Week 4 & 5

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Redoing Stuff

After some feedback from my tutor, pointing out some problems that could be fixed and made, more accurate to the reference, I decided I would go back and do them. That involved completely redoing all of my cushions. I was originally going to only redo the bottom cushion you sit on, as I wanted to get more of a curve at the front and some of the shapes better, but I  decided to redo all of them, and try to improve the high poly model in it's entirety.

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Retopology

Because I have remodeled my high poly, I also needed to retopologize the cushions again, which I had already done before, and is a very tedious process, getting the shapes of the bumps and trying to keep the topology consistent. This took quite a few hours to do again and I am realizing that I am starting to run out of time and I am quite behind on schedule. By 2 weeks! I was supposed to do my photogrammetry halfway through the module. Oops.

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Uving and Baking Problems

Now was time for The UVing process. There was quite a lot of stacking to do and I messed up pretty bad in the beginning. I had realized that before redoing my stuff and even before texturing my previous low poly, that I had to offset my stacked UV shells which is a big 'no no' for the baking process. Especially for the ambient occlusion map as the program tries to take the information from multiple different parts and positions of the model, instead of just one part and applying that to the rest. So fixing that was a little tedious too. At least I managed to get my UVs a little bit better...I think.

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Back To Texturing

Texturing I tried to add some more roughness values. I also added the lines that you see in the refence where the leather is stretched over and stitched using a fill layer with height. This turned out to be quite a significant addition and I would now argue that it was 100% necessary.

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Photogrammetry Summary

Now it's crunch time. I have essentially one week to complete my motorcycle boot. This involved staying back the entire day and evening for at least 4 hours of just taking photos. I ended up with just over 1000 images of my boot. This was then taken into reality capture and aligned. After it finished aligning, I had a miniature heart attack as there was a large slice of missing geometry near the heel of the boot, going straight up the back. I started to contemplate changing my model to something slightly simpler, but I soldiered on and started adding hundreds of control point on my photos and in the end, I fixed it! To be completely honest, I thought I was boned but I managed to struggle through it and get it done. 

At this point, it was near the end of the week and I cannot stay at uni past 10pm as it closes and my normal detail model is taking ages to render. This wasn't even the high detail model and it was saying it was going to take until 12am  to complete. Luckily it lied by about 4 hours and it finished around 9pm. I managed to get the .fbx file of the model and quad drew it over Friday and Saturday. Quad drawing took at least 5=6 hours. I then UV'd the model.



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Baking Texturing The Booty

Texturing this model was a little more interesting than my chair which you would think is quite weird. A lot of people baked their high to low using Substance Designer, but I just baked vertex colour map and used that as the basecolour layer in Substance Painter. This worked perfectly fine. Kept that layer at the bottom and started texturing over that. 

Because photogrammetry doesn't like shiny objects or reflective materials, when I finally got my mode lto work using control points in reality capture, the parts that were shiny, have a lot of noise and roughness, when it's supposed to be completely smooth with a few scratches and knicks here and there, but this information was baked on, so I had to manually fix and change the normal map in photoshop, looking at the UV maps, pinpointing where the shiny parts are on the UV shells and then removing all of the bump map information from those parts. Wasn't too difficult. Just a small extra step.

To get the final results of my model, overall, I added some more contrast to the base colour that I baked in, cleaned up the siny parts, added new roughness values so that the velcro and mesh parts weren't as glossy, as well as the leather and that was about it. It was then time to export the textures and mesh.

One thing I did go back and add was a plane on the inside of the boot where the geometry ends. It didn't really need any resolution as it was just going to be a dark matte black plane. I also went around and hiding any holes that baked as well,

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Rendering in Unreal Engine 4

Now that I have the fully textured boot and chair, it was time to take in into unreal engine. I created a new project with levels for both the boot and chair. The lighting setup is different in both levels to showcase my asset in the best west possible, but nothing too over the top so that you can't view it properly. I also created a sequencer shot of my assets along with the different camera angles.

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Problems in Class

The day before submission, I get to class and realise that I cannot open my unreal project that I rendered and setup for my assets because I stupidly did it all in a newer version (4.23) and the uni systems only have 4.22.3 which was pretty annoying, so I had to quickly mockup another unreal project in 4.22.3 to showcase and submit for presentation day. Sucks, but crisis averted. Wasn't too bad in the end.

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Schedule

I did not stick to my schedule what so ever. According to my schedule, I was supposed to finish my chair three weeks in, so that I had three weeks to do photogrammetry and learn the software, however, it turned out being that the chair took about 4.5 weeks to do as I made a lot of changes which was worth it in the end. So I had one week to take all of my photos (1060 estimate), roughly learn a completely new software, fix all the problems I had in the software, take more photos, build the mesh. The most annoying thing was how long it too this computer to compute everything in RealityCapture. It took over 30 minutes just to align my photos and over 4 hours to build my normal detail. This set me back even further. I then had to export the mesh, quad draw it which took about 5-6 hours, UV, fix and texture and then finally...render everything. Crazy amount of stuff to pack into one week of work and it was all my fault in the end. I should have managed my time better or not make as many mistakes.

Original Schedule:

Week 1:

1.    Model body of Victorian chair, and finish the high and low poly for the wooden parts.

2.    Block out the leather cushions, ready for Zbrush to add the cushioning and details.

3.    Start adding details to the leather cushions (seams, creases, stitching, buttons).

Week 2:

1.    Finish the details of the leather cushions/

2.    Decimate and/or Zremesh for exportation for retopology in Maya.

3.    Separate and mask high poly to later bake ID map if required.

4.    Quad draw the leather cushions in Maya.

5.    UV the low poly model.

6.     

Week 3:

1.    Export the low poly to Substance Painter and do first bake.

2.    Fix problems with bake.

3.    Texture the low poly.

4.    Render model in Unreal engine (bonus – sequencer).

5.    Start researching into photogrammetry more.

6.    Bring motorcycle boot in for scanning.

7.    Figure out how to retopologize photogrammed mesh.

Week 4:

1. Retopologize motorcycle boot model.

2. Export to Maya for low poly retopologization.

3. Quad draw the boot.

4. UV the motorcycle boot.

Week 5:

1. Export UV’d motorcycle boot.

2. Texture the model.

3. Render model in Unreal engine (bonus – sequencer).

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