Monday 14th November 2022:
The next piece of trim that I wanted to focus on was the pillars. This was a crucial trim sheet for me to do, as it makes up a very large part of my scene and I was really looking forward to seeing how it looked once all the pillars had a texture on. I began with planning again, of course. As this is a more complex sheet than my marble stairs, I wanted to label some of my references to work out how much space I would need to dedicate to each section of the pillar. I counted 5 areas needed for the one sheet, and also realised I may be able to use the leftover space on the sheet to cover my wall pieces as well, which use very similar textures and designs to some of the parts of the pillar. I did also find a trim sheet for this pillar online, by a student that had worked in a team to recreate this scene (Keohane, 2021), which I looked at as a potential layout idea, although I decided to try and better maximise the texture space I would have by making my own layout in Photoshop.
I started the process in a similar manner to last time, laying out my trim sections in Photoshop to scale, before applying it to a 4m by 4m plane in Maya and adding in edge cuts as usual, making sure to duplicate my low poly plane before cutting it up and getting ready to export it to Zbrush. I knew that this time around, most of the texture work would be created in Zbrush, so created as many extrusions that would help me as possible in Maya, although there wasn't much to do before exporting it to Zbrush.
I began work on the trim sheet, starting with some of the more difficult areas, like the large panel that is very visible around the base of the pillar. I sculpted these details largely with the Clay build up brush, as well as Dam Standard. While I tried to match my references as best as possible, the panels are not exactly the same as the film, because even my best references were blurry with some of the small details, although I did my best to try and find closeups like the panel that I found online before in a prop website, (2) Other parts of the trim sheet were quite easy, and I was able to use Alphas on my brushes to add some simple scratches to roughen up some of the materials that will be largely coloured stone in the final texture.
After adding some more details, I decided to do a test bake from Zbrush to Substance Painter, to see what settings I would likely need and to check the details were transferring with enough quality. Initially when I did this the ID maps were not baking properly, so I thought about instead creating a texture map in Zbrush, by converting my polygroups to polypaint and using this. However, I found that I thankfully didn't need to do this, as when I exported my final plane and baked it onto my low poly in Substance Painter, the ID map baked just fine this time. A relief and a concern at the same time, as I am not sure what I changed between the two versions of the high poly, except for more sculpting! After testing that the readily available materials applied to the UV shells in Painter, I was able to begin texturing.
The texturing took a long time to do, mainly as I had to use a tablet to paint out the areas I wanted to be gold for the decorative elements. The other elements were quite quick and easy to make, mainly just being different variations of coloured stone. After this, I exported my maps and added my albedo into Maya, to do my UV unwrapping. I wasn't completely satisfied with how the UV unwrapping turned out and thought that it was quite obvious for some parts of the pillar where the pattern repeats, but decided to persevere and bring the material into Unreal anyway.
For my first 'proper' trim sheet, where the entire thing was sculpted and slowly textured, I am fairly happy with how it looks and how much of a difference it makes to the scene - it definitely adds a lot of details that were previously missing within the scene. I would ideally like to go back and tweak it, perhaps just redoing some of the UVs and spending some more time carefully positioning them to make the most of the details I sculpted, but for now, I am quite happy with how it pulls the whole scene together.
I think once I have the nice reflective floor texture in, everything will have the chance to reflect nicely and by using some more careful lighting, I will be able to create a glossy and regal effect, which I am excited to see come together slowly over the next few weeks.
References:
KEOHANE, Aine. 2021. 'Thor Ragnarok: The Asgardian Throne Room' [Artstation post] Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ykVRPK [accessed 14th November 2022]
YOURPROPS.COM 2004. 'Thor Ragnarok, Asgard throne room wall panel' YourProps [online]. Available at: https://www.yourprops.com/Asgard-throne-room-wall-panel-original-set-dressing-pieces-Thor-Ragnarok-YP822938.html [accessed 11th August 2022]
MOVIE-SCREENCAPS.COM 2013. 'Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [4K]' (18.04.17) Movie-Screencaps [online]. Available at: https://movie-screencaps.com [accessed 10th August 2022]
Comentarios