Game Scene Blog 6 - Texturing

This week I've added the base colors to all of the objects for my game scene. I was in the process of testing some Substance materials / smart materials for some of my objects to see what I could come up with, however nothing looked quite right. The assets are more stylized and painterly in StarCraft so I'm wondering how I will compromise between the original assets and ones realistically achievable in Substance. Perhaps I will use Photoshop in order to get the more intricate designs done. I'm not sure how much we are allowed to do in Photoshop actually.

With the base colors complete, I will be adding more complex details by next week.

 

Game Scene Blog 5 - Normal Baking + Texturing

I've moved to Substance Painter now to begin making the texture maps. Right now I am working on baking the normal maps for all of the objects. I've been messing with the poly count of the low and high poly in order for there to be less critical seams in the normal maps. Because of the amount of tris in my low poly, some of the normal maps baked with obvious distortion so I had to go back and either up the poly count on the low poly or reduce in the high poly. Now that I'm done with the normal map baking, I will be moving on to texturing. By next update I want all of the objects to have basic textures. Once all of the objects have their base colors in order, I will start adding more detail in the texture.

FireHouse Final

This is my final FireHouse modular model. In total it reaches 21k tris and 13k verts, most of it going towards the rounded trims on the building. I spent most of my time with the building's multitude of trims. I had difficulty with the corners until I discovered a technique where you can alter the rotate options to Step Snap at 45 degrees, which I applied to the vertices, and then duplicate it over to the other side to form a corner. This allowed me to make more precise corners with minimal touch-up, which was nice! Texturing in Substance was a lot easier when I utilized materials. It's a super powerful way to crank out appealing textures.

Here is the link to my FireHouse in Sketchfab:

FireHouse by Kristen Malone on Sketchfab

Game Scene Blog 4 - Modeling + UVing

I'm done with modeling and UVing! I've also made the high poly of each object for normal map baking except for the mineral (when I attempted to do Mesh > Smooth it becomes majorly contorted, I'm guessing due to the points and triangles. Because the mineral has hard edges anyway, I decided not make a high poly of it). The assimilator and gateway definitely took me longer to model than everything else because they're such weird, unnatural shapes, but I've got it as accurate as I could. Now that I'm done with the Maya portion, my next step is to go into Substance and begin texturing!

The final tri count is as follows:
Nexus: 2968 tris and 1659 verts
Forge: 1644 tris and 918 verts
Gateway: 1496 tris and 912 verts
Minerals: 172 tris and 108 verts
Pylon: 734 tris and 377 verts
Assimilator: 1572 tris and 878 verts

Fire House Progress 1

For this project we are modeling a modular version of the building from Ghostbusters.

So far I have the modular wall pieces measured, UVed and put together to create the base building. I also have all of the types of trims the building will have created. The next step will be to UV the trim, create corners (using the multi-cut tool and making edge loops at a 45 degree angle), and piece them together onto the modular building. Once everything has been completely modeled and set up, I will move on to texturing the pieces in Substance Painter.

Building reference

Trim pieces

Building with modular pieces