More Drawings

More 2D artwork. Most of these were done using Photoshop CC 2018's new brushes and tools, taking me away from Corel Painter again. I especially love the brush smoothing setting; it was one of the Painters biggest advantages over Photoshop to me.

Update

久しぶりですね。

Working at AO.com in Manchester has been a great step forward for me, and some of the best days of my life so far. I'm independent from my family now, living with my best friend in Manchester, and doing what I love: 3D graphics!

I've had little free time to truly undertake my usual projects, though its not stopped me drawing as of late. I have picked at my Bell 407 helicopter project in 3Ds Max every now and then, but haven't made any serious progress as of yet. I do however plan to change this in the near future!

Here are some 2D bits I have been working on:

Suga - BTS

Photoshop CC

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Photoshop CC

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Photoshop CC

Not so happy with this piece, so it never really reached completion.

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Photoshop CC

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Corel Painter 2017, Photoshop CC

Life Up In The Air

So I've been quiet recently due to big life-changing events taking place. I have a new job as a 3D Artist at AO, which has required me to relocate my life to the big city of Manchester! I'll be house-sharing for a while until my friend is ready to move up here too, and then we'll get an apartment together. Until then, I'm in a strange grey area of my life, hoping everything turns out well!

Substance Designer - Learning The Next Generation of Texture Methodology

I have started to pick up Substance Designer recently, discovering its awesome power of procedural texture generation. The idea is that it can create textures from scratch without any need for external texture files, and it can make pretty complex patterns if you know how. I'm still learning, and have a way to go yet, but I'm building a clear picture of how it works it seems.

This is a tiled floor texture, complete with Albedo, Normal, Roughness, and Metalness maps. The texture is entirely procedural generated, with no external image files being used of any kind.

Here is it's creation graph:

The brilliant advantage of this is the ability to create textures that have infinite iteration possibilities, all at the push of a slider or two; or indeed however many you set up. For example, you could make a pristine metal wall, and use a set of sliders that dynamically age it with weathering and rust as required. From here, you could make an entire texture set that shows an environment ageing over time, without any real extra effort taken to paint the texture up.

I will soon incorporate this method into the Gas Station scene, probably only to the extent of texturing something like the floor, but I'll see how it goes.

Gas Station - Texture Update

During further development of the Gas Station scene I have corrected most of the issues with the normal maps by using cages when baking. Apparently if you use hard edges on the low-poly model, only baking normal maps with cages will produce nice results in xNormal.

The texturing is 99% done in Substance Painter, with some Photoshop involved in areas where it made more sense to use it.

I plan to use Substance Designer in this scene as well, which I will start to properly learn soon.

Gas Station Update

This is just a quick update on the Gas Station project. I may add a roof and some more items, but otherwise, the main part of it is done. I have fully modelled the high-res meshes and the low-res meshed now, and xNormal has created normal maps from each of them. The results can be seen below.

On closer inspection however, you can see that the normal maps are far from finished, and this is the main part of conducting this project; to learn how to correctly bake normal maps on hard-surface models.

You can clearly see in this surface that there is a black line striking through the normal map where it should look smooth like the high-res version.

This error is all over the model in different areas, though not everywhere in what appears to be the same situation, so I am looking into this.

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Update:

http://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

This covers everything I needed to know. :)

Gas Station Random Project

Recently I have been working on a Gas Station. Didn't really plan to do this, but it's already pretty far on in development. Here are some screen shots:

The model is built in high-res with the aim of its surface data being baked down to a low-res game mesh for the final scene. With the gas pump and some items around it being finished, I have already started to construct the low res geometry, which the last image shows.

Also, just a random update on the helicopter model from my previous post; this model is still being made, and has progressed a bit from where it is shown there, but not by enough for me to bother posting any news on it yet I don't think. I also have an urge to make a kitchen scene for some nice interior design renders, but I probably shouldn't start a 3rd project on the side....

Karma Akabane - 3D Print Material Possibly Chosen

So after doing some research, I think I will go with the company 'Shapeways' to produce my model of Karma Akabane from Assassination Classroom. It sounds like I will use this plastic in the end too, opting to print the model in smaller separate parts, and then paint them using spray paint base colours.

Shapeways Material 'Strong & Flexible Plastic'

The model is currently at the stage of creating the joints to bind the model together, however in doing so, it seems the high-res sculpt information may not work so well anymore in the end. This is due to the meshes being significantly different now, and so the re-projection will get a lot more things wrong and messed up. Essentially, the model should have been built this way from stage 1. Whether or not this proves too much work to be worth the end result at this stage is yet to be seen. I'm still in the stage of just getting the model set up, and I'll see what ZBrush says later on when the meshes are brought back in. 

I'm sure it will do that silly scaling bug it loves to do so much, and I'll never even get the meshes to go over one another again...

Karma Akabane - Final 3D Sculpt

Today I finished the first stage of sculpting Karma. This was then decimated using Decimation Master in ZBrush, then brought back into Maya for retopology. I soon figured that I could just speed most of this process up using ZRemesher in ZBrush, and bringing those models in too, which worked well for the most part. Then things stared to go wrong.

The final retopology would need to be built in a way that came apart, with the joints all modelled internally ready for 3D printing. This was already proving to be a lot of trouble to make properly, especially from a high res mesh. Then getting the original mesh to re-project its details onto the new geometry in ZBrush also didn't appear to be going as smoothly as I had hoped either. 

The upshot is that there is now a full, high resolution sculpt of Karma, all posed and set for good renders, but not suitable for 3D printing.

The downside is trying to figure out an efficient way of creating his internal structure while maintaining all of his sculpt information, and have every piece of the final mesh completely 'water-tight'. It can be done, but it looks like one hell of a lot more work than first anticipated, mostly probably down to the way I created him in the first place, which is unfortunate. If I continue down this path, it may mean having to re-sculpt a lot of his from scratch again.

For now, I will fight on to see where this goes. Until then, I at least have a perfectly renderable character, which could be basically coloured with some ease too.

Karma Akabane 3D Model Update

Today I have the model of Karma Akabane complete, and fully rigged (or as much as its going to be for this). He also has one of the 'Koro Sensei' killing knives, and a re-purposed Glock handgun as a pellet gun, of course filled with 'anti-Koro Sensei' bullets. I'm not sure if both of these items will be used, or just one or the other, if any at all. However, I know that the knife at least can be quickly retopologised to a much lower res version, and given to the previous 'Nagisa Shiota' project.

His hair, while done, will most likely undergo a lot of alterations once its in ZBrush.

Next is the most important part of the entire project: posing. I guess it might take a few attempts to get a good pose down, and I may do some preliminary 2D work to figure some ideas out first too.

This figure is designed to fit in with his friends from 'Assassination Classroom' that already have models, such as Nagisa Shiota below. I was upset that Karma doesn't seem to have his own version, so that is the reason for making him.

The base of this figurine was copied and built to measurements in Maya for Karma.