Time Machine Project

Week 1: (Research and Basic Design)





When I began working on my Time Machine I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted a platform that transported the user through time rather then an object, so I was able to create a more large scale design which would use some form of energy to encompass the player and let them travel through time.

My initial design was exactly that, a type of platform the player could walk onto and interacts and have a 3-Dimensional of the entire piece. The basic idea was the poles on the platform would be some form of generator, with the two semi-circles going around and overhead would be some form of conductors. I realised however through making this number of problems arose. The first being I found the design to simplistic, even with using edge loops and smoothing the mesh, and adding random parts to the Time Machine the concept simply didn’t look right to me. I felt I had a decent idea, but no real was to work with it.

After brainstorming a few ideas I came up with a final one. After looking at versions of Time Machines online I really liked the design from such things as the over all shape from Stargate, the style of technology from Hellboy and the industrial uses of the Delorean from Back to the Future. However because of the basic similarities from the Stargate inspired main shape, I had to think outside the box and come up with my own original idea.

The main point of my Time Machine would to simply be that, a machine; I wanted to cut out any fantasy possibilities and wanted to try and look at a more of a scientific representation. Enjoying such things as industrial work and steampunk, I wanted to make a more industrial looking Time Machine, adding ideas like although it would be futuristic, maybe not being the cliché perfectly formed, smooth, chic Time Machine, but this would be done through texturing.

Week 2: (The New Build)

Once the main body of the Time Machine was done, I started to plan out how it would work. I wanted to make a Time Machine where the player would actually see how it worked, why it worked, etc. Although I wanted to stay away from fantasy, I incorporated some forms of science fiction as Time Machines are only theoretical, but this gave me a fair amount of leeway.

The basic idea is that inside the quarter-semicircle (Conductor) is a kind of smaller generator, which as the Conductor spins, would create energy of its own, to in turn would be transferred to the Receiver on top of the Reactor, which would go around getting faster and faster, eventually creating a portal. I wanted to think deeply into why the Time Machine worked as it gave me more and more ideas as to what would be needed in the design, rather then simply adding random parts to it that wouldn’t make sense.

To keep with my futuristic theme I wanted to add an opening in the Reactor showing the pipe, which would flicker with light until eventually glowing when it was ready and had enough power. I made this by extruding 2 of the faces offsets inward and then deleting the faces, to then connect them to each other on the inside. It was difficult finding the right angles to place certain things at but with a little help and math I was able to have everything uniform.

I continued adding parts, thinking how would these be useful for a Time Machine. I added switches would regulate power or activate different parts of the machine. I also added an odometer to measure power output and a dial to control power output. I really enjoyed looking deeply into the design and ideas, and thinking about the model from a more realistic point of view rather then simply saying “it’s a Time Machine because I said so.”

Another piece I added in was a way to turn the Time Machine on; to which I modelled a Frankenstein styled switch plate. I got the idea from watching the first ‘Hellboy’ film’s opening sequence with their version of a portal, and after being inspired by that I had to add one onto my model, not only fitting the overall look of the Time Machine but also being able to create one on Maya. This piece was properly the most fun to create as with all the intricate parts I found it to be a good experience to create this. I enjoyed being able to put a more detailed piece into such a large scale model, and could actually clearly show how it works.

Week 3: (High-poly model creating)

Once I added pylons of the Conductor and the Receiver, I began to create the high poly model. To do this I added edge loops so when the mesh was smoothed it wouldn’t collapse in on itself. To do this I used the connect function within Maya to create edge loops which would make the model smoother. I did this around all parts of the model which as I now knew how to do this more clearly it didn’t take to much time.

Reactor_(Low Poly and Smoothed) 

Generator and Conductors_(Low Poly and Smoothed) 

Rotor and Cap_(Low poly and Smoothed)

Control Tower and Supports_(Low Poly and Smoothed)

Odometer, Switches, Dials and Flip Switch_(Low Poly and Smoothed)

Entire Mesh_(Low Poly and Smoothed)

Once the edge looping process was finished I had to begin turning the model into a low-poly model. In hindsight I realised it would have taken less time by duplicating the low-poly model and then adding edge loops to the to save time, however this process can be done on projects in the future. To do this I simply duplicated the high-poly model and then deleted the edges and then the vertices of the high-poly model, until the Tri count went back to being under 10,000 Tri’s and being familiar with the process didn’t take much time.

After everything had had the edge loops removed and I had my high and low poly it was time to UV map my model. The process was fairly complicated as I was using a different method to get my UV my model to get the most efficient effect. As the only real method of UV mapping I had done prior was a full sized piece with minimal duplicated I had to find new ways to make a most effective UV map. 

For most of the parts of this were things I was fairly comfortable were things such as creating shells for specific faces, turning them into a UV island, scaling it and unfolding it; some parts such as the switches was much more difficult because of their size and detail.

Although some parts where more difficult then others I feel I finished the UV process with enough time to spare and kept to my schedule. As a lot of the model is cylindrical I had to unfold the islands as well, by that I mean doing the same process of creating the UV Islands, but then selecting an edge and cutting it to create a seam, and then unravelling the faces of the Island to create a more rectangular shape. Once everything had been UV mapped I scaled down the entire model so that the largest piece would fit, and manually began fitting in each UV Island corresponding with each component of the Time Machine, as this would make creating texture maps a lot easier later on. 

Once (I had to the best of my ability) lined up everything within the UV space, I began working on my cage. Unlike other projects where id use a cage to encompass my entire mesh. I did it on sections of the mesh to be able to capture all the detail. This method proved to be very beneficial as with pieces like the switches, or the any piece there was a duplicate of, once I had made a cage for one, I didn’t have to for any of the others, as although they may have differently placed UV Islands, they were exactly the same. Because of this when it came to baking I simply had to delete the duplicated switches and move the original one into the places of the duplicated, as the information will be captured without costing memory or my Tri count. However if I had knew this sooner I could have added a bit more to my model as I had a lower tri count by the end which could have been used for detail. Another issue would be that anything that was textured and had a duplicate, would be textured exactly the same as it has the exact UV’s, so this would have to be use moderately as if a model had to many duplicated a pattern would be seen quite visibly.

This process took a decent amount of time, as it was new to me as well as I was trying to work in a no destructive manner by using Maya’s layer system. Although I had previously used it before, I hadn’t used it on this scale and found thing out about Maya that would disrupt my work flow, such as if 2 meshes on the same layer are combined, they mesh will be put onto a ‘Layer 0’ which confused me for a decent amount of time. I feel that learning all this has helped me also as I now know this for the future and will be able to rectify mistakes much quicker from now on.

A lot of the time while making the model from start to finish I ran into numerous little mistakes that cost me time. For example the first time I had baked the entire separate piece for my mesh I had forgotten to harden all the edge, which cost me a lot of time having to re-bake everything. A lot of these were simple yet very tedious mistakes that if I had not done may have let me finish my model sooner. Once I had correctly baked all the individual maps correctly I loaded them all into Photoshop and ‘Shift’ moved them all onto the same page, and then filled the background with the colour RGB 128, 128, 255 to match the colour of the rest of the Normal Map. Id did this as well for the Ambient Occlusion map but this time I didn’t need to add any colour to the background.

 Week 4: (Primary Texturing)

I then began working on my Albedo, Roughness and Metallic maps. Going with my initial deign I wanted to create a steampunk styled time machine or something similar. I wanted the Time Machine to be futuristic, but also old and rushed, like it was built out of scraps and is barely functioning. I wanted my Time Machine to not have the cliché perfect edge and gloss but rather rust and to show clear signs of being mishandled, by having scratches, possible dents and chipped paint.

Old Albedo Map

I began on Photoshop using block colours to flesh out my model and using Marmoset Toolbag to see a live version of it to see what was working and what wasn’t. Although I was trying to use something other then pre-set textures that I used for my damaged pillar, and although I wanted to try and practice with this project, the model just didn’t seem to match a hand-painted look. I realised this halfway between finishing my Albedo and Metallic map, comparing my version of a hand painted model to such things as World of Warcraft and other examples of games which use this sort of method, I found that this way of working just didn't suit with the theme of my Time Machine. Whether this was because overall look of the model or I wasn’t adept enough in hand painting on Photoshop I decided to try a different route in order to finish my Albedo map.

Old Metallic Map

Emission Map

Looking back at my old Time Machine I feel there could have been potential, as the colours somewhat worked together as well I still needed to add my Roughness Map and build up the colour of the Albedo Maps. I feel I could have possibly done more to it however with time constraints I feel that I either would have spent to much time on it and fell behind or that I wouldn't have been happy with my final.

Old Version of Time Machine with Textures

Damaged Pillar Project

Week 1: (Sculpting Bones)

When first designing the base of my pillar I looked into many different types of pillars throughout history. At first I was planning to create a Greek styled pillar base to sculpt into on Z-brush. The pillar base was pretty simplistic and after looking at it from different angles I realised that I wanted to make a more complex unique pillar.

I began looking into different styles of pillars rather then the conventional “straight stone” type. My first designs where rather simplistic, and I wanted to push myself with the first 3D project where I could be a lot more open with my designs. I became interested in Native American styled totem poles and thought I could create one with my own ideas. I liked the idea of going back to one of my previous projects, which was my timepiece that used necromancy to work. I was really interested in not only creating my pillar but also using Z-Brush to create a more organic piece, which would not only improve my 3D modelling skills when it came to organic and inorganic shapes.


Originally I was planning to stack a number of skulls and bones in a totem style, however when looking into it I realised it would be more complicated then what I would be able to do with my level of skill and taking time management into account at the time. I wanted to skulls and bones to different from one another to give a sense of realism to the piece, however this was much harder to do and realising the amount of time I put into one skulls I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to multiple different ones.

I then researched a little on the destruction of Pompeii, how lava flowed and cooled and eventually found my idea. I was originally going to use the same base but after talking to lecturer Chris and Mark (Head of our course) I was told I would be able to create all of it in Z-brush as the mesh I was going to create would be predominantly organic in shape.

I began to sculpt my shapes using the various tools in found in Z-Brush. I used cylinders for the skulls and Z-Spheres for the bones. The skulls were especially hard to sculpt as because of the complex shape (as well as this being the first real time I had ever used this programme) it tool a lot of trial and error. I used multiple research material such as looking at skulls from various angles to see the depth and scale. I am very happy with how these turned out, and if I had more time I would have liked to work on the upper jaw some more, giving some more definition to where the teeth would connect. I am especially pleased with how the nose turned out as its shape is a lot more complex.

Once the skull was complete I moved onto making another bone for the pillar. At the time I made it I was fairly happy with it and also when onto make a skeletal hand, as my original idea was to have a skeletal arms holding skulls from the pillar, trying to escape a lava flow and an envision of my idea of Pompeii. Both the arms and the hand was made using Z-Spheres which gave me a lot more flexibility then using cylinders as I was before. As I hadn’t used reference for this and on reflection I could see a number of errors. 

My design at the time was to have the skulls and bones going around the pillar, similar to the Alien Café as a form of decoration, however looking back on the design I’m glad I didn’t stick with it as it seemed to simplistic. As I had put the effort into creating the skulls and bones I wanted to utilise them to more of an effect rather then copying and pasting them around a cylinder. On top of that I realised how much time it would take to UV map and re-topologies each piece, which I feel is a good use of time management and being able to estimate how much time I would need.

After a Critique with my class I was giving some more ideas and was told about how bones can look very wrong if not done correctly. Although I am nowhere near having the bones I create looking realistic I like to think that I am slowly getting closer to being able to create these comfortably.

Once I had found a suitable amount of reference material as well as looking into different bones of the body I decided to sculpt an Ulna and a Humerus bone. I choose these bones as while one was rather simplistic but more recognisable as a cliché bone, the other had a much more interesting shape, especially in the socket joint. I also noticed while sculpting them that although they took longer then the first bone, I was working much swiftly and more comfortably. Although only taking about an hour longer for each, I found myself becoming more used to how Z-brush worked. Once each everything was sculpted I once again used a cylinder as a base and started on the pillar to damage it.


Week 2: (Damage and Quad draw)

As before I looked into damage done by lava and how it forms/cools; I found it to have a very organic shape and tried to sculpt it into the pillar. Because of how the lava would move and act while hot, I had to take that into consideration, such as damage to skulls as well as thinking how the base of the pillar would look. It was difficult at first to work around using different Alpha’s and Brushes however after some time and comparing with others I was able to find different ways to create damage, mass and texture within my mesh.

While creating this mass and shape around the pillar I was able to incorporate the skulls as well exactly how I imagined them. The whole idea of my pillar came in 2 stages, firstly being some sort of cult had embedded the skulls into the pillar as a form of “decoration, warning”, which I was inspired from the design of the “Alien Café” (however mine being in less of a uniformed manner), and then the second stage being some sort of event caused the an eruption and the lava to move around create this mass of damage as well as solidifying the skulls into their slots.

I was very happy with the pillar at this point with how the damage looked and created a more organic piece. Once everything was done I saved the mesh as my high-poly model as well as exporting it as an FBX file for later. I then opened it up again as a new document and then decimated it to be able to load it into Maya. Once this process had been done a few times the tri count was low enough to export it into Maya so I could begin making my low-poly model.

Because of the complexity and how organic the overall shape of the pillar was, I had to use a tool within Maya called Quad-Draw. I first made the mesh live and then by using Quad-Draw I was able to effectively paint quad and tri polygons onto the mesh making the a medium to low-poly mesh. To do this I started off with a quad and kept adding vertices with the quad draw, liking them together and making more and more quads. This process was took an enormous amount of time to finish with the size and different levels of depth of my pillar. Creating the entire medium to low-poly mesh roughly look around 30 hours and looking back on it I feel I could have done more of a cleaner job, however being my first time using this tool within Maya I feel I did a fairly good job.

Week 3: (Retopolgy and UV Mapping)

Once the entire mesh had been created I moved onto a process called retopology. This is where you delete vertices and edges to lower the Tri count, making UV mapping easier and the mesh cleaner. This process didn’t take as long other then making sure there was no polygon with 5 or more sides, as this would cause trouble when baking the mesh. I feel I did this to the best of my ability, however after researching more on the subject of retopology, I found there was a much cleaner way to use the Quad-Draw tool to create faces by utilising the contours and working the quads in a more circular manner, creating a much more smoother mesh as meaning the UV mapping process would be much easier. Because I neglected to look into the topology of he skulls was very messy and made it difficult to work with, although I am happy with the final outcome looking back I could have spent more time focusing on detail rather then rushing to meet my time constraints.

Once the retoplogy process was gone and the tri count was under 10,000, I moved onto the UV mapping stage. To start I used the Automatic Unwrap feature in Maya to make it easier to see the polygons I was working with. I started on the Humerus bones by, selecting all the faces from where the bone met the pillar and the bottom of the skull, essentially giving me a cylindrical shape. Once selected I then Planar wrapped it, made its scale at 200, which compressed the Humerus’ mesh onto a flat plane. I then selected edges round the back of the bone where the player wouldn’t be able to see and created a seam, this would let me using the Unfold function cut the mesh and spread it out, like cutting a can length ways and then flatting it out into a rectangle. This process would give me much more room to place all the UV islands together inside the UV map as well as making it much more cleaner when it came to adding textures.

This process was used for the Humerus, Ulna and the pillar to create these rectangular UV islands. The UV map for the skulls was roughly the same with on difference, because using a seam creates a break within the UV’s and can make texturing clash against itself, I only made a small seam in the skulls, rather then cutting all the way down the skull. This still let me unfold the mesh, but not having to split up the UV’s down the centre and so letting my texturing seem more realistic, as this can be very noticeable in games. When everything was put into its own UV Island, we loaded in a script Chris had shown us to make all the UV edges hard to stop the texture bleeding into one another, and moved onto creating the cage.

The cage essentially traps all the information while baking the data of the high and low-poly meshes. The baking process takes all the information of the high-poly model such as depth, damage, cracks, or any other forms of detail, and captures it in a Normal Map. Once in a game engine the Normal map is used to project all the detail onto the low-poly mesh, without costing massive amounts of memory for the game.

To create the cage I first made use the meshes were in a certain order; firstly the low-poly model, then the medium-poly model ‘sitting’ on top of it, and then the cage. I first copied the low-poly model onto a new layer, changed the colour and transparency to see any breaks through the cage mesh, as if this happens data can be lost, and then used the transform tool to make the mesh slightly larger while still keeping on the same plane as the other meshes. Once this was done I selected the vertices and edges of the cage and moved them so the cage encompassed all the of the medium-poly mesh. Once the cage looked like it had covered all the medium-poly mesh (representing the high-poly mesh) I exported the low-poly and the cage meshes as FBX files.