Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be covering the topics we went over during this week’s lecture. As mentioned in last week’s blog post, I’ll then be going through how I fixed my 3D spider’s animation. Afterwards, I’ll be demostrating how I managed to fix my 3D spider’s UV map, where I used the same approach I did for my 3D bird’s UV map last week. I’ll next be talking about the last-minute change I made to the “Press Any Button To Start” animation, where I had to change the appearance of the text as it blended too much with the 3D environment background. I’ll finally be talking you through the process I took when texturing my 3D bird object in Substance Painter, outlining the difficulties I faced during the process. Lastly, I’ll be listing the final objectives I’ve set myself to complete by the submission’s deadline.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we went through our submission guidelines as it was the last time we all would see each other before we had to submit our work. This lecture was treated as an excellent opportunity to ask our lecturer for any help regarding our projects as he was offering one to one support with everyone. I took this opportunity to ask my lecturer for assistance when applying a texture to my 3D animated bird, which I’ll further discuss later on in the blog. By the end of the lecture, I resolved the problem I had with the help of my lecturer.
Fixing 3D Spider’s Animation:
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I wanted to fix my 3D spider’s animation before moving onto the texturing stage. The problem with this animation was that it overly wobbled in certain areas, similar to how my bird squashed and stretched as it moved. Now that I already knew the solution to this problem, this stage wouldn’t be too difficult as I was well acquainted with the Paint Skin Weights tool.
As you can see in the playblasts above, the back of the spider’s body moves drastically from left to right as the legs are moving. This already appears unrealistic as spiders’ bodies don’t move with that much significant movement. Ideally, I would want the back of the spider’s body to move very little in all directions, as it would also appear unrealistic if it were to be completely still throughout the animation. Therefore, I went back into Maya and used the Paint Skin Weights tool to see what joints were over influencing the back of the body.
From using the Paint Skin Weights tool, I noticed that the two back legs of the spider were responsible for rocking the back of the body from left to right. I pinpointed the exact joints and painted over the spider’s body. However, as I still wanted minimum movement, I didn’t decrease the value of the brush to 0 and instead reduced it to 0.0500, allowing slight movement.
As you can see in the screenshots above, the spider’s body now consists of very little influence from the two back legs joints, meaning it will no longer drastically rock from left to right throughout the animation.
As I completely fixed the animation now, all I have left is to texture the model; however, I will need to clean up the spider’s UV map before exporting my object into Substance Painter.
Fixing 3D Spider’s UV:
Cleaning up the 3D spider’s UV map wouldn’t take me as long as it did to clean up my 3D bird’s UV map, as I was now fully aware of how to fix this issue. I repeated the steps, beginning with creating an aiStandardSurface shader for my spider’s legs, back, head, and fangs. Afterwards, I went into the UV Editor, deleted my current UV Map, and created a new one from the camera-based angle.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the UVs were already overlapping, meaning there would be problems when texturing.
Now that I had a new UV map, I next had to split up the UV map using the cut tool, so each of the body parts was separated. I used the same method as I did last time, went into my Top View perspective, and selected specific areas of the spider from their edges, moving them manually away from each other within the UV editor to see if I split everything up correctly.
Once I split everything up correctly, I flattened each body part using the Unfold tool, converting the 3D UV maps into 2D UV maps.
After unfolding each body part, I had to position them efficiently within the squared bracket using the Layout tool, making sure no UVs overlapped each other.
Now that I’ve cleaned up my spider’s UV map, I was set to export my 3D spider model and import it into Substance Painter to begin texturing.
Changes to “Press Any Button To Start” Animation:
Before I moved on to texturing the models, I was fortunate enough to see a quick preview of the title sequence I animated when implemented into the game.
Overall, I was happy with how everything looked when brought together; however, whilst watching, I was struggling to read the “Press Any Button To Start” text as it blended into the background too much. I was set on changing this as I didn’t want our audience to have trouble visualising anything within the game, especially as we created the game to be aesthetically satisfying. Therefore, I asked the game designers if I could quickly change the text by adding a black stroke to it, helping it stand out from the background. They agreed with my reason for the changes and said it wouldn’t take them long to replace the current text with the new one I wanted to make, meaning I was all good to make those changes. Therefore, I opened my animation back into After Effects.
To apply the stroke, I had to select the text layer and go into the character panel, changing the text from having no stroke colour to having a black stroke. I chose the colour black as the stroke’s colour as it would help the text stand out from the vibrant background, and it was already part of the game’s colour palette.
This minor change to the text was needed to help the text stand out from the background. I then rendered the animation out as a PNG sequence and sent it over to the game designers to implement into the game.
Texturing 3D Bird Model:
As I began texturing my 3D bird, I needed to find an excellent material to use as the foundation for the bird’s skin. I needed something related to hair/fur as it was a bird. As I wasn’t familiar with the materials in Substance Painter, I browsed online for hair/fur materials to use. I managed to find a website called Substance Share, which allowed me to download textures and materials for free.
After downloading the material I wanted, I restarted Substance Painter and imported my 3D bird into a new project. I began by baking each of my texture set layers and setting up my project.
Afterwards, I browsed through the library for the material I downloaded from Substance Share and applied it to all texture sets besides the bird’s beak. I chose to use a Wood material for the bird’s beak, as they’re relatively hard and solid and don’t emit much reflection.
Once I assigned a foundation material to each texture set, I now needed to paint my current bird to look like an actual bird. Therefore, I browsed online for reference images to use as inspiration.
To get my 3D bird to appear like the bird within my reference image, I first had to apply a fill layer on top of my hair material for each texture. The fill layers allowed me to change the colour of the hair material according to the colours found within the reference image. For instance, the body’s fill layer colour was changed to white, whereas I changed the beak’s fill colour to yellow. I used the Eye Dropper Tool for colour selection to match the bird’s colours in the reference image.
Once I selected all the fill layer colours and assigned them to the bird, I needed to find the right type of brush to paint over the bird’s skin. Again, as I wasn’t familiar with the types of brushes, I experimented to see what would work best. I ended up using the Cotton brush as I felt I could create some good fades with it.
Before I started painting over the bird, I turned on the Y-axis symmetry, allowing me to paint the object faster as I only needed to paint one side now, whilst the other side just mimicked my painting.
Now that my bird’s texture was complete, I had to export my textures out as PNGs. Overall, I was proud of the texture I created as it looked relatively similar to the bird from the reference image, as well as it being my first time texturing (without following a tutorial).
Objectives For Next Week:
- Texture my 3D spider model in Substance Painter.
- Apply my textures to my objects in Maya to see if everything is correct, before sending them over to the Game Designers.