Final Week Final Turnin

 

For this week I have been working on retopolgy, and will continue to do so.

3DCoat

 3D Coat is a powerful tool that allows the user to model, sculpt, retopo, uv, bake, and texture their mesh. For this research project, I created my base mesh in Maya, sculpted it in ZBrush, and retopo'd also in Maya, and so my primary focus here is on baking and texturing, but I will go over the other tools available in 3DCoat as well. 

To begin the process with a pre-existing highpoly mesh, you must first import your mesh under voxel sculpting, and will be prompted with some tweaking options upon doing so. 

After you center and reset your pivot (for objects not at 0,0) then you must hit apply to preserve your sculpt in the scene. Once done so, you can sculpt on and adjust your imported mesh as you wish with the brushes available on the sidebar.

To retopo your work, you must switch to the Retopo tab, or "room."

Within, you'll find that the tools tab has updated, and many new options are now available. 

To begin making quads, you must use the point/faces tool. Using the left mousebutton you can set points as you desire, similar to points in Maya, and use the right mouse button to confirm a face. 

Using the quads tool, you can drag out from edges to make more quads, and using the add/split tool, you are able to add edges to divide your quads further. As my model is already retopo'd elsewhere, however, we will be moving on.

To import your already-topo'd mesh, you must go to import->import retopo mesh. 

Here, you can adjust your topology with the tools I mentioned earlier if you decide to do so. When you import a mesh, you also have the choice to auto-snap your mesh to the one below, but that can mess up your topology if you are not careful.

From here, if you select the bake tab, you can bake your normals. You may want to enable dithering. 

These are your baking options. You may want to adjust the depth scan to better fit your object.

After switching to your paint scene, some additional options may appear to adjust your normals and other settings. You may want to bake your AO and curvature maps as well, and if so, you will need to bake textures.

From here, painting is fairly straightforward. 

However, your high-poly sculpt is still preserved in layers, so you may want to disable that while you paint. 3DCoat uses opacity levels as its main method of blending, so you will want to watch out for your opacity as you work.

Initial color. 

Blending with opacity.

You can also add depth maps while in paint mode that will adjust the shape of your model, similar to sculpting. 

3DCoat is a versatile and interesting software, and it feels good to paint in the scene. I did compare it with Substance Painter, however, and I find that Substance does a better job of handling baking and ao, in a more convenient way for the user. Here is the comparison.

Base retopo.

Bake with ambient occlusion. 

I also found that similar painting effects can be achieved in Substance Painter as well by adjusting the stroke opacity in any given brush. 

Though Substance may be stronger with baking, however, 3DCoat offers many more painting tools that could be found helpful to a texture artist, including in-built text tools and painting along curves, applying pre-made textures along curves, text along curves, texture magnification tools, and the ability to paint in things that would typically be found in layers settings, such as smoothing/sharpen/saturation adjustments/value adjustments. 

 

 

Final Turnin Week 3

 

This week, I first started working on retopology for the Wizard's House, but as I made progress on it it began to take significantly longer than I anticipated, so I decided to swivel to at least have something to show, and finished the sculpt for the Pumpkin House. This includes two leaf sculpts that I will be reusing to populate the rest of the scene. As the pumpkin project is also my research project for tomorrow, I have switched to retopoing this one instead and getting this project to completion over the Wizard's House, which will be finished at a later time. A key take away from both experiences is that though a concept may not look difficult on face value, each individual asset in a scene takes time, and sometimes more time than expected. Accounting for taking each asset through the whole pipeline is something that I failed to do, and became overwhelmed by the number of pieces in both of my scenes very quickly. 

Angel and Demons Final Turnin

 

This flower was made by making UVs prior to making the sculpt and baking it down to the already existing UVs. It was added to speedtree by taking its mesh and texture information and converting it into a flat plane. The original goal was to make it a low-poly model and use it as a 3D object, however even at 1k tris per flower it was overall too heavy to do so due to the large amount of individual flowers needed to cover a tree. 

Final Project Week 2

 

Castle update week two: Hiccup in the sculpting process. During this project, I ran out of not just storage but also RAM which paused my ability to sculpt. As a solution, I decimated all completed components down to the lowest point possible while still preserving their quality in order to be able to continue, though that is where I most recently left off. I am also looking at re-importing the few remaining pieces and finishing those off alone before importing back into Maya for retopo.

Schedule: 

Week 1 > Finish the pumpkin house itself (complete)

Week 2 > Finish the Wizard's House Sculpt, Retopo, Start texture if possible (incomplete)
Week 3 Reprised > Finish entry platform to top level, retopo, texture, in engine, lit. Return to pumpkin house, retopo, texture. 
Week 4 > Finish all that is undone. If time permits, return to land and pumpkins surrounding ground for final pumpkin turnin. Return to Wizard's House for birds for final turning.

Angel and Demons Sprint 4

 

Currently UVing Pose 1 of Tree. Pose 2 of tree is in process of finishing up sculpt. 

Final Project Week 1

 

I also returned to the Wizard's House and finished one of the yet to be completed high poly sculpts.

Schedule: Week 1 > Finish the pumpkin house itself (Complete)

Week 2: > Finish the Wizard House sculpt, retopo, start textures if possible

Week 3: > Finish Wizard's House. In Engine, Lit. Return to Pumpkin House, retopo house itself, textures. If time permits, return to land and pumpkins in surrounding ground for final turnin.