Staying Zen

Applying last week’s action plan.

I’m feeling much better this week despite still not being where I want to be with the project. I decided last week that I wasn’t working efficiently, and wasn’t looking after myself properly which meant I couldn’t work efficiently, essentially the kind of vicious cycle you should avoid when at university, but often fall into all too easily.

So I decided to adopt a more ‘do things as I go’ mentality, and use my time more effectively, and it’s actually paying off. Last year I would come into labs for 9am and work till 9pm, then go home and keep working. Unsurprisingly I burnt out pretty quickly. This year I’m still working until 9, (I’m working on it) but I’m taking the evening for myself which has really helped. It means I can wake up the next day relaxed (well, relatively) and ready for a new day.

A good example of how I’m using my time more efficiently now is file keeping as I go. Before I would just create a model, save it, iterate, save, copy, etc. and then once I was finished go back and clean-up, which often happened during hand in, so It meant I wasted lots of time opening and closing files to check if they were the right ones, when I could have been doing last minute touch ups to my models.

I’ve also decided to take progress shots as I go. It’s not a habit yet, but it will be, and it will shave a lot of time off my working process. The snipping tool is god.

Also using a separate notebook for clear and broken down tasks to work on is the best decision I’ve made to date. So congratulations week 2 Eva, not all your decisions are bad ones.

Forcing myself to work in personal tutor sessions is another ‘more efficient’ thing I’m trying to do. I find concentrating on written work around others very difficult. However doing my written work in these allotted times will be much more productive for me, and will free up my weekends to focus on the personal work I’ve been neglecting. I’m getting there with the aid of ambient/chill music. Zen. It’s all about creating the best work environments for yourself.

In regards to the project tasks I set myself last week, I found a lot of issues that set me back a bit, but thankfully, as I allowed myself extra time for any issues, I'm not too worried about it. Plus I've completed all my unwraps, fixed all my normal maps and have finished texturing one object, which came out way way better than I'd have ever expected. But more on that later. I also have a good idea of how to proceed with the rest of the textures, so I should be done with texturing by Wednesday next week, and have time to work on lighting then. I have also cleaned up my file structure and made sure all my models were fine to put into engine, and now have them in our room.

A big frustration for me this week was my team not being on track with their own tasks. A lot of people are still unwrapping and it's the end of week 3. One of our team members volunteered to get everyone's assets into engine, which I'm a bit worried about as I'm not too sure they can handle the task. However I can't control everything in the project and I'm trying to step back a bit, so I'll put my trust in them that we'll have an engine ready room to show on Monday.

The asset list has been updated though which is good. I'll talk about my assets and their changes later on.

Confidence

It’s something I've really struggled with, I’d like to say since coming to uni, but that’s not true, so since forever. I've always been someone that might be naturally quite good at something as a beginner, and then the moment I have to start showing progress I jump onto something new for that same instant gratification without having to try too hard, or worse, risk failing. However that’s an attitude I've been working hard on adjusting these past 3 years, and on this course, I can feel it starting to pay off. The great thing about being in second year now, is that I can start trying to improve upon my work, and seeing real progress. Learning new workflows, working on my fundamentals, fine tuning my time management and existing skills, it’s really satisfying and a huge achievement for me.

I've stopped comparing myself to others and I'm starting to have confidence in my own decisions. Now I can see multiple ways to do something and have the confidence to pick the way that I think is best, or that works best for me.

In game production this week we covered lighting, which of course is going to be very useful next week when my group starts lighting our TV room. I decided in this lesson that I want to learn more about being a technical artist. I’ll be honest, at the moment I don’t know much about it, but that’s what an action plan is for right?

We were also given a PBR task to do alongside our project, which is due in Monday. It's to use PBR to do 9 Material Spheres in Engine, and I don't know how, but I actually managed to get it done, alongside the project and desperately creating props for comic-con (which weirdly helped with unwrapping, I guess making patterns is a similar skill...).

In visual design we went over Bitmap to material which is an amazing piece of software, and has made my life a lot easier. Of course whilst the programme does a lot of stuff for you, that doesn't mean you can slack off. You have to edit the maps it spits out quite a bit, and of course make the textures your own. If you’re using CG textures (referenced of course) it’s probably going to be best to edit it in Photoshop first, (I like to mash up lots of textures and use layer modes to get the effect I want) before running it through Bitmap. This project I also want to try and use my own textures. It’s going to be tricky as I don’t have a good camera and all my assets are indoor ones, but I’ll do my best to work around the problem. (see action plan).

In Critical studies it was all about taking feedback and applying it to your work, so that by the time you get assessed you're not wondering why you haven't gotten the grade you want. I do want to start actively applying feedback to my work, but I won't say much more on it as I've already mentioned it in previous blog posts.

In the seminar we worked on group communication. This was very relevant to us as we've been dealing with absent members this week, as well as people who aren't on task or simply aren't acknowledging what is being said to them. I am finding it very frustrating trying to communicate with people about what needs to be done and having no response, whether positive or negative, at all.

The Project

Amazingly I'm on track. OK, so I’d like to be further ahead (I know I sound like a broken record right now, but one project I will start out ahead I swear) but overall I'm just getting stuff done. I realised I stress out a lot when I think along the lines of ‘I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO’ but if I just attack each part piece by piece it helps a lot. I focus on one task at a time, and I won’t worry about the next task until the one I’m working on is done. It really has helped.

Last week I lost communication with the group a bit as I got a bit lost in my own work, so this week I’m working on keeping in contact with them. We've set up a group drop box so everyone can drop their assets in there and we can start seeing how they look in engine (yes, we’re a bit behind there, but everyone has been using the Max white box so scaling shouldn't be too much of an issue). Lets hope anyway.

So anyway onto actually showing you what I've done this week.

Any textures used that are not my own have been taken from the following referenced site (and have been heavily modified and used on some of my models as permitted by the site):

Textures.com(2015)[Online] Available from: http://www.textures.com/ [Accessed: 19th Oct 2015-13th Nov 2015]

The Couch

I'll start with the couch as thats my first finished asset.

So I fixed the normal map for it and also applied a surface detail texture over the top of it to give it further definition.

I created the base leather texture for both the normal map and the albedo using leather textures off CG textures which I edited to make my own. I found two textures that looked right for my couch (you can't see the couch very clearly in the reference pictures, so I was told to go with what I thought looked best. I then stripped them of light information using high pass, and merged the two textures, using clone stamp to blend them together.

Here are the originals for the base:

Top Texture:

CGTextures, (2015), Leather0013 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0013/3167 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Bottom Texture:

CGTextures, (2015), Leather0113 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0113/107713 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Here's the new normal map:

I made the surface detail very subtle as it just didn't look right in engine when it was harsher.

I then proceeded to make my albedo for the couch, which involved grabbing information from these four textures to grunge it up a bit and give it some interesting surface and colour variation.:

Top Left: CGTextures, (2015), Leather0109 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0109/106582 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Top Right: CGTextures, (2015), Leather0069 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0069/15486 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Bottom Left: CGTextures, (2015), Leather0068 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0068/15485 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Bottom Right: CGTextures, (2015), Leather0067 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/leather0067/15484 [Accessed 24 October 15].

I also used a gradient map on my base texture to give it a nive variation in colour, as well as 'filter-render-clouds- and a few brush strokes to try and make the colour look as accurate as possible, and also to give it nice variation (wow, I really like the word variation today I guess).

It was tricky to get right as the couch in the still is very red and purple in colour and the one in the most well lit room looks more of a light orangey brown, so in the end I went for a nice middle-ground, that could be pushed back or popped out slightly by colour grading in engine.

I also couldn't see the feet so I decided to make them a dark metal as it fit the grungy look of the apartment quite well in my opinion. This I created by blocking out a base colour, mashing up a few metal textures, adding on some grunge and then passing it through bitmap to generate my other maps (which I edited in bitmap too of course.

Top Left: CGTextures, (2015), Grungemaps0136 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/grungemaps0136/45589 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Top Right: CGTextures, (2015), MetalScratches0079 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/metalscratches0079/113878 [Accessed 24 October 15].

Bottom: CGTextures, (2015), MetalBase0148 [ONLINE]. Available at:http://www.textures.com/download/metalbase0148/112551 [Accessed 24 October 15]

Essentially these textures were created using multiple base textures and lots of layer effects, filters, masks, clone stamps, etc etc. to make them look the way I wanted them too.

My couch roughness was made by turning my albedo to black and white, then again, grabbing various texture details from different textures (I even used some of the metal textures I used for the foot to grab out nice grungy looking details) and playing around with levels and curves to get the tightness of the highlights right (plus using brush strokes on it in areas with opacity to make stuff pop). I work a bit destructively (which again is something I need to work on, so a lot of layers have been merged in my final PSD file, which is a shame as I would have liked to have shown all my process in that. However that's something that can go on my action plan (keep a neater file structure in my Photoshop files).

Anyway here are the final textures for the couch:

And here is the final couch in Engine:

The Blanket

Now a big issue I had this week that set me back quite a bit was re-doing my blanket. I found so many problems on the normal map when I looked at it more carefully, that I realised I needed to redo it. The problem was I had moved my blanket around in Max, so the high Poly wouldn't bake over the low poly any-more. Plus as I mentioned last week I realised the low poly one was too low poly for my normal map to look right on it. So I z-re-meshed again, this time upping the target polygon count so it came out higher poly. This actually worked out quite well as I found that when I baked the normals it was a bit odd even with my relatively high detail low poly model, as there's a lot of information that doesn't look quite right without a good silhouette to sit on.

I then put it back into max and stripped out loops and faces like I did the first time, to reduce the tri count/

I had lots of weird problems with it initially though. When I first tried to export the new blanket from max (to bake it as an obj) it refused to do it. I tried deleting and re-loading, I tried pro-optimising the mesh, but none of it worked. So I went back into z-brush, dynameshed the model, re-exported from z-brush and re-imported into max, and this time it worked. I then had trouble with X-Normal recognising my high-poly model to bake.

I found that it wasn't being found when I imported it into max. So I re-exported the high-poly one from z-brush again, and made a new max scene with just my low and high poly blankets in it (as I figured max might be freaking out with too many tri's in the scene. I exported it from this scene and this time X-Normal found my model and everything was okay.

So it also meant I had to re-unwrap my model which was a bit tricky, as since there's more detail on the front of the blanket now I couldn't just use planar. In the end I used peel, and was shown a really useful way of having more control over my unwrap, by pinning verts in peel-mode I could move different sections of one island about with much finer control, so I could unwarp any slightly warped sections. Very useful.

So anyway here is the new low-poly model:

Here is the new unwrap:

And here is the blanket in marmoset with fresh, cleaned up normals applied:

Much better in my opinion

The cushion and pillow normals didn't really need much cleaning up done to them. However the Armchair did.

The Armchair

This was very difficult to clean up however I managed it in the end. In the end I simply re-imported my low-poly armchair into Z-brush and did the sculpt again, which meant the normals were much better.

Again the Armchair has been a bit confusing to blog about as I didn't track it's progress that clearly whilst working on it. Most of the changes to it I did in week 4 so thats where all my iterations for the armchair will be. (I keep having to back blog which is getting confusing, definitely something I'll try and avoid in future projects).

I did make another irritating error this week, where I took progress screenshots but not of the right stuff. So that's something I'll try and do better next week. Clearly it's going to take a little while for me to get good at this whole 'do it

as I go' thing.

The cushion and Pillows normal maps required very little fixing, so thank goodness for that at least.

And finally here is the PBR sphere project completed:

So Action Plan time.

Action Plan

Project wise I need to:

Finish Texturing all my assets
Start lighting the room
Make sure everything is in the room and start putting textures and materials into the engine file.
If I have time learn Marvellous designer (to create jacket on back of chair-stretch asset)
Take my own texture photos on Monday (rent out a DSLR from gateway house to do this)

I definitely want to make a Gant chart for the next project, as I just feel like our group hasn't been that organised. I've tried my best to stay on top of what everyone is doing, but perhaps if I'd timetabled out the project in more detail people might have found it easier to stay on task.

I also want to try and keep a neater file structure in my Photoshop files.

Finally we also updated the asset list as a group.

Here's the original Asset list: