Week 3

Quad Drawing

Now that I have finished my highpoly to 99% as there is always some changes that will probably be made soon in the future, I can start modelling the low poly. For this I just exported my ZBrush high poly back in Maya after decimating the mesh. The only parts I had to quad draw was the leather cushions and the sculpted front legs. The rest of the chair already had a low poly from the first stage of the modelling process.

While Quad drawing my cushions, I kept it quite high poly and dense in the cushion-y areas, as I want the normals to bake better and to be able to see the indents from the side of the chair. The entire poly count of the chair is 20,034 tris. This is quite a lot, but with the use of LODs in Unreal, I reckon it is well worth it to capture what I deem, necessary detail while you're close to the chair.

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UV Maps

After the low poly model was finished, it was time to UV all the parts of the model. For objects that are duplicated, I UV'd the object first, before duplicating, so it is already stacked and I don't have to UV each one. 

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Baking Texture Maps

Once the UVs were complete, it's almost time to start texturing. But before texturing, I need to bake my high poly mesh details onto my low poly, otherwise the high poly was all for nothing. It's the whole reason there is a high poly in the first place. For this, I used Marmoset Toolbag and Substance Painter. I used Marmoset for more control while getting my normals, as you can individually paint and skew the cage mesh on each individual object by naming convention. This is very powerful as Substance Painter only has a set value for all of the objects in the scene. Marmoset allowed me to get rid of a lot of artifacts that I wouldn;t have been able to get rid of otherwise. This is not to say that you cannot get amazing bakes in Substance Painter too. You definitely can, but I thought this would be a good chance to test new software quickly, during the project.

The only maps that I didn't use Marmoset Toolbag for, was the Ambient Occlusion and Mesh ID, which I ended up exploding and doing in Substance Painter in the end as I was getting a very weird issue in Marmoset. For some reason however, the ambient occlusion map was refusing to bake at all while the mesh wasn't exploded, which kinda defeats the purpose of an AO map in the first place, which I hope to fix or get to work at some point.

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AmbientOcclusion Error

AmbientOcclusion Map Error

UV Map

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Texturing

Now that my low poly has UVs, and the high poly details have been baked on, I can start texturing it. Following the reference, I'm trying to get the textures, as close to the original references as possible. The leather is kind of a orange-redish brown almost. Very weird colour. And the wood is quite close. It has some orange in it, and kind of a mid dark brown if I had to describe it. It's proved quite difficult to replicate and it might take a while. 

Trying to get the roughness values correct is a pain as well. The entire chair is very glossy and lacquered. I think I need to brighten the colours up a bit and make it slightly glossier.

Original Reference

Model