My Contributions!

Here's a Unity scene with all of the assets I worked on/created for the group project. I was head of Environment Design throughout the project. :)
I textured and UV mapped everything shown here.
Modelled the character's outfit, the background, the pod and the barrel.
Gabe modelled the other assets.



The project has been very difficult with only 3 members, but I'm happy with how the end result is looking and hopefully we'll be able to setup the game on time.

Texturing Gabe's Models

I'm very pleased with how the texturing went for these assets, I spent a short while sourcing different metal textures and looking at examples to improve on what I'd done previously. The UVs also worked extremely well, a few errors popped up while I was doing the mapping, but there is little to no distortion in every asset.
While looking at metal textures I found that lighting and reflections are what makes or break a metallic texture, unfortunately the Unity toon-shader doesn't support lighting or reflections of any kind. So I really wish I'd had time to change the method we used for the toon outline.

Really happy with how everything looks together.

Backgrounds

I made a few background planes & textured them, these will be sitting right at the back of the scene to fill up any empty space. Once again, this was before I'd received feedback on the textures for the Pod.

Cleaning Up Gabe's Models

Me & Gabe came to an agreement that he'd model a bunch of assets for the environment, then in turn I'd UV map and texture them. This worked out really well in the end, because there's a definite consistency to the style of everything.

I did have quite a bit of extra work to do on the models because there was a lot of unneeded topology and every piece of the mesh was a separate entity. This meant I had to combine the objects and then merge the vertices which was very tedious. In the end this came down to a misunderstanding between Gabe and myself, since he uses a different workflow to my own.


This is a small example of the kind of topology I was able to cleanup.

Barrel Model

We needed more models to fill up our scene, so here's my contribution!
I made this before I received feedback on the Pod's texture, so it uses the same stone looking texture.
If I had more time I would revisit the textures for this & the Pod, but that's not possible this far into the project. I would also have liked to swap the toon-shader we're  currently using with the Maya method, but again, there's not enough time remaining to change this.

Toon-Shaded Textures

Gabe exported the character rig & tested it in Unity, once the export was working properly I took a copy into my own project and tested the textures on it using the toon-shader.
I played around with the shader to adjust the thickness of the outline in different areas, and changed some of the shaders to toon-lit to make some of the darker textures stand out more. (Right picture is after the shader was adjusted on the holster and boots).

Character Texturing

The group hadn't yet completely decided on a colour scheme for the character so I tried to do a mix between the final concepts Gabe & I had produced. I was really happy with the jacket shirt & skin, but the pants were looking really dull. Jacob & Gabe also mentioned the boots were far too dark and the character was missing a belly button. We had a small discussion and tried a few different tests and ended up deciding to go with dark red pants, similar to my original concept.

These are the original textures I showed the group.

Here's an updated version of the textures.

I also updated the texture on the hands, but it was more so to fix a seam that had appeared so the difference was barely noticeable. Gabe wanted to texture the hair & eyes for the character since he'll be able to reuse those textures later on.

Platforms

I started working on the platforms for the game. They still need a little polishing, but for the time being the results are good enough. Unfortunately the toonshader in Unity does not support the use of Normal Maps, and it's too late in the project to make a change to this.

Texturing the Pod

Texturing the metal of the object was really simple because of how I'd UV mapped everything. All I needed to do was block in colour and trace the UV lines with black. I imported it into Unity and played with the toon shaders to get different results. I ended up altering the textures to work with the toonshader. The images at the bottom  are a comparison between with & without the toonshader in unity.

Synth Overlord Full Render

Gabe helped me set the lighting up for the shot, we've decided to render the Eye's glow in Maya as a separate layer. This will allow us to import it into After Effects and then alter it within the composition.

Importing Rhys' Normal Map & Rendering

Rhys sent me the normal map for the Mudbox work he'd done for the flesh. I was really worried this wouldn't work properly since I had already made a normal map for the same piece since the right arm is connected to the main body; however I was able to combine the 2 maps in Photoshop and it worked perfectly without any alterations.

This is the end result for the Bump-Map in Maya. Rhys made the normal map for the flesh whilst I made the normal maps for the armour.

Once I had that done I imported the model into a scene Gabe had made for me, set up with the lighting and camera for the turntable, smoothed the mesh then rendered it.

Normal Maps

I finished texturing everything in Mudbox. I didn't have too many problems, although one big issue I encountered was the mesh for the right arm/bicep wasn't working in Mudbox and no matter what I tried it wouldn't allow me to sculpt anything on it. This piece isn't overly important so I don't think it matters all that much if it doesn't have a bump map on it, if we need this doing then that piece will probably need to be remade in Maya.

Once I'd exported all of the textures as Normal Maps I took them into Photoshop and manually tidied them up with a soft brush. This made the texture look significantly better, before I'd fixed them there were really hard edges along the seams of the UV which made the texture look really messy.


The tidied Normal Maps in Maya with an updated texture.

Texturing Issues & Progress

This is the first time I've worked with the X-22 model since I'd created the hands for it. I had a lot of issues getting it to work in Mudbox correctly and even more issues with getting it to render. When I imported it into Mudbox I was greeted with several errors, the main two were an overlapping UV and a hidden n-gon which was preventing me from subdividing the mesh in Maya.


Luckily I was able to resolve these issues and began to work on the armour in Mudbox. I got a piece looking exactly how I was wanting it to, so I exported the Normal Map into Maya to see how it would look in there, and not surprisingly it looked disgusting.


I then looked up how to edit Normal Maps in Photoshop and managed to clean up the Map to a point where I'm happy with how it looks. Unfortunately the legs aren't UV mapped the same way so I will have to texture both of them individually.


Another issue I ran into was rendering using MentalRay as the Shader was missing from the material it was attributed to. I reapplied a material to the mesh and was able to quickly recreate the one Gabe had made previously.


Once I'd finally got all of that working I decided I'd do a test of a batch render to make sure I wouldn't run into any problems just before the deadline. I'm so glad I did this because the render wasn't working at all, it was only rendering out occlusion passes for some unknown reason.




After spending ages trying to find what the problem might be my friend suggested I look under the layers in the Maya file which is where I found all of these layers which Gabe had used to test a render earlier in the project. The reason none of the renders were working was because the normal render layer had been hidden in order for the occlusion renders to be used, which had most likely been forgotten about.
.

The render finally worked and the texture is looking good so I'm finally able to start the final texture in Mudbox.