Wednesday 21st September 2022:
I began to blockout my assets in detail with the pillars, one of the main major assets of the build, and one of the assets that repeated the most times. I wanted to make sure these were as accurate as possible, so ended up using some of the fight scene references (Movie-Screencaps.com, 2017) where Hella lifts Thor against a pillar. I used this reference and some other photos of the pillars to work out roughly how tall Thor is against the pillar. These references are helpful to see where the geometry needs to be extruded, but will also be helpful later when making trim sheets.
I used these estimations to create a basic pillar blockout, making sure it was scaled correctly the the blockout primitive and the Scaleman, and then used the Replace Objects tool in Maya to replace all the blockout primitives with the new pillars. After deciding that this looked okay, I then began to work on the stairs and the torches on each side of the hallway, adding them into the blockout once they were finished.
I then continued to work on creating my assets for the blockout. In some cases, I was creating a low poly version of the asset, as I will take certain assets, like the torches and the chairs into Zbrush in order to create a high poly version, which I will either bake or retopologise, depending on the asset.
I also started at this point to work on the most time-consuming asset, the throne. I made a specific reference board for the throne itself, with as many angles as I could find. As this will be the asset that your eyes will immediately be drawn to, I wanted to make sure I dedicated time to it to make it as polished as possible.
This is my first progress image. As you can see, I started with the least curved pieces before moving on to the more complex forms. I regularly went through and checked for n-gons as well, as I figured this level of detail could easily result in n-gons, so I made sure most parts of the throne were separate to make it easier to sort through and refine them. I will make sure to combine most of the throne before texturing but prefer to work with it in several parts for now.
To make the fine details at the back of the throne, I used NURBS curves using a drawing tablet. I imported a reference onto a plane in Maya, and used the front view and a drawing tablet to create the same patterns that are visible at the back of the throne. I converted these to sweep mesh, but found that this made them very high poly, and also didn't close the edges of the cylinders. I fixed this manually, moved the piece into place and duplicated it so the throne details looked the same, before using Maya's Reduce function to reduce the polycount.
I then started working on the most complex parts of the throne, the two large lion heads and Odin's ravens. I started by making a low poly version of Odin's ravens in Maya and a low poly version of the lions too (visible below).
This bit was definitely the most complex section of the throne as a whole, and a bit I definitely wanted to get correct, as this would bring the whole asset together. I started by remodeling the blockout of the two lions using cylinders to try and replicate the smoother surface seen in my references.
I then imported the lionhead blockout into Zbrush and began adding the head details, as well as the marks on the rest of the body. Below is an initial progress image, before adding the main body details that wrap around the sculpt.
Upon finishing these details, I used Zbrush's Decimation Master plugin to reduce the polycount of the lion head to just under 20k polys, so I didn't lose too much detail, and then brought it into Maya to see how the whole thing looked together. Overall, I was pretty pleased with the outcome, although I still need to look at the ravens again and see what I can do to make them look a bit cleaner. I also brought the throne into Unreal to check for any glaring mesh errors and made a basic gold texture.
I was not sure what the easiest method of preserving this sculpted detail in the final build was. I considered using the decimated model, as Unreal can handle it fairly easily, but the topology flow of the lions wouldn't be very good. I tried using Maya's automatic retopology feature, but this proved ineffective, no matter how much I fiddled with settings. After speaking to one of my lecturers, I concluded the easiest method would be remeshing the model in Zbrush as low as possible and then baking it in Substance Painter. At this point, I had been working on the throne for a good couple of weeks, so decided that I should focus on finishing the other assets for texturing purposes and to come back to the throne when I was happy with my progress in other areas.
Next, I focused on the grate wall piece which I also struggled a bit with. I thought I could use the same NURBs to polys method I used on part of the throne, which worked, but even when reduced, each grate piece consisted of a massive amount of polys, just under 100k per piece - and I was going to have 6 of them. I tried putting them into Unreal as a full scene anyway, and it looked okay, but I wasn't fully satisfied with the look and definitely not with the polycount of the scene as a whole now. I chose to speak to my lecturers again and get their opinion, and they told me about one of Unreal's newest features that I could use, Nanite. From what I can tell, it is basically a new and more intelligent way of rendering static meshes, and allows for a much higher polycount of an overall scene, without having to worry about polycount and resulting lag. My lecturers showed me how to make sure Nanite was enabled upon reimporting my assets, which I did for the grate pieces.
Due to the volume of assets that needed to be made, this process of modelling took several weeks and will be broken down into several posts for that same reason.
References:
MOVIE-SCREENCAPS.COM 2013. 'Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [4K]' (18.04.17) Movie-Screencaps [online]. Available at: https://movie-screencaps.com [accessed 10th August 2022]
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