For Week 6 I decided to focus on UV mapping and texturing. UV Mapping was a tedious task but fairly easy compared to how I found it when I was first introduced to UV mapping in study block 1. However. Mapping the UVs uncovered a lot of issues with my geometry and made me heavily regret abusing the bevel tool in the modular construction phase. What I estimated would be a short, easy task that I could do whilst watching YouTube turned into a long, gruelling task of going back and forth between the UV editor and 3D modelling toolkit, merging a lot of overlapping vertices to centre and using the weld tool to sort out problems.
I had to rework my geometry for the dormer windows twice. This caused me a massive headache, but I ultimately learnt a lot from this about what makes good geometry and how to not get into a situation like this again – the underlying cause of this was BEVEL TOOL once again, therefore I removed a lot of unnecessary edge loops. You may notice I also removed the window box – I felt as if it was too big and chunky, and the character of the building would benefit more from bigger windows. I also extracted the roof, window frame/trim and panes from the base of the window so I could apply my tiling brick texture to the base and tiling tiles to the roof.
There were some back and forths between substance painter and maya whilst I was texturing the window frame and trim, but I ended up with a more than satisfactory dark wooden texture, with the wood grain fibres running the correct way depending on how the wood would be cut and positioned in real life. I used tri-planar projection for all my substance painter textures because it hides any seams by blending together 3 planar maps of the mesh (Adobe, no date).
At this point it made sense to start importing my project into Unreal Engine 5 so I could start seeing what my textures looked like in engine as there’s a big difference between Substance Painter Iray view and Unreal engine viewport.
I export selected my shop and imported all the meshes into Unreal, ready to place my textures onto them. To start actually placing textures onto my model I had to export the suitable textures from Painter into Unreal and then create a material that complies the texture maps into one material. I quickly learnt that I didn’t need to export all the texture maps from Painter as there were some that weren’t needed all the time (emissive, metallic etc.). I also discovered the reimport button in Unreal which was useful for when I wanted to quickly update changes I had made to a texture.
I'm now going to go through a collection of changes I made whilst finalising my model in Maya.
I remodelled my guttering by extracting the face at the start of the gutter, using the insert edge loop tool with a fixed number, and extruding the edge loops. I also repositioned the gutter so it would catch water in a practical scenario.
I created a door to my shop rather than just having a blank space. I extracted the windowpanes from the main door so I could give them a window/glass texture, however the letterbox was left on as I could use masking in Painter to give it a metallic texture.
I also extruded the foundation level of the building to make it more apparent – I planned to add a different texture rather than the brick texture, so I also extracted it from the main base of the building.
During this time, I also added foliage to my model using a tutorial by FastTrack Tutorials on YouTube (FastTrack Tutorials, 2022) which talks through how to create ivy in Maya. This tutorial was extremely useful and helped me create multiple ivy branches within my scene, however since each ivy leaf is a face, my project started going rather slowly due to the amount of faces it had to render every time I moved the viewport, therefore I had to hide the ivy whenever I was moving the view or if I was making modelling changes.
For some reason, the ivy.tiff file that is meant to be set as the image file within the leaf shader wasn’t present on my home version of Maya, which was strange because it was on the Games Academy and Design Centre computers. I tried to troubleshoot online, but all I found was an unanswered forum question with my exact same problem (fATIMAANIMATION, 2020). Therefore, when I import my ivy leaves into Unreal, I will need to create a new texture for the ivy leaves.
In next week’s blog I will showcase my textured building in Unreal and talk through how I did it.
References
· Adobe (no date) Tri-planar projection - substance 3D painter, Tri-planar projection | Substance 3D Painter. Available at: https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/tri-planar-projection-180191954.html (Accessed: 1 March 2023).
· FastTrack Tutorials (2022) Creating simple ivy using only maya, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_kRG2gRPag&t=212s (Accessed: 1 March 2023).
· fATIMAANIMATION (2020) Paint effects .TIF files not opening, Autodesk Community. Available at: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-shading-lighting-and/paint-effects-tif-files-not-opening/td-p/9522803 (Accessed: 1 March 2023).
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