Week Four – Texture

How did I move forward?

Last week I did Z-brush and model changes/preparation to be added to Z-brush. However due to having my tutor look at my model I decided to shift to adding wood textures before bringing it to Z-brush to add that 3D wood texture to the model as well.

What did I do this week?

I learnt Substance Painter and all its capabilities, however on the days I had off I researched/ watched videos on how to create your own texture and add it onto shape in Maya. I had already known how to add a new material in Maya however I wanted to create my own texture image first. To do this I decided to try taking an image sample from one of the old devices in my old device mood-board. In this mood-board I decided on the chair as it was the only one with a clear flat photo of the wood texture that I could use in my own model. I took the image sample into Photoshop to edit the photo to fit the UV editor square. However when doing this I tried to load it into the material to only show black.

This was an issue I didn’t know at the time how to fix. So I looked up how to fix a texture that won’t show up in Maya. In the end I found out, with using the original photo without photoshop, that when I did layout on all of the models UV shells it shrunk them to a really small size so all of the image it perceived was black. So in order to change this I resized each of the UV shells of all the models shapes. I had manually rotated some of the shapes so the texture was looking the right way up and lining up grains so it was seamless on the actual model. A time consuming step but proved very helpful in the future when adding the textures back after Z-brush.

Changes in the story/model

At the end of this week all I changed was some of the UV unwraps as well as preparing the model for Z-brush (Such as using clean-up). Another part I changed/improved was labelling the components/grouping them all to one group in the end.

Overall critique on my workflow/work output this week

Substance Painter by far was one of the more difficult programs to use due to how many parts it had to make textures show up on models, so that part of the week took most of my time to process and learn. However even with learning a new program in two lessons I was able to figure out how to add my own materials to my model and problem solve how to get it to appear the way I want it to. I am proud of my outcome so far, although it was different from what I envisioned in the start it has evolved to become a model I stand by quality wise and is a representation of my best 3D abilities at the time.