Style matrix - project 3 - Final week and submission
- Jennifer Stevens
- Dec 6, 2015
- 4 min read
This week has truly been hectic. Ive been texturing every day from the moment I get in to when I leave. I would say it went pretty well but truthfully by Wednesday I was starting to panic. With a few major aspects of my level un-finished and the environment in general lacking a wow factor. The only thing I am sort of proud of was generating the normal maps in substance painter. Although I do feel they lack the height I really want and are more useful for subtle detailing such as carved tiles, scratches, dents and cracks, that kind of things. This is why I wanted to use Zbrush to raise the surface of the model. The whole idea was that Zbrush would save me time that I would have taken, tediously modelling the Aztec carvings detail.
Anyway with time and a lot of effort I did manage to get the temple looking at least looking a little more temple like mostly thanks to my repeatable assets namely my gold artefacts. I am incredibley disappointed that I didn’t finish 2 assets that could have really helped flesh out my throne room and made it feel more like and environment. Those two assets were the sculpted dragon head and the font. The dragon head I dropped because its base mesh I felt was too simplistic and I didn’t have the time remaining to texture it detailed enough that it would fit with the rest of the room. The font was also dropped for similar reasons. I envisioned taking the font into Zbrush and adding a huge amount of mark making detail creating a grainy and rough surface as well as adding cracks, chips and general rock aging traits. The smoothing groups were all set up to do this but as I came across the normal map rendering problem I knew the font couldn’t be saved.
After submission and my room was reviewed Im not going sugar coat it I felt defeated I really did. Marked as a third I felt my heart sink. It was the first project all over again with this one issue destroying my work. Ive never felt so upset and disappointed in myself. Here I am at the end of my 3 years at DMU with little problems defeating me. My work deserved so much more from me and I know I could achieve greater things than this. After having a mini melt down I have managed to pick myself back up again, which is a testament to my character I guess, and Ive started to look at my situation with new and more positive eyes.
The issue is really bothering me so I have reached out for help from tutors and I am aiming to sort out why this issue is happening to me, how to fix it and how to improve the projects that not knowing the answer to this issue, ruined.
Reviewing my Aztec project I feel I should make a note of improvements for the future. The single most disappointing element of my project for me personally is the roof. The roof is so wonky and doesn’t fit snuggly onto the walls at all. This caused so many issues when it came to lighting the room in engine with crevasses letting light seep in which I then had to botch together with bsp volumes to attempt to stop this. Learnt a valuable lesson there, get your model into engine as quickly as possible and test the lighting. I really don’t know why I didn’t get it into engine earlier to test it. The other reason I picked the roof was that the carved detailing. It is clearly the worst thing ever. Im partially to blame for this though. As I can see I rendered the uvw maps out at 1024 rather than increasing their size then compressing it when I was done. The roof is an asset that would have benefitted from being taken into zbrush and worked into. I also thing since the shapes were quite geometric I could have raised some basic form during 3DS max modelling stage, its not like I was short of tris or anything. Second thing that really lets the environment down is walls. They seem baron and bare. I could improve them by rendering them as larger sized sheets then perhaps mimicking so Aztec wall paintings however I know I overlapped the unwraps for the walls on top of each other so an exact same paint on each wall may look a bit strange.
Im pleased with some of the gold textures on my assets however looking back at my work I realise that some gold is glaringly too bright and really need toning down a bit such as the golden wall at the back and the room and the cylinder block tiles. I am pleased with the wall tiles that had raised detailing however looking back at them I realise I really could have worked into their diffuse colour a little more to improve their aged look with grunge and dirt.
Overall I feel that I could have done considerably better with this project. I had a vision and I failed it completely just like I did with the aviator project. My goals from here are to identify what it is that’s causing these terrible normal maps then go back and improve my two failed projects to a much higher standard.
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