so that they can adapt more readily to Substance Painter.

 

Screenshots of the Complete modals