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.
Week 4:(Baking and Textuing)
I opened the baking program called XNormal, and loaded in the meshes into each section of the program. I made sure all the setting were correct such as setting the resolution to 2048 (which will be needed for texturing) and then ran the program. I used this method to create my Normal Map, which shows all the detail and my Ambient Occlusion, which creates depth within the game engine.
Once this was all done I took a screenshot of my of my UV map back in Maya and loaded it into Photoshop. From there I was able to find some texture which I liked and used Photoshop to create my Albedo and Roughness Map, which are used to create colour and texture on the model. I found it much easier then before with texturing the barrels as I had much more practice since then and knew what I was doing. I used a bone texture I found on the Internet and then used a vector mask to put the lave/rock texture over the bone texture where the UV Island for the pillar would be. I did it this way as the pillar only being on piece, it was easier to do it this way rather then adding individual bone textures for each of the other pieces.
Once this was all done I opened up a new document within Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) and loaded in my low-poly mesh as an FBX file and created a new material. I added all my different Maps and then loaded it onto the pillar and took a screenshot within UE4. I also done the same in Marmoset Toolbag as a comparison as well as to simply have another picture of my work in a different programme.
I was very happy how the pillar came out in the end. I was able to able to see all the detail of the high-poly mesh combining with the rock texture. The bones looked realistic with the occlusion map creating shadow and depth. I was shocked to see something I designed and create come to life UE4, and inspired me to want to push myself further and create more.
Looking back at my work I feel I should have spent more time on the topology and retopology, but this is in hindsight and I’m happy with the design and outcome. I was hopping to also add some realistic glow in the eyes of the skulls however with time constraints this may have been possible but I would have fallen behind on other work, however this only being a spur of the moment idea I’m not entirely unhappy I wasn’t able to add these in. I can see how the lava looks like its eroded and bubbled up into areas on the pillar, and even though this would be a centre piece in a game, I feel like in the right lighting and setting this can achieve the reaction I’d want within a game, which is to create a unnatural atmosphere and give the player a sense of tension.
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