Week 10: Sentry Done........

This whole week,baking.

So as much as I wanted to post a cheerful gif this week, xnormal and 3ds max's projection modifier thought otherwise. This week on reflection was very progressive in terms of my project however technology kept having a knack for setting me back several steps. I've managed to accomplish finishing both my high poly and low poly model as well as unwrapping my low poly for the bake.

Older build of my Unwrap

In this week’s game production once again I had to present my progress to which I had feedback to improve my uv's by delegating more space to objects of larger surface area and focal points. Below is my improvement based on this feedback.

It does make me happy that feedback on my Uvs didn’t include pack tighter as this personally tells me that the experiences I learnt during the film room project has improved my skills packing. Game production’s feedback sessions remain to be very supportive as they allow me to gauge my progress with projects and just generally help with selling ideas which speaking off will help with the upcoming character pitch idea for the character project.

Outside of taught lessons, this week was tough. As mentioned above a great deal was accomplished but a lot has been held back because of technology.

LOWPLY

High Poly

Cage

Iterations

get good help

help p2

Bake Errors

Help p1

DiffuseWIP

SentryWIP

SentryWIP2

SentryWIP3

Turret develop

Texture development

Help me pls

Help

Halp

The countless amount of unwraps and constant iterations of high poly models due to geometry messing up was a nightmare (Never trust booleans). Not to mention baking going wrong such as Normal projecting geometry on areas of my model which shouldn’t have said details or overlapping cages in 3ds max. This week has broken me but on reflection built me up to have a stronger understanding of baking. With each problem I had to meet it with another solution such as seeking help in the game art feedback page, "Get Good" and learning alternate baking methods such as making a bake farm out of many detached models or what I eventually did was to study how hue change affects normal and paint in areas of my normal rendered by max to fix errors. This week was essentially a trial by fire which at the time of writing has burnt me out but taught me more of an understanding of baking and normals which I now appreciate.

One major problem I am facing with my Sentry Gun is the texturing process. Admittedly it wasn’t smart going into texturing straight after spending a whole day stressing over a bake and in turn burning myself out but I’m a workaholic unfortunately. Anyway several problems I encountered during texturing included areas of my textures details looking pixelated as well as the weird stretching in the front sign which as of now I have no clue how to fix since I have gone back to check if my unwrap was stretched and it appears as if the UV is fine. All this and just general dislike for where they are going has caused a lot of doubt in my skills to be a proficient artist and has in turn worn me out even more. To be honest as part of an action plan it would probably be best for me to take a small break from this process for a while and get a clear head. In addition to fix the pixelisation of the textures I've decided to work at 4096x4096 and then rescale down to 1024 preserving details and hopefully taking advantage of Photoshop’s anti-aliasing to tone down the sharpness of the pixels. As for the front face that is something I'm going to refer to a tutor for some help.

The pressure of getting this done and getting this done to a standard to which I feel is portfolio worthy is getting to me and I need to step back before it hinders my progress. Anyway this has been week 10.

Quick bonus, with the character project ever looming I've once again gone back to Z brush and experimented with Z spheres this time. Honestly where was Z brush my whole life. It’s a shame if I was more confident and skilled in this area as of now all my free time would be dedicated into pet z brush projects for a portfolio but we’ll have to see where this program takes me.

Sculpt 1

Sculpt 2

Second image was a paintover of the character I wanted to sculpt - this was just me playing around in Z brush

Playing around with Z brush, it’s become clear that my knowledge of anatomy needs to be pushed as I need to be confident in understanding muscle placements in perspective. There were several times in which I really needed to work out what muscles are seen in certain views. Currently I am quite pleased that I’m failing now with these z brush projects rather than during the character project but with each week ending the pressure of the character project slowly looms over and I'm slightly worried.