Week 8: Baking Bad

christopheranka
Nov 26, 2015
3 min read

This is fine.... Everything is going to be alright...... -Summary and visual representation of my experience baking

So as the title and gif suggests this week I just had my first experience baking normals from a high poly mesh to a low poly mesh. (Wait actually that sounds too intricate to relate to my poor pun... Never mind)

Anyway in Game production we had a session on baking via xNormals and in all honesty. I messed up good.

Low poly + High poly Turbo smoothed object = Mess in engine

To put it in clearer details from my massive mess up baking I learnt that when baking normals down to a low poly object baking doesn’t affect silhouette but rather the internal details of the object unless I want to create a strange Transformers G1 texture on my models.

Speaking of which, this happy accident lead me onto thinking about the style of textures I would like to represent on my models. Seeing as I am going for quite a whimsical idea of hell in Las Vegas I decided to build my visual style and moodboard around stylised game graphics and styles and took a look into how I could practically make these textures.

In terms of overall style I'm still debating whether on my final texture utilise a hand painted look to convey the clay like feel of the team fortress games or feature a saturated cel shaded style or compromise between both as seen in the Street fighter 4 games. Depending on my final chosen colour palette for the turret and how well it works within engine will be the deciding bet.

Moreover in Game production I presented my progress so far in search for some feedback.

The feedback I received is as follows:

Bigger stronger legs
Extend the front sign shape
Think about having the base stamp a pentagram in engine (Stretch goal)
Think of features as functions
Consider where the shell will discharge

As a result of this I spent this week working towards meeting these targets via means of research as well as generally working on the concept.

Moreover whilst working back and forth between 2d and 3d I started to find some problems with my design particularly how it would function within engine, i.e rotation and movement. This resulted in me changing the back leg of my models stand, protruding more outwards. This will allow the gun pitch/body of the turret to rotate without any clipping. As a result of this however this started pushing me to adjust my model to more of an overall goat aesthetic/silhouette. This can be especially seen in the bottom legs of my model which I have now based its silhouette of goats legs. This chosen goat aesthetic was chosen to convey the look of Baphomet and maintain the whimsical occultist look of my turret.

This week’s visual studies we started to learn about how to make a clean render of a 3d asset in Z brush for the promotional concept art stage. This lesson I felt was quite informative and allowed me to refresh on my Z brush knowledge. Turns out I’m really rusty. Anyway the tools and methods learnt such as using masks and taking advantage of Z brush's own material texture feature will prove to be useful in future stages of the project especially in speeding up my own work flow.

Speaking of which....

During my free time I got doodling and started working on a rough promotional concept art render based on once again 50's aesthetics. This was more of a quick render based on some of the masking techniques I had adapted from the VS. I hope to convey a similar if not better and much more polished look in my final Sentry Gun render as this design was quick and I didn’t have enough time to really research 50's graphics and design. More or less this was a quick brain fart which I have learnt a great deal from especially rendering leather and just general revision of masking.

oh... I also learn concepting ray guns is a lot of fun.

Anyway this has been week 8 for week 9,although I am dreading it, I need to really start pushing the 3d model more and start thinking more about the smaller refined details of my turrent.