Here comes the final blog for my final project of 1st semester in which we have to work on hard surface 3d model and organic model.
I’ll be using both Maya and Substance Painter software for this project.
I had lot of dilemma for choosing references for both the models, at first I was going to model my own illustrations because as an illustrator myself there’s nothing more I would like to turn my own illustrations into 3d model and even showed one of the organic illustration to my professor. He encouraged to go ahead but he also talked about the issues that I would face if I go for this model because at that time I was in the process of finalising my hard surface model and the Reference which I finalised was not simple and had lot of objects in a scene. For hard surface model I wanted to go more in stylised art because I’ve always been interested in stylised form of artwork even my own artwork has always leaned towards semi realism.
I began collecting references for the inorganic model from Pinterest, google, art station and Devianart.
After lot of thinking and analysing I decided to go for this model. There were two reasons behind choosing this model. 1st was I wanted to push my boundaries by creating this complex model and 2nd was as a stylised illustrator artist loved this artwork and artist very much.
I began my modelling with hard surface model in which I tried to create the basic foundation level of ship in zbrush but it wasn’t coming out as I wanted it and as this is a 2d art when turning it into 3d we have to consider all of the sides. So the back part of the ship felt unrealistic while modelling. Because of that I decided to go for simpler version of a ship. After modelling for the ship I started to create smaller objects on the deck which includes 2 houses on top of each other, stairs, ladder, barrels etc. At first when I made the house I didn’t put lot of supporting edges and simply just extruded the door part inside and because of that when i went into smooth mode whole topology of the house felt really weird and the door wasn’t showing at all. So, I started to put the supporting edges with the help of multi cut tool and tried to maintain the loops in order to correct the topology. I did tweak some of the objects to make it easier for me. For example, keeping the door closed for the 2nd house and putting the shutter instead of open window. For the chains part I simply just added torus, deleted one side, added 1 edge loop and then mirrored it. I was considering to create ncloth for the flag and add a little wind simulation but when I tried it was too organic which felt misfit with the stylised concept. I even tried giving a subtle wind simulation but at the same time I even wanted to give flag hoisting motion so for now I scraped the idea as I did not have much time on hand.
As for making ship standee I inserted the image which I drew in front view and then took plane and manipulated the vertices and edges according to the image and after that gave a little thickness to it. I made all the clothes roof in the same way as well.
At this point, I realised I didn't delete the tris of cylinder so I went back and deleted the faces and bridged the gap on both the sides of the cylinder.
Moving onto UV Mapping, at first I freaked out seeing so many things that needed to be unwrapped. But as I moved forward It became a lot easier for me as most of them were simple shapes.
As I have so many things in my scene, I separated all the textures in different UV tiles so that it becomes easier for me when texturing in substance painter.
After doing that, renaming all the files, deleting history and freezing transformations I combined all the objects and tried importing it to substance painter but it showed error in uploadng 3d scene.
I tried to solve this issue by seperating the objects and importing it again but it still didn't work so after that I combined all of the UVs in one tile by applying layout, combined the objects and then imported. It worked this time, so I continued with the same file in substance painter which was my biggest mistake as I didn't consider the texel density at this point.
Taking it to Substance Painter, when I baked this model, it showed so many issues in the maps but thinking that it's a low poly model I turned blind eye and started applying base colour to the objects. More than halfway through the model when I wanted to give little bit of details by applying bolts on wooden planks and algae on the ship, I realised the texel density was way too low for me to apply any details. So, I consulted my classmates, and they suggested me to change the tiles again.
Thankfully, I had backup of original file in which I did not touched my UDIMs and when carefully looking into it my UVs were overlapping that's why it was not importing to substance painter.
Finally, after sorting through that my model got imported in the substance painter where I baked the mesh maps and applied textures and details on it.
After applying textures, I imported the fbx file to Maya where I linked all the texture maps to it's corresponding models.
Coming onto rendering part I had lots of issues while rendering as my maya crashed so many times stopping the rendering on random image sequence. I even had to send the file to my professor, but it was working properly for him. So, I tried many alternatives such as lowering the resolution, deleting the preferences etc but what finally worked for me after 2 whole days was rendering in gpu with highest resolution
The textures and colour turned out exactly the way I wanted it. Later I compiled the image sequences of default and wireframe in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Self Critique -
I need to work on better time management for my projects because even though I started early I spent a lot of time on each of the workflow.
I wanted to push myself further and challenge myself to make more objects and use different methods to make the scene more visually pleasing such as ncloth, aitoonshader etc but couldn’t because I spent a lot of time on modelling such basic shapes. I need more practice with modelling so that I can model more efficiently.
I feel like I could’ve make better textures and add more details to the whole scene.
Overall, there were many areas where I could’ve done better and was stuck a lot while working on this project but with the help of my classmates and my professor I could overcome those difficulties.
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