CAGD 320

Final Project Microscope

Purpose of Assignment 

This assignment included expanding a microscene of one of our previous projects. This involved making ten additional models to create a story to out scene. We needed to add a model with emission as well as create textures that made the scene look as we intended it to look. 

Problems and Solutions 

A problem I encountered was creating the bear model. I was playing with primitive shapes in order to create the face which was easy, but the limbs were more difficult. The most challenging part was figuring out where to connect the limbs to the circle that was the body. I eventually made a kind of messy way of attaching them including making them separate objects and covering up any holes by stretching the limb models over the bottom model. It ended up looking better than I thought, even though there are probably better ways of connecting geometry and smoothing to make a more plush looking surface.  

Another problem had to do with the ID models. When I imported the models into painter, I realized that I had made some IDs the same color that I did not want to transfer onto different models. This was an easy fix, but I was upset that I had to go back and fix it. I created some extra colors and tried to figure out what materials I made shared amongst models. I did have to sacrifice some extra detail on the skateboard model because I had forgotten that I put an ID for the undercolor of the board, but ended up making the whole board black by applying one ID color to it out of time crunch and I simply had forgotten. 

Overall, I am very happy on how this project turned out. I worked very hard on creating accurate UV shells and making sure nothing was breaking and that everything looked ok in every UV channel. I think I could have created a more complicated and more accurate base and also made the VW bus fit more naturally to what the theme of the scene was by adding more detail to the model such as stickers and a better color scheme. I also wish that I made the fire on the candle more realistic looking, but that was the model that I textured using emission.

Normal Stamp and Low Poly Wall

Normal Stamps

Purpose of Assignment 

The purpose of this assignment was to use Maya to create normal stamps that can be imported into Adobe Substance Painter. Substance Painter can utilize normal stamps to add extra detail onto any 3D model without adding additional geometry. With these methods, it is possible to make fun shapes by adding and subtracting shapes into base shapes without worrying about N-gons or incorrect geometry, because normal stamps are essentially just flat images. 

Problems and Solutions

This project was my favorite and the one that gave me the least amount of stress because modeling without worrying about incorrect geometry is a very fun way of modeling. Using a tool that was new to me called Booleans, it is possible to combine objects using "Union," extract any shape from an object using "Difference," and do some other neat thing that I don't really know what it does called "Intersect." This project was an amusing way of experimenting with the Boolean feature in Maya and creating whatever shapes that I wanted without any repercussion. 

A struggle I might have had included finding out how to render a normal stamp. I had to pay close attention and take some notes from the teacher to figure out how to correctly use rendering software in Maya. The way to do correctly do this is to make sure the ratio of the render fits the object, select the "Arnold" tab at the top with the render tab instead of Maya's default options to render. Using the Arnold tab instead of the default Maya render icons will allow you to access different render types including Ambient Occlusion, Normals, etc. I learned that there is in fact more ways of creating renders in Maya than I originally thought. 

Low Poly Wall

Purpose of Assignment 

The purpose of the "Low Poly Wall" assignment was to learn how to render an object with a very high geometry count onto a single one-dimensional polygon (or a plane). In this class, have done this type of rendering before, however, this project provided some much needed clarification on the concept of how to use Adobe Substance Painter to "Bake Mesh" on to another mesh or object. We call this concept "baking." 

In previous projects it was not very clear on how this type of rendering can be utilized and how powerful it can. This is because baking high poly objects onto low poly objects was not the focus of the other assignments, therefore it felt like a side detail that was given to us. This project differed in the way that we actually had to create the high geometry piece using objects and texture them without any help.

Problems and Solutions

An issue with this assignment was that I did not realize that the high polygon object did not need to be UVd. Just like the Normal Stamp project that proceeded this one, the high polygon acted as a projected image. This was slightly annoying because of course I had already started UVing the objects. The solution to this problem was to stop UVing and simply bake the high polygon mesh onto the one polygon plane using Painter. The only object that needed to be UVd was the one polygon plane, which is the simplest object possible to lay out into UVs. 

Another issue that I had was software related. I wish I could add some more detail using texture generators, however I quickly realized that baking in 4K was difficult for my computer to handle. Every time I moved the brick wall texture (behind the iron bars), every texture would disappear from the object, making it impossible to see the changes that I made. Next time, I would utilize a more powerful computer to create the detail that I desired for this project. For now, I had to settle with the way the textures looked by default, which is when you drag them onto the object unedited.

For the sci-fi wall, I got a little bit lazy and did not have a plan on how I wanted it to look. I realized that a single one of those double round circles looked too small, and two of the circles made the object look phallic, you know what I mean. I just ended up dotting them almost randomly around the plane. I also failed to find a good color scheme. Looking at the assignment, I see we needed an object that utilized emission in Painter, which I did not account for. I made the center circles all confusingly each and all have emission. It could look better to me, but I am satisfied with just finishing the project. You can maybe tell my favorite wall though.

As you may have noticed, this project taught us the powerful tool of baking, making a flat object have the very compelling looking illusion of 3-dimensionality.  

VW Bus Microscope

Purpose of Assignment 

The UV bus assignment involved laying out UV shells from an extremely complicated model. It also included modeling and texturing four additional models to add to this scene. This assignment focused on improving our knowledge of UVing and making high quality textures.

Problems and Solutions

The first problem that I encountered was that I had made the entire model a single material to start. This is an issue because the UV shells would appear to be lower quality and smaller if they are not separated into at least three different materials. I did not fully understand how this worked and how it could be a powerful method for texturing until this assignment. Once it finally clicked in my mind that different materials appear as different UV sets in the zero to one space and can overlap based on which material they are assigned to when they are imported into Substance Painter, I found it very easy to create textures that can make higher quality work. It took a long time to reorganize the many many shells, but the outcome made this worth it.

Another problem was making the lights for the bus. As I assigned textures into Maya from Substance Painter, I realized that the Painter textures appeared different on the lights. In Maya, they appeared as if they were completely black, while in Painter, the textures for the lights looked as intended. I found out that this was because I had made it so that every layer of the light in Maya transparent, which showed the inner shell of the bus, which ended up appearing black. This did not look good, so how I fixed it was search and find the bottom light layer and made it a different material that was not transparent. This brought out the transparent textures better.

Sci-Fi Assignment

Purpose of Assignment 

The Sci Fi assignment was the choice to UV and texture either an X-wing or a tie interceptor model in addition to texturing and UVing a crate that needed to fit into a scene. The crate is required to have an "emission" channel from a feature in Substance Painter. When turned on in Painter, emission allowed any texture to "glow" or become bright and appear different and greatly contrast from the texture below it. 

Problems and Solutions

A problem that I encountered was that there was an issue with the UV shells with my create. The UV shells looked different in Maya and Substance Painter. This caused distortion and ugly features when the textures were imported into Maya. I tried to figure out what was causing this by importing different alterations of the model several times to Painter. When I could not figure it out, I asked for help and figured out that the reason why the UVs were different was because there was one item in the model that did not contain a UV. I went through all of the items on the model and found out that the missing UVs were some of the "feet" at the bottom of the box. I UV'd them and the model was finally acting correctly. 

As for the tie interceptor, even though I kind of think it looks interesting, it was not my intention to make it look lumpy and deep-fried. I found out later that this was because of the size of the textures which I only exported in 2K instead of 4K to save my computer some stress. It was also because it had never occurred to me to separate UV shells based on material, which I learned how to utilize better in the next assignment. To fix this in the future I would have applied more materials to the tie interceptor as well as use a different computer to export higher quality textures. 

I like how the scene looks in an artistic sense, but I feel like it could also look better. I would also like to have added a more interesting background and a better textured floor if I had more time to work on it and fix the UV shells. I am proud of how the crate turned out because the textures and stamps that I used look more natural and fit it better.

 Charcuterie Board

Purpose of Assignment 

The Charcuterie Board was meant to be a first intro project to teaching us how to bake high quality models onto lower quality models, create textures for food, and create our own material. Using tutorials and previous lectures of Substance Designer, we were tasked to create a texture of our own to fit one of the foods in the scene. 

Problems and Solutions

The first challenge was how to texture some of the complicated food. I only used masking layers in Substance Painter instead of creating ID exports in Maya. The salami roll was challenging to create a custom texture for, so I started with using textures that I found on Substance Share. I used one called "Zombie Flesh" which looked the furthest thing from appetizing. I found out that the material that looked the most like meat when changing the color was actually the rough concrete material. I think that it turned out one of the best looking models in my scene. 

Another issue dealt with ambient occlusion. I had forgotten how to apply ambient occlusion to the models in Maya to make a nicer looking render. I looked up a tutorial that gave me a complicated solution of selecting all the objects in the scene and applying a render overlay through the render settings. I found out that there was an easier and more affective way of achieving ambient occlusion through the Arnold renderer in Maya, but this solution worked for the moment. 

Overall, I feel like the scene is very dark, but I might have done that on purpose to cover up some of the textures that did not quite import well back into Maya from Substance Painter. Next time I would organize the materials and UVs better as well as carefully make sure the textures do not look too shiny and ugly. I love how the cheese and salami textures as well as my pickle texture that I created in Substance Designer turned out. I tried to illuminate the pickle texture in one of my renders, but it still somehow looked very dark.