Finishing the Beelzepub

Monday was a glorious day! Why? Because I finally finished re-topologizing the dogs head! This took weeks to complete which is why for the fountain skull I didn’t bother re-topolgising by hand but after it was suggested to me by my mentor and seeing what a dramatic poly count difference it can make I understand the importance of this process. The dog’s skull when from being 31,346 poly decimated model to 8,256 poly model with virtually no quality loss and as I am aiming to have three of the heads in the level that would have been 94,038 polys just on the dogs head! Way to high. With the new topology models it’s going to talk just under 25,000 polys. Great result.

Showing these heads to Craig my adviser he suggested making a taxidermy esc plaque to mount the heads onto before placing them on the wall of the Cerberus gateway. This looks much better than them awkwardly floating by their craniums.

Moving on from this I continued with the goal of completing the texturing on the Beelzepub. Having started the horn last week I continued with that first adding normal, roughness and metalness maps to the sheet to bring the horn more to life. This allowed me to add more contour and ridges to the horn mimicking that of a ram with a mix of beige, browns and dirt colours to make it seem weathered and worn adding minimal gleam to it to avoid the glaring over shiny properties while still mimicking the properties of keratin found in nails, horns and hair. Pretty happy with the horn I moved on to the other 3 texture sheets which I had already added colour to but none of the additional maps.

A particular highlight for me was applying the pub tankard graphic I created 2 weeks prior to the modelled sign however I repeatedly had problems as I had laid the UVS out back to front and miss aligned and all other manor or wrong! What resulted was such a mixed up back to front sign. To fix this rather than try and adjust the art work to fit whatever god forsaken order I chose to lay the UVs out in, I decided just to go back into my unwrap and replace them properly. This fixed the back to front wrong way round issue but now I had miss-matching wooden boards which I needed to repaint which was both tedious and time consuming. Lesson learnt to check the graphic matches up correctly before painting in the wood work.

I had a lot of fun painting in signage for various elements in the level including the menu for the Beelzebub and the signs for Alastors Armoury. Creating pun drinks names was particularly fun and I could certainly go for a Sin and Tonic right now!