Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll first be going through what we did during this week’s lecture, where we had to present one of the projects we’re currently working on for another module. I’ll then be talking about how I managed to learn the foundations of Substance Painter, highlighting what exactly I gained from the tutorial course. As mentioned in last week’s blog, my objectives were to complete the texturing for the 3D bird and spider model this week; however, I ran into multiple problems, causing me to take a detour and focus on fixing these problems this week instead. So throughout the rest of this week’s blog, I’ll be discussing the approach I took when fixing my 3D bird’s animation and UV map, explaining how I managed to solve these issues.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we had to pitch an informal presentation where we presented one of our projects from the Advance and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques module, showing our current progress. I used this opportunity to present one of my ideas, which related to the importance of mental health. I wanted the narrative to be shown through a male’s perspective as I believe men struggle to reach out for help when experiencing mental health problems – according to statistics. As this was a fresh idea, I didn’t have any practical work to present. Therefore, I spoke about the narrative of the animation, explaining its purpose and the ideation behind the ideas I wanted to implement. I also presented a storyboard of one of the scenes I wanted to create, helping my class and lecturers visualise my ideas. I also presented the current research I had in this subject, displaying the colour palette I plan to use and where my inspiration came from. I ended the presentation by listing my intended milestones, giving my audience a brief look at the many stages I’ll go through to complete this project.
Overall, my lecturers were happy with my project idea and mentioned it consisted of a powerful narrative and that it was great that it had a purpose behind it. However, one of my lecturers advised me to be aware and careful about how I approach this project because it’s a sensitive subject in many people’s eyes. Furthermore, he also advised me to be careful when differentiating how mental health has impacted each gender differently. In contrast, my other lecture gave me a few helpful tips relating to my presenting skills.
Learning how to use Substance Painter:
As I have never used Substance Painter before, I thought the best thing for me to do is go through a beginner’s tutorial, where I would learn how to navigate myself around the UI and see what features this software consists of. As an alternative, I could have used Maya to texture my 3D models as they weren’t required to look realistic; however, I was set on learning this software for future purposes.
Throughout the duration of this tutorial course, I learned how to apply realistic textures onto a 3D robot spider model, where I used various materials, brushes, decals, and many other features. Overall, this tutorial gave me a helpful introduction to navigating through the software. However, I knew I would forget much of what I had just learned from this tutorial course. Therefore, I decided to jump into Substance Painter, with my actual 3D object, to experiment and play around with it.
Fixing my 3D Bird’s Animation:
Before texturing my 3D object, I ran into several problems regarding my 3D bird’s animation. As I exported my animation out as an FBX, I noticed that my object squashed and stretched a lot as it moved. At the time, I had no idea why this was occurring.
As you can see in each playblast above, there seems to be much squash and stretch around the body and head area. After researching this fault, I realised it was regarding the Painted Skin Weights. It looked like my animated joints within my rig were over influencing certain areas of my object’s mesh. This was a feature that I’d never used before, meaning I had to browse through tutorials on how to use this feature.
I found this tutorial extremely useful as it demonstrated the common problems that could occur when animating joints breaking it down, so we know how to tackle this issue.
As you can see in the screenshot above, specific joints heavily influenced the body and the head of the bird, causing it to squash and stretch unnecessarily. Following the tutorial above, I decreased the value of my brush and painted over the heavily influenced areas. I went through all joints individually, ensuring each joint only affected the places I wanted them to.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the joints now have less influence on the bird’s body and head, meaning they won’t squash and stretch as much. As I’ve finally fixed the animation, I could now export my animated model out as an FBX file and import it into Substance Painter.
As you can see in the playblasts above, the influence has decreased significantly on the body and head area. My goal was to mainly minimise the head’s influence, as birds’ heads don’t move as much when flapping their wings. Whereas with the bird’s body, I chose to keep some influence in that area as it connects to the wings, meaning that the body still needs some influence kept whilst the bird flaps its wings.
Fixing My 3D Bird’s UV Layout:
As I imported my 3D bird into Substance Painter, I applied a few materials that could represent hair/fur onto my object; however, the textures seemed off to me once assigned. Again, this was another problem I had never encountered, as I was new to the software. Therefore, I conducted some research on how to approach this problem. As I applied materials onto my object, the same way as the guy did in the tutorial, I assumed it was related to the workflow between Maya and Substance. Therefore, I browsed through videos and went onto forums to find out what I must do before exporting my object from Maya and importing it into Substance Painter.
A few forums mentioned that the problem might be occurring due to the UV layout of the object. I have little experience when it comes to fixing UVs, meaning I had to browse for a tutorial to help refresh my memory.
This tutorial was perfect as it explained the importance of the UV layout when it comes to texturing, and it simply broke down step-by-step what I needed to do to achieve a correct UV layout.
However, before fixing my UVs, I had to create several materials for different sections of my bird. For instance, I made an aiStandardSurface shader for my bird’s wings, tail, body, head, and beak. I began by going into the UV Editor, deleting my current UV map, and creating a new one from the camera-based angle.
Using the cut tool, I then had to split these up within the UV Editor. To make this task easier for myself, I just went into my Top View and selected specific areas of the bird from their edges. After using the cut tool, I would move each body part away from the other within the UV editor to see if I split everything up correctly.
After correctly splitting up the body areas, I flattened them using the Unfold tool. This tool converted the 3D UV maps into 2D UV Maps.
Once I unfolded each body part, the last thing I did was position them correctly within that box, making sure nothing overlapped each other. Instead of moving each of them manually, I used the Layout tool, positioning the UVs in the most efficient layout.
Now that I’ve correctly fixed my Bird’s UV Map, my 3D model was ready to be imported into Substance Painter for texturing. However, I thought it would be best to clean up my 3D spider’s animation and fix its UV map before moving onto the texturing stage, familiarising myself with this process and not forgetting any essential steps.
Objectives for Next Week:
- Fix my 3D Spider’s Animation.
- Fix my 3D Spider’s UV Map.
- Start Texturing my 3D Bird Object.