WEEK 9 - Hustle Harder...

Week 9 is definitely the definition of “HUSTLE WEEK”! There was a lot to do, a lot to fix and a lot to accomplish, but I pulled through!

To begin with, we had to complete and submit our learning contracts for the trimester, all of which was something completely new to us. However, this allowed us to evaluate if we are on the right track or not and make adjustments to our workflows as needed. We had to state what we are to accomplish and deliver from each of the Learning Outcomes, and quite frankly, they were a lot to do!

Ahmed was out of the country so Amos and I had to continue with our tasks as scheduled. And since he was away, I had to assign tasks accordingly.

I managed to finish texturing 3 variations of the vases. From last week’s vase design, I made another variation of it but through feedback from the lecturer, more alterations were needed. I also textured 3 pillars and recycled some of our already existing texture assets for them. Below is a gallery of these assets.

Above are a few screenshots and renders of the vases and pillars I textured from Substance painter.

From the games design side, the map has been made and the animators are ready to populate the scene. I made a few adjustments to the walls of some rooms since it looked too repetitive.

Screenshot of me trying to use differnet wall textures to break the monotony of the game design.

However, from the learning contract we were once again reminded that we had to make the grey-boxes for the map. Since the whole map was already built, we decided to take up a few rooms and grey-box it so that we could have drafts of how the final scene could look like. I took the Sarcophagus room. Here is a screenshot of my work-in-progress for the grey-box.

Screenshot of my grey-box scene (still working on refining and population) in UNITY.

Aside from this, I textured the door posts, modeled the props for puzzle 2 and 3 and gave them to the game programmers to code as per the concept. Texturing for puzzle 2 is currently in progress. I received feedback and some suggestions on how to make it look better as I am working on it.

This was the first eye drawing I made but I received feedback that it looked too polished and modern - an art style that doesn't suit our game. So I had to change it up to flat colors and research a little more into how Ancient Egyptain art used to look, yet by giving it a slightly modern touch in order to stand out.

As we journeyed through the week, we also encountered some unexpected problems. The NINJA textures weren’t working in UNITY and so Amos had to find a fix around them. He figured the ID maps for it and sent it to me to replace the rig. However, there were even more problems (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Screenshot of the problem. The ID maps don't work properly as can be seen near the crotch area.

I presumed it was due to the difference in 3Ds Max software versions that we were using. So I sent him the final rig file and asked him to replace it. Surprisingly, things worked!

I also learnt how to make normal maps in Photoshop. I had to download and use the newer version of Photoshop for that. Through tutorials I made normal maps for the pillar textures after texturing them in Photoshop and Substance Painter. I did encounter a problem, though. As I tried to use smoothing groups in 3Ds max for the pillars, one of the pillars wouldn’t smoothen AT ALL! So, I thought of experimenting with creating a high poly pillar and implementing the render to texture option to make normal maps for it. I followed this video that gives a detailed step-by-step guide on how to render-to-texture (even though we also learned how to do it briefly in the games class, earlier this trimester).

This was my attempt at making normal maps using the render to texture feature in 3Ds max.

Because it didn’t work like it was supposed to, I just used the same textures on the high poly pillar and it looked extremely good! Everyone loved it and preferred the high poly pillar instead. Since it was 996 polys in total, it would have affected the performance of the game so we collectively decided to use the high poly pillars only in important areas. Scroll up to view the high poly pillar texture in the gallery of assets!

Overall, this week was an extreme hustle. I did not expect the pillars and vases to have taken me this long to texture, but since it did, all of my pending work has been pushed into the next week! Hopefully I get everything done on time as I have to focus on my other LO’s as soon as possible.

References:

Jack, B. (2015, Feb 7). Generate Normal Map in 3DS Max Fast!!! [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGHirP8WE-I