Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll discuss the last few bits of changes I’ve made to my work before submitting it, starting with the approach I took when creating the textures for my 3D spider model. I’ll then be discussing the problems I experienced when attempting to assign the materials I created in Substance Painter to the 3D models in Maya, covering what exactly caused the problem and how I went about solving the issue. Afterwards, I’ll be giving my thoughts on my final rendered animations, talking about what I did well and what I could improve on. I’ll also be displaying a short playthrough of our completed game, highlighting all features and work that each group member contributed to the project. Next, I’ll be giving you an overall summary of this project, expressing my thoughts on how it was like to work on this project with the team members that I had. During the conclusion, I’ll also be self-evaluating my contribution to the project, outlining what I learned, what I could have done better, and what I would have done if I had additional time. Lastly, I’ll be displaying a showreel, portraying a montage of each group member’s work, showing the progression over the past few weeks.
Texturing my 3D Spider:
Texturing my 3D spider model was easier now that I was more familiar with the Substance Painter software. I used the same process when texturing my 3D model bird, starting with setting up my project and baking each of my texture layers.
For the spider’s body, I used the same downloaded hair material I used for the bird as it was necessary for the spider’s skin. I wasn’t sure which texture would be best for the spider’s fangs because I haven’t got much knowledge about spiders’ fangs. Therefore, I experimented with multiple materials and strictly focused on what looked best. However, if I had additional time to complete the texturing, I would have conducted some research into the appearance of spiders’ fangs.
As each segment of the spider’s body now had a material applied to it, I was now ready to paint the spider’s skin. However, I needed a specific appearance to work towards. Therefore I browsed for spiders online to use as inspiration. I ended up choosing a Black Widow spider as my reference image.
Following the same approach as I took last time, I added a fill layer on top of both hair/fabric materials, forming the foundation colour for my spider. I used the Eye Dropper Tool to select the black colour within the reference image and applied it to all fill layers to achieve an accurate representation.
Now that I had set the foundation colour for each texture set, I needed to find a suitable brush to paint over my spider’s skin. Again, due to the lack of familiarisation I had with this software, I experimented with several types of brushes until I found one that provided the right looks. I resulted in using the Charcoal Strong brush.
Before painting over the 3D spider, I turned on the Y-axis symmetry, making sure I painted each side equally.
Now that I completed the texturing for my spider, I exported my textures out as PNGs, ready to assign them to my 3D spider model in Maya. I was satisfied with the overall look of the texture as it appeared similar to the Black Widow spider found within the reference image.
Problem When Assigning Textures To My 3D Bird:
When assigning the textures, I created in Substance Painter to my 3D bird in Maya, I ran into a problem that caused a severe setback, especially with the submission deadline around the corner. Before the problem, I followed a tutorial that taught me the correct workflow when exporting textures from Substance Painter into Maya, ensuring I did everything correctly. However, I experienced a problem where the textures weren’t sticking onto my 3D bird object as it animates.
After spending several hours online trying to figure out a solution to this problem, I still couldn’t resolve this issue. Therefore, I contacted my lecturer and explained to him the occurring issues. He went through my Maya file and created a backup save file so he could play around with my animation, trying to outline what was causing the problem. My lecturer eventually found out what was causing the textures not to hold their position whilst animating. It turned out that I had to unbind my object and rig firstly and bind them together again, this time with the textures assigned to my object. The original problem occurred because I assigned the textures after I bounded my object and rig together, meaning the textures were left out.
From experiencing this problem, I learned the correct workflow in modelling, texturing, rigging, and animating. Even though unbinding and binding my object and rig together managed to solve this problem, I had to reuse the Paint Skin Weights tool again as my 3D bird began to squash and stretch throughout the animation again. After changing the amount of influence that each joint had on the object’s mesh, I made a playblast of my animation with the textures assigned to it.
Overall, I wasn’t delighted with the final version of my bird animation as I believed I could have produced a version where the animation and texturing were more polished if I didn’t experience the setbacks that I did. I noticed that the outcome didn’t look like the texture I created in Substance Painter. I don’t know what factors are involved in this, but as I continue working with Substance Painter and Maya, I’ll eventually figure out why the textures appear different in each software. However, I couldn’t invest more time into this animation anymore as I had to move on applying the textures to my 3D spider object.
Final Renders:
I believe there’s room for improvement for this bird animation, mainly texturing. I experienced many novelties throughout the process of creating this bird animation. For instance, I built my first rig and textured my first model in Substance Painter. Even though I didn’t achieve the results that I initially set out for myself, I learned so many new skills and tools across both software, which I’ll further develop in future projects.
This animation was my favourite out of the two as it resulted closer to the look I wanted, compared to the bird animation. I am most proud of the animation as It appears precisely how an actual spider would walk. I found it difficult at first, animating eight legs simultaneously. However, I eventually managed to achieve the look I wanted whilst picking up new skills.
“To Bee” Game Playthrough:
Conclusion:
Overall, I believe our project resulted in a massive success as we managed to complete the game within the deadline. The chemistry between all group members was terrific as we all maintained excellent communication with each other throughout this project. I was glad to see my group members’ optimism for this project, consistently pitching new features that we could implement into the game and discussing how we could further develop our work. But overall, I was most proud that everyone tackled something new, creating novelties for themselves. We could have decided to choose a project that would have been a lot easier for ourselves; however, we chose not to be complacent and agreed on a project that would be a milestone for all of us.
In terms of my contribution to the project, I believe I contributed a good portion of work and ideation. My organisation and time management weren’t too bad, even though I was polishing up my designs so close to the deadline. I believe if I didn’t experience as many problems as I did, I would have had all my tasks completed earlier. However, this project has taught me to leave additional time in the end for corrections to compensate for the setbacks I face. In my earlier blog post, I mentioned that I would attempt to complete all tasks around week 8, leaving two weeks for me to polish my work. However, I underestimated how complex these tasks would be, especially regarding texturing. This was my first time texturing using Substance Painter, meaning there was a high chance of me running into unexpected problems. If I had additional time, I would have modelled extra details onto the Bird and Spider, for instance, eyes. But to conclude, I’m heavily satisfied with the work that myself and my team put into this project.