Week 8 For The Industry Level Project

In the past few days I have finished the textures for the typewriter, the lamp and the desk, although I feel that I can improve on them I am happy as a first result, especially with the desk.

The typewriter was separated into 6 separate objects (minus all of the keys and legs), each had to be painted individually. Unlike the desk and lamp, the lamp was 2 objects (the shade and the stand) while the desk was one object.

Something that this project has shown me is that Stencils in Mudbox are awesome. They are the reason the get high detail while you are painting your models. In this project is allowed me to add scratches and patterns in the wood, rather than a plain brown layer. It also showed patterns in the worn metal in the handles.I have learned the uses of the burn tool for the draws and blur tools for fading colours.

The typewriter textures were fine in my opinion since I also added a gloss layer to the major steel parts at the back. A way to improve I feel would be to add space for more polys to sculpt the model in some parts the problem is that when I add a subdivision layer to the body, it gets malformed.

A corner that I did have to cut though was painting all of the individual keys letters because that would take a lot of extra time with other textures taking priority.

Also I don't know if I could bake down this model because I have not added in any other sub-division layers, the poly count is only 456.

 A improvement to the lamp that I feel I could make is to make the shade more translucent to appear more like fabric rather than green plastic. Trying different layers in Mudbox for the lamp shade I have tried to add a bump map layer to the top layer to give the idea of roughness to the shade, however for some reason when I imported the object to Maya the layer seems to disappear.

If there was one complaint for the textures, it is that the edges seem to meld into each other that seems to show a more pulp look to it, and I have no idea how to fix this right now. However if I was able to get more polygons in the model I could add detail to the mesh rather than just the textures.

Something that was recommended was using a program called 'Mental Ray', this adds shaders to the model textures to not make the layers appear flat. I have tried the program 'Substance Painter' for extra detail however there is a learning curve to the program that I haven't past yet so it is out of the question for now.

Something that I am going to do first though is get the textured assets to better quality before adding in anymore objects to the scene.

One more thing that I have learned is from rendering the scenes, sometimes Maya can screw up with what software to use while rendering. If you don't take notice this can screw up the render. You can also use resolution gate in camera settings to show how much of the scene will be rendered.

So the next steps are to see if I can add new polygons to the typewriter without changing the shape of the object, try to add shaders to the textures, get to grips with Mental Ray and get a good bake for all objects in the scene.