Look back to reflect and move on

One thing that I've learned and has been learned by many in creative industries, is that we start to learn that we don't always enjoy our older work. We do however learn things from old work by analysing it and comparing against recent work to realise improvements. Here are a couple of my older projects that I like and dislike in many ways, but I'll talk about the things that really stand out and how I would improve them now.

Railspike Gun (Railway Rifle, Fallout 2008)

This piece was created for a submission in the first year at Teesside University. The objective of the module at the time was to introduce students to 3D modelling and texturing workflow from concept, block out, low to high poly workflow, baking, texturing and finally presentation.

A lot of time went on this piece in terms of the texturing which has got reactions such as "Woah, that looks so real!" but then that's often met with "What's it for?, what are you studying? why so much detail?" and something quite obvious about the quality of this work is presentation in many respects, as the asset could have been placed in an environment with a context to match. The texturing itself could have been created in more efficient and accurate manner. Too much time was spent on the details as ,many of the rusted details were manually applied. Lighting in the above image is quite harsh so the temperature could have been changed but no matter how much the lighting was changed, it wouldn't hide or work with other aspects that could be greatly improved.

In relation to lighting and the way it's scattered around the asset is the vertex normals.

The light does not reflect evenly over many surfaces in the asset. Where there are cylindrical aspects, there isn't the same problem as areas where edges are sharper. By changing the normals to be set to face normal, light would be evenly reflected to give the impression that edges are not as sharp which seems to be bounding the reflection of light to individual polygons, which is made worse by the harshness of the colour temp of the light. The texturing does break up the sharpness and harshness in a way but again, even the texturing could be improved alongside the light not being evenly reflected and scattered across direction changes in topology.

Regarding the texturing, It's very heavy in detail comprising of many layers to build the texture maps. Whilst it does fit the concept of the Railway Rifle (A cannibalised scrap metal, air pressure powered rail spike launcher as

portrayed in the concept image) there are mistakes.

To improve texturing it would be best to revise the substance painter file to look at the construction of the texture maps and change the parameters to tone down height alongside areas that have been hand painted or where alphas have been used to create the impression of rust. A lot of it could even been removed completely and used much more sparingly.

There are some components of the asset that work such as the handle, rubber piping and the rifle stock. The copper pipe isn't too bad in terms of too much detail in some places but could still benefit from the previously mentioned improvement ideas.

So far this piece has been slated by it's creator, however, much was taken away from this project in terms of learning the basic concepts of production pipeline and software skills. By looking back at this project I realise that It was a fun and gave a lot of freedom to explore and play around with texturing by just using what was available in software. One particular person that helped greatly with the use of Substance Painter was Viktor Kam. His lessons on Plural Sight were a great resource for learning the software.

Other things have been taken into account such as why is it that there are so many unnecessary polygons in the asset when they are simply not needed. So many edge loops creating more polygons where they were wasted. Optimisation of the topology would bring the final poly count down.

The Dragon Skull

Another submission for a university assignment that I wish I could do all over again (Introduction to digital sculpting) as looking back at this, there is the realisation of improvement from back then to now. Firstly, this piece would definitely be improved in presentation and lighting alongside some ideas that have been that have been applied to a current project in progress.

While the piece is a world away from the Railspike Gun as it's meant to be in the stylised context of art, it's still a little bit bare in terms of detail impressions. From what has been previously learned when using ZBrush and texturing software, giving the impression of weathering and organic perishing by applying some unique alphas would be beneficial. Old bones are often pitted and stained so applying those impressions sparingly would add to visually communicating the deteriorating nature of the piece.

Der Rüchenbrecher (WIP)

As seen above, this is the most recent asset that I'm working on, Der Rüchenbrecher. There are techniques that have been applied here that could improve the Dragon Skull by way of applying what has been learned and improved upon since then. Der Rüchenbrecher features a high poly bake that was sculpted and retopologised in ZBrush with the help of Maya to optimise the low poly model.

The sculpting used only a few simple brushes to create the base for the textures as well as some alphas. Some research was conducted to learn techniques to create the texture base sourced from YouTube, for creating wood and metal sculpts, courtesy of Polygon Academy and Danique 3D. TUTORIAL: Sculpting Wood in ZBRUSH - 3 EASY STEPS! | Polygon Academy - YouTube , Quick Metal Surface and Cuts Brush tutorial for Zbrush - YouTube.

Substance painter was later used after baking, where I found that using ZBrush to create the wood and metal components to be advantageous as it provided a normal map with a great texture base. Adding colour and some generators were greatly influenced and blended with the texture base from the normals, which made the workflow much more time efficient. The whole process was meant to give the impressions of imperfection and some mild weathering.