Colouring and Texturing

Using the newly-made UV Maps (which I had now taken a snapshot of), colour and detail can be applied in the form of Normal Maps and Diffuse Maps. Diffuse Maps are used to define a surface's colour, while Normal Maps are for showing bumps and dents using fake lighting, which saves extra polygons from being used.

Here, I coloured over the UV snapshot in Photoshop. I had to go over the UV lines just to make sure that there weren't any seams in the texturing. All seemed to work fine with this basic colouring, so I could easily move onto the texturing phase in Mudbox. 

When the model is exported to Mudbox, all off the edges would be automatically smoothed out when it is subdivided. This can be prevented on all the edges you want kept hard with Maya's Crease tool. The Crease tool is an easy to use and very helpful item which requires little effort to get right. All that needs to be done is select the edges that you'd like to remain hard during exportation, and ramp up the Creasing value. This must be done on a duplicate version of the model, however, as the un-creased version is still going to be the model used for the final product.

Creased edges are shown with a thicker blue line.


Now that the edges were creased, I could save it as an Object (.OBJ) file and Import it into Mudbox. Once in Mudbox, I created new layers which would hold the High Poly detail, while keeping the Low Poly mesh on another layer. This allowed me to easily select which mesh I needed when creating the Normal Maps after sculpting was complete.

To Normal Map, I simply selected the Maps toolbar, followed by Texture Extract. This allowed me to choose from a variety of options but, in this case, all I needed was the Normal Map selection. Once in the Normal Map options, I set up the preferences to how I need them and create the Normal Map. Unfortunately, since my Normal Maps came out badly when everything was selected at once, I had to map everything one object at a time and put the map together afterwards.

Now, applying the Normal Map to the original Maya mesh was where it started to go wrong. After I applied it as a Bump Map to coloured texture, The model looked...dirty. There were black splashes and strange bumps where they shouldn't have been. I tried for so long to fix this, but whatever I tried came out with the same result every time. In the end I could not figure out what was causing it, so this is how it ended up looking unfortunately:

I was very happy with how the Mudbox model turned out, it was exaclty as I'd envisioned it. It's a crying shame that I couldn't fix the normal mapping, though. I would have loved for the texturing and colouring to fir together seamlessly. Still, I'm very happy with what I've accomplished through this project, and definitely hope I can apply what I've learned to more projects in the future. It feels great to see something you never thought you could do and be so proud of it and, looking at my Mudbox model, I think I've got that feeling right now.

I also forgot to copy the plinth over in these screenshots. That's not good.

UV Mapping

UV Mapping is the process of taking a 3D object and creating a 2D representation of it, so that it can be painted on with precise detail. It is the laying out of an objects polygons so that an even texture is present, making sure  no distortion occurs when painting is required. Distortion can be seen if you apply a chequered texture to the model, and the aim is to lay out the UVs so these checkers become perfectly even. It can most easily be described using the 'open box' analogy, where UV Mapping is essentially like 'unfolding' the object until it is flattened out:

As you can see, each part of the box can be easily identified and visualised as if it were going to be put back together. 

When UV Mapping more complex shapes like those featured in my door, different methods of projecting the different faces of the objects are required:

Planar Mapping: Projecting all faces of selected object that are visible to selected projection axis.

In other words, if you choose to project using the Z-Axis, only faces facing along that direction will be mapped onto the UV Texture Editor. In this case that is the front or back of the box. If it were the X-Axis, it would be the left or right sides, and the Y-Axis would represent the top and bottom. This is the most widely used form of mapping, as it covers most basic shapes easily.

Cylindrical Mapping: Creates a cylindrical projected around the selected faces.

This kind of mapping is perfect for shapes primarily made of cylinders (obviously) when the rounded parts need to be mapped. Though it might sound as easy as clicking a button and it's done, it's not. I ran into a problem with this method, but managed to fix it swiftly and easily:

As shown above, the projection has laid the UVs out in a very non-workable way (circled in red). The solution to this was even more simple than I could have imagined...

On the object itself, you can click one of the boxes situated on the manipulator to bring up more options for you manoeuvring tools. One of these is a red handle (circled in green), which controls the orientation of the UVs for the selected object. If you click that, you can free move and rotate the UVs. In this case, we need to rotate the UVs until they are in a perfectly straight line (in line with the darker purple). When it's straightened up, cylindrical mapping is complete!

The idea now is to carry on unfolding the rest of my model using these projection methods.

Here, you can see the unfolding UVs of the right plinths base, stick and ball. The base UVs were created using planar mapping on all each axis, then sewing the UV edges together to create the 'unfolded box' effect. The stick was accomplished using the technique outlined above and, since the ball is an unaltered polygonal shape, had a perfect set of UVs already applied to it.

Here we have the UVs for the whole object unfolded and ready to be packed. UVs must be packed into a positive space (essentially the top-right section of the editor graph) for them to be applied to the 3D model correctly.

Here, the UVs were all packed into the right space, though they weren't making use of the entire space available. The bigger UVs are within the grid, the more pixels are allocated to them, therefore the more detail can be applied to them. I wanted the main biscuit and Happy Faces to be the most detailed parts, so I made them bigger than the rest.

Here are my final set of UVs, making the most of the space as I see fit. The UVs of the plinth base are red (overlapping) because I'll have a left and right plinth which will be using the same set of UVs for its texturing/colouring.

I actually found UV Mapping an absolute nightmare at first, but as soon as I'd started to understand it, the process seemed to fly by. I actually had a lot of fun with this part of the project! Now I can begin with the colouring and texturing!

The Modelling Process

So now I had an idea of what I wanted to create, I could start creating the mesh in Maya. Using the cleaner image I made as an image plane, I could essentially 'trace' it when creating and manipulating polygons. There are many tools in Maya at my disposal to help me create the perfect shapes needed for my vision (shown below) but I mainly used 2 of the below tools and other options available in the top toolbars:

Maya's Polygonal Toolset

Split Polygon Tool: Select a point on an edge to start cutting the face.

This tool is used if you have a face on your mesh that requires a new edge within it to enable further manipulation of said face. This also comes in handy when making sure your mesh has no 5+-sided faces or triangles.

Extrude Tool: Extrude the selected component.

The Extrude tool is used for elevating select faces from their original points of origin and creating raised portions within your model.

Bevel Tool: Round off the selected edge(s).

Bevelling is an excellent tool which gives edges a more realistic feel. If you were to look at any edge in the world, you'd see that it's not perfectly sharp (unless it's a knife). The left box in the above image shows a regular, un-bevelled edge while the one on the right shows a medium-strength bevel. The tool can be tailored to make very minor bevels or make the edges engulf the object, and gives models a much more 'real' feel.

Once I was happy with shape of my door, I checked it over for any faces with more than 5 sides, or any unwanted faces/edges/vertices. It was that I ran into a problem with the archway of my door. Since it was unfortunately beyond repair, I unfortunately had no choice but to scrap it as I couldn't recreate it so late into the models construction. Now the mesh was clean (with the help of Maya's 'Cleanup' tool, which added vertices/edges to faces which had more than 4 sides) I was ready to start UV Mapping the model!

Concepts and Ideas

When coming up with ideas for creating an interesting door, I looked at already-existing doors for inspiration:

A basic wooden door

A church door

A sci-fi door

A cartoon/cel-shaded door

While making a conventional door with a twist would be ideal for the task, it seems far too easy and simple. Since I wanted to set myself a challenge, I came up with something very unique to try:

I had the idea of creating a door that could be used in a world of food or sweets, similar to the classic 'Hansel and Gretal' fairy-tale. The door itself would be a Jammie Dodger biscuit, while lollipops would sit on plinths on both sides of the door. The archway would be a spiralling Marshmallow and the step a marshmallow wafer.

This is a very ambitious project I'm attempting, but I believe that, if I can get it right, it will look fantastic.

I also gave the door a very rough colour scheme, as seen above. Upon finishing this, however, I felt that the finished product might look a little bland, so I thought of adding another twist to the piece. I conceptualised the same door, but abandoned and creepy. I thought by taking away some of the brightness and joy from the door and adding things like Happy Faces moulding out of the wall like lost souls would give it that extra edge I felt it needed. All I needed now was a neater image of the biscuit, etc. and I'd be good to start modelling!

Introduction

In this brief, I have been given the task of digitally modelling a door using technical process and contemporary theory, whilst building upon skills I gained from the previous brief. The door must also be UV mapped, re-topologised, textured, coloured and prepared for an animation/game engine. 

I will also be introduced to the most efficient ways of modelling and creating other in-game assets that contribute to the production pipeline along with historical and contemporary workflows.