Tuesday 6th December 2022:
The final week of term time, and my final planned sprint! As you can see from the Trello screenshot below, I had a fair number of tasks left to do for this week, albeit only a few textures, with the rest being related to lighting and my submission renders and cinematic.
I began by creating a simple material for the mural that is on the ceiling of my scene in Substance - this was a fairly simple case of the standard unique asset pipeline workflow, where I UVed the mural piece and quite quickly textured it in Substance, before implementing it into the scene. Finishing this left me with just the hero asset of the scene - the throne. After modelling the majority of the throne back in week 3 and 4, I had moved on to tackling trim and other textures, leaving my major asset in my backlog.
The first thing I needed to do was finish modelling my high poly for the throne - I was happy with most of it, except for the ravens that perch at the front of the throne. I began by going back into Zbrush and Zremeshing the lions that are at the back of the throne, as I was using a decimated model as my low poly for now. This was fairly simple, and allowed me to have a fairly low poly mesh with good topology flow to use as my low poly. The scaling was definitely off between Zbrush and Maya, but I decided it would be easier to keep the throne as 3 parts for texturing: the lions, the ravens, and the rest of the throne. This would make my life much easier for UV unwrapping and getting good resolution when using stencils to texture the throne later.
I began with the lions, as they had the simplest texturing to do. I UV unwrapped the low poly from Zbrush fairly simply, just focusing on on placing cuts in places I thought was sensible in order to get good texel density and made use of the 'Layout' function to preserve the size of the UV checker squares all across the model.
I then brought this model into Substance Painter and baked the low poly, and was able to get a good quality bake without changing too many settings or having to fiddle! After that, the actual texturing wasn't too complicated, as the main details for this part of the throne had been baked on and sculpted. I only textured one lion, of course, as the two lions are just exact copies of one another.
After working on this part of the model, I moved on to the arduous task of UV unwrapping the biggest section of the throne. I had to be careful as I wanted to make sure I maximised some of the UV shells that I knew would have stencils on them, so that the textures would be a better resolution in those places.
After around 3 hours of UV unwrapping everything carefully and doing a few test bakes in Painter to see where I had problems with overlapping shells, I was finally able to move onto texturing the bulk of the throne. I made sure to keep a reference of the values I used for my lions in a notepad, to make sure that the albedo, roughness and metallic values of the different parts of the throne would match exactly, and began blocking in the main colours in Substance Painter,
It was at this point I returned to Photoshop, to make more stencils for the throne, I had found the stencils to work well for the windows and was able to re-use part of that stencil here at the back of the throne, and wanted to use the same method for the other areas of the throne. Thankfully, I had some great close ups of the throne and its decals from several compositing clips that Rising Sun Pictures uploaded on YouTube (Rising Sun Pictures, 2020), and was able to use these to reliably create the decals I would need to continue texturing the throne.
Somehow, in all my haste to get on with texturing, I had managed to hide the part of the throne that joins the two lions together behind the chair, and only realised partway through this texturing process that I had forgotten to include it! Deciding it was not worth restarting all the texturing I had already done, I decided to just UV unwrap that small piece separately and texture it with the same basic gold material that I had covering all the other parts of the throne. Thankfully, this was quite quick to do as the piece I had missed didn't have any decals on. After this slightly embarrassing forgetfulness, I continued adding my stencils to the bulk of the throne. The two pages of stencils I ended up with look like this:
After this was done, the only section of the throne left to do were the pesky ravens that perch at the front. Before this though, I wanted to see how the throne was looking all together, and decided to take the bits that I had textured into my Unreal scene, just to check everything was looking okay, and also to make some lighting changes that had been suggested to me by my teachers.
As this throne took a lot of time, I decided to split it into two blog posts, so see the next post for the continued documentation of the throne.
References:
Rising Sun Pictures. 2020. Rising Sun Pictures ( RSP ) - Thor: Ragnarok - Palace VFX Breakdowns [showreel]. Available at: https://youtu.be/HW_a6OJyu8A [accessed 15th August 2022]
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