1 Hour tilling texture study. I'm not good with tilling grass texture so I'll be doing them the most.

More work done on the bag for finals.

Did a color study for an hour today. Would like to spend 2 hours next time but yeah, today was a long day.

Long day, didn't get to do as much art as I would like. Just going to dump some work I've been doing for school. There are also some Unity stuff that I might upload after finals if I figure it out.

The finals that I'm working on.

Also the texture sheet for the sci-fi floor which I am going to fix up after reading PhilipK tutorials. I only realized that I was wasting a lot of UV space after I started texturing because it was a pain trying to fix the normal map problem in UDK. Next time I should double check before baking the Normals.

I might need to take a week break from personal projects until finals are over and since the folks are leaving soon I have to spend more time with them.

Finished the lamp. It's around 400 tris, 512 Diffuse/Spec/Normal and rendered in Marmoset. Total time is around 4 Hours. I didn't get to work much on the light bulb area and it still looks quite jagged at some area. I also think 256maps or even less would have been sufficient considering how small this prop would have been in-game. I'm going to keep making these type of small props every weekend and the goal is to make more complicated ones once I'm faster.

Going to call this done and move on. I don't want to spend too much time on one project especially if I'm getting stuck so often. I need a lot more practice in photo-source texturing and getting the realistic look.

On a side note I'm also going to start doing daily studies from now on in order to improve my skills and speed. Saturday and Sunday are when I'm going to try to make and finish a small prop. Each studies will be around 1.5 to 2 hours long. Right now I'm making a lamp on my desk. Going to fix up the normal map problem tomorrow. I also think that I need to add a bit more geo for my low-poly so it doesn't look so edgy at some area.

More progress~ I'm having a difficult time with photo-source texturing. It's definitely out of my comfort zone and it's hard to get it to look right. Going to finish up tomorrow.

Finally fixed that nasty seam running down the middle of the mesh. That happens when you have mirrored Normal and UDK just flips out. Apparently there are workarounds for it but after trying several times it simply didn't do the trick for me. So I decided to just UVed and bake the Normal on a full tile floor instead of only half and mirroring it. I was also told that I could have design the floor so it would have a natural seams in the middle where you mirrored the geometry. Maybe next time I'll just do that since that will give more texture resolution for the floor. Now that I have finally finish fighting with most of the tech problem (hopefully all) I'll get to the texturing process.

Should have posted these up earlier. Here are the low + hi poly as well as the main images I use as references for the floor.

After doing some more testing I think the problem might just be that I didn't model the high poly correctly and resulting in weird artifacts showing up in UDK right now. To make matters worse I already smooth the high-poly without any back-up so now I might have to go back and remodel a lot of it. Gah bad work ethic is bad. So right now I'm going to go back and redo the high-poly the rebake everything. I'm also going to learn how to do a proper light map so it doesn't look odd in UDK as well. Going to have to change my goal up to finishing this by this weekend since Finals for school are starting so I won't have as much time to work on this.

I finished modelling the high-poly. Also baked the Normal,AO map and exported it into UDK. Getting some small errors with the Normal map that I'll just fix inside Photoshop. I'm also getting what I am assuming are light map errors. Not sure what they are but it's not looking good right now. Going to have to do some research and figure it out before moving on to texturing.

Started on my next project. I'm doing a sci-fi floor and porting it in UDK. The low poly is done and UVed. I'm doing the high-poly next. The goal is to finish this whole thing up by next week Wednesday or so.

Ok going to call this done now! Mess around with the settings in Marmoset to see how it would look like under different lighting. Might go back to it this weekend to see if I can make some small changes or not. But for now I'm going to move on to the next learning project.

 There are a few things that I learn throughout this project besides just the art side of things:

* I'm slow, it took me 3 weeks to do this and a professional would finish within hours. Definitely going to set stricter deadlines for myself and push to meet them in order to get faster. Obviously quality still comes first.

*Quite a few of the details sculpted in Zbrush didn't really show up in the Normal Map because I made them too light or too small to notice. I should learn to make bigger changes and look at things as a whole instead of being afraid and work in a small area for a long time.

*Taking 3 hours to to figure that Maya AO Map transfer doesn't work were a waste of time. I should have move on to xNormal or another program within the hour already. I shouldn't be set on using one program to do something but instead learn others in order to not waste time during the technical side of the project.

Overall this was a great learning experience and I'm looking forward to the next one!~

The Game Developer Meetup was awesome! Would definitely go again next time. Also textured the chest as well. Going to polish it up tomorrow and make the spec map for it.

Phewwwwwwwwwww. Finish UVing and baked down the Normal as well as AO map. Normal map wasn't quite as hard this time but the AO map... After about 3 hours of trying to transfer AO map from High to Low in Maya I figured out that it doesn't actually work!#@$% So I had to use Xnormal and bake separate AO maps. One for the chest, one for the straps and one for the lock because they were causing weird shadow errors when it was just one mesh. Well at least that's done I can get on to texturing wooooooo!!~ Going to try to finish that by tomorrow if possible but I'm also going to a Game Developer Meetup so maybe only finish by Wednesday =/

 

So I woke up this morning still not knowing what to do for the bake. Open up Maya and tried to test bake just to see and... it worked....I'm not sure if I should be angry or happy because I didn't change a single thing since last night. This is a test bake on 2048 Map. Anyway now to move to UVing and texturing. Since I will be helping the folks today I won't have too much time for art so I'll set the goal of finishing the this up by Tuesday or Wednesday latest.

Now I know why people are so happy when they get a good Normal Map Bake. Because it's literally impossible. . . Been trying the whole day and I'm still getting a lot of shading errors. I think I need to fix up the topology again in order to get a good bake.

Finished up sculpting the chest! Added the lock and bolts. I also went back to the metal parts and fix them up a bit. My mentor mention that I was setting the bar too low and looking back now I realize that I'm taking WAY too long for this project. Definitely going to try and get a few more hours of work done per day. I'm also going to start setting some realistic goals to force myself to focus and speed up the work process while not sacrificing quality. With that said the goal for this weekend is to retopo and bake everything. Hopefully starting on the texture as well on Sunday.

Started sculpting the leather straps and lock area of the chest. Going to try and finish sculpting everything by this weekend. Then it's retopo and texture time!~

Finish fixing up the metal parts. I'll probably have to visit it again later but for now I have to move on with the rest of the sculpt first. Also from taking the screenshots I realize I have one direction cut in the middle of both my front and back wood parts. Going to change that up after.

Finish up the rest of the wood parts. Started going back to the metal parts as well. Seems like I need to so some more research on that in order to sculpt it right. Just can't seem to get the feel of metal for this sculpt right now.

Sculpted more of the wood part. Going to try and finish up the rest of it by tomorrow. Then fix up the metal part before moving on to the rest.

Happy July 4th! Holy crap am I behind with my schedule for this project. After 2 days of struggling with the wood it still came out quite muddy. I also deform the old mesh way too much to work on it so I decided to simply re-do the whole wood section. At least now I understand the process and it came out a lot better than before. Never thought I would spend so much time trying to sculpt wood. Definitely a learning experience.

Following my friend's advice on the wood being too clayey I went back and fix up half of them so far. This time going much more slower and trying to get it to look right. Still not totally happy yet so going to spend some more time looking at references and refining them. I feel like it's much harder working off one plane to make multiple wood planks. I think the better approach would be to create individual blocks for each of them and then sculpt them.

Finished sculpting the other half of the wood parts. Going to go back and fix up the metal pieces first before continuing on with the rest of the chest. No school on 4th of July too so I can probably do more personal art then!