It has been a while since I posted last.
To give a bit of an explanation why- Shortly after my previous
post I successfully acquired a part-time job, which I sorely needed. However not
long after that there were some problems resulting in me being forced to work
essentially full time. That combined with some personal issues and the general
misery of the pre-Christmas period, and my work completely ground to a halt.
By January I knew I needed to do something to pull me out of
the rut. I decided to put the money I’d earned doing all those extra hours
towards my art, just to make it feel like it was all worth something. It’d long
been a goal to buy myself a laptop to work on my art anywhere I wanted, but I
decided to take it one step further and buy myself a surface Pro 4.
I won’t go into a full review but I’m quite pleased with the
performance, it is very enjoyable to use with Zbrush or Photoshop. My main
gripes would be the slight delay when starting a stroke in Photoshop, and the
hold to right click function getting in the way of painting small dots. This
can’t be disabled or the program will start bugging out. If you buy one of
these you’ll be having a lot of fun wrangling drivers before you can get
cracking!
But that investment gave me the boost I needed, and I
started wanting to work again as sculpting directly on the screen definitely
feels more intuitive to me. Then my workplace finally got its act together and started
reducing my hours back to how they had been. With things looking up it began to
positively affect the rest of my life too, and right now I feel more driven
than I have in a long time.
I still need to work very hard if I’m going to get my
portfolio to a state I’m happy with by the end of summer but I have plans and
it’s definitely achievable.
I finally got around
to finishing the sculpt after a fair bit of trial and error, trying to work out
how to model obscured or less defined parts of the concept. The tri count of
the finished piece was stupidly high so decimating had to be done piece by
piece.
Once that was done I had to create the low poly. There were
some asymmetrical parts and others that needed to be symmetrically duplicated
so I had to pay attention. I was worried I was going to end up with it being
far too high poly- the result was a little under 4,400 tris, though not knowing
the average tri counts from the other weapons in game I can’t be sure how this
stands. I don’t think I could’ve gone much lower without losing a lot of the
form.
Unwrapping wasn’t too difficult, maybe there could’ve been
some changes with my bake in mind but for a fairly small asset I feel it was
adequate. After tweaking the smoothing groups a bit I started trying to bake. I
used xNormal, first without a pre-generated cage. Then I made a cage in Max and
imported that. I edited both together to make sure I got the best parts of
each. I was going to bake in Max too, but found out it had been a mistake to use
the cage modifier manually- the cage reset every time I selected the high poly
and I couldn’t find a way around it, and it wasn’t going to be a good use of
time to remake the cage again so I chose to move on.
Then it finally came to the main challenge of this project-
the stylised texture. I used the normal map to generate a rough AO to use as a
guide, then got stuck in. My general rule of thumb at the start was to lighten
outer edges and darker inner ones, then start adding some shading and gradients
to highlight the forms. I kept having to go back to different reference images
to make sure I was doing exactly what the game does- I was unsure whether to
add shine highlights and what style to do them in at the start, but later found
better reference to guide me.
My current model is starting to look complete, but it needs
some finishing touches first. I’ve gotten some advice from some helpful users
on Polycount as to what I’m missing, so I have a clear path as to how to get my
stylisation looking accurate.
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Once I am done with this model I’ll be concepting for my
next project, which will most likely be a small environment piece that will
make up for the shortcomings of my FMP. I have a vague idea of what I’d like to do, but
I’ll leave that for the next time.
