7 | All My Homies Prefer Maya To Zbrush (they dont)

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First order of business was the Railings.

I had a choice to make. Should I just unwrap them as curves? Or should I bake them onto a trim sheet/flat plane? Both options had pros and cons, with a reduced number of polygons meaning less stress on a computer but unwrapping a curve is generally okay due to the cylindrical, primative nature. In the end I decided to bake them to make the most out of optimisation, and to further familiarise myself with the workflow.

I created a plane that would cover the dimensions of the railings and imported it into substance painter and baked the railings to create the normal map. Adding opacity was achieved by changing the template to one with an alpha channel and adding in an opacity mask.

I made the iron material on the crate model from last semester, it has begun to become my default object to create materials on after experiencing resolution errors last semester that I was unable to fix. The crate, I am sure, will display these materials properly and accurately.  

My railings looked like this in the end :D

The process was repeated for the different plane/railing size combinations until they were all successfully baked and textured.

Every time I feel like maybe, just maybe, I’m done modelling the base of the house I find something that needs either amending or building from scratch. This time it was amending the roof.

I had just re-glanced over my references for the roof, and I noticed 2 things, the first was that all of them had upturned corners where a plane meets another, and the second was that the plane was not a flat one. These roofs tended to dip in the plane, creating this concave curve running along the lower edge.

The first problem was swiftly modelled and had its UV shells corrected.

The second problem would dealt with through a lattice deformer later. Going over my building with lattice deformers has been on the list for a while and you know what, it can stay there for a bit longer :D

It was also high time I made a trim sheet. I have 2 planned, one for features such as windows and doors, and the other for actual trim. I created the latter first.

We are working with 2k textures, so I created a plane in Maya that was 4m^2 in total, meaning 512x512px/m^2. This I split into rectangles based on which trim textures I would be creating, extracted the faces, and extruded shape into them.

excuse my spelling

Once the rough shapes were in, I added edge loops to even out the geometry into squares in preparation for further dividing in Zbrush.

Zbrush has a wonderful feature called polygroups, which allows me to work on separate parts of meshes at a time, hiding the rest. I separated each of the bricks into their own polygroups and worked on them 1 at a time.

Bringing work from Maya to Zbrush is a common workflow for asset creation, allowing for an otherwise geometric base to feel more sculpted and organic. The sculpting nature of Zbrush and brushes such as Trim Dynamic allowed me to create bevelled edges which feel unique and natural, and the use of alphas to add noise and texture is something that one could not do in Maya.

I want these textures to tile, this involves them having to line up at each end. Within the curves brush settings, Zbrush contains a feature called ‘Wrapping’, and by enabling this the brush stroke will indeed wrap around back to the opposite edge of the model. In theory my textures will line up correctly as they tile.

The next step was to take these into substance painter and bake them, akin to the railings.

This part was more problematic.

Tiling is a key part of trim textures, and I needed to check all the maps were going to line up with each other when tiled, so I brought as many of the sculpts into Maya as I could – crashing it several times. (One of them never actually managed to import itself, even after I left it for over 10 minutes) Once in Maya, I was able to duplicate them and transpose them to the left and right, lining them up with the area that will be baked.

There were gaps where the mesh had shrunk during subdivisions and those had to be filled or the textures would also have those gaps. This was fixed by slightly overlapping the textures by .05 of a cm.

Turns out, all of that work was for naut because that last subtool wouldn’t import.

In the end I just took it all back into Z-brush and did it over, the drawback here is that those overlaps are imprecise and less seamless than those from Maya. Hopefully this will not show as it tiles – which I will check after I have baked them in Substance Painter.

Baked!

Looking at these normal maps, they feel very high contrast, and may possibly not convey texture as well as I would have liked – the solution here is to take them back to Zbrush and sculpt further, adding more planes that don’t directly face the front, and adjusting the distances between some of the planes which may be creating a lot of contrast.

Now is time for texture! I already have one of the textures, the iron that I created for my railings, and I find creating textures really fun, so I’ll map this one right now :D

Let me just draaaag this over the plane aaaand.

What

No texture? Red lines? Error message?

Damn, maybe I forgot to UV it, I’ll just jump back into Maya and unwrap it quickly. Oh? Looks like I didn’t forget, well I’ll re-unwrap it just to be sure…

Still error???

Who knows what that’s about, for sure not me. I shall deal with that later.

Me and Fork are getting along better now, I feel like I understand the GitHub process which will undoubtedly be imperative for future group work. Unreal Engine is also coming around, having now imported a few materials, and set them up in-engine along with updating the block-out railings to the new textured planes.

We have a 1st lighting pass due soon so I added some soft, warm glow emitting from the windows and doors which I will expand on once I have placed the lanterns.

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REFERENCES

User “PixelMasher”. (2019) Creating Trim Sheets 4 Part Tutorial - Polygon Academy [online] Available at: https://polycount.com/discussion/214726/creating-trim-sheets-4-part-tutorial-polygon-academy Polycount

IMGFLIP. (2019) Whatcha Got There? Template [online image] Available at: https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/164065279/Whatcha-Got-There. Imgflip LLC