A Game Resolution Crate!

 Hey everyone! 

What a wild week it's been! From RPP to tech art, we've had a lot of assignments, but I've got a lot to show you so buckle up! 

Boom! 

Here is my game-ready crate model! Get ready to press A, everyone because this crate has collision and everything. 

You can jump on top of it! 

I just need to learn more blueprints so I can make it break or explode! 

This crate was lovingly crafted in Maya, ZBrush, and Substance. Unfortunately, my Substance skills do not yet pay the bills, so I had to do more than enough of the work in ZBrush. 

It still turned out great, though, in my opinion! I'm proud of myself for facing my fears head-on and working past all the difficulties! 

Yeah, have some beauty shots of just a solo crate, this time! I wanted to be sure to show it in a natural environment, so I stuck with the plain ol' template world! 

I tried to take these beauty shots from all angles, so you can see all the detail in my texture. And my ZBrush sculpt. All in all, I'm really happy with how this looks! 

Have a look from above, while you're at it! The view is great from up here! 

Or you could drop down low and take a look at this really really close?

What if I added more friends for our crate? Now you can really look at all of the details I've added without having to rotate around. Woohoo! 

Here's the same stuff from another angle. From here on out, we are going to continue cycling through these, so I won't comment on every beauty shot. 

But yeah, this project was a bit of an undertaking for me, especially since I have been drowning in homework. It's the last week of bootcamp and with everything pretty much due on Thursday, I'm gonna have a helluva time getting through this Pit of 100 Trials. 

So, that leads us to the problem I had with this assignment. No matter what I did, my ZBrush was not properly sculpting my model. It twisted, warped, and grabbed my planks, but it did not draw on them, as I wanted. I was pretty discouraged, so I sought help from my classmates. 

After a little bit of troubleshooting, we were able to figure out the source of the error- I hadn't subdivided the polygons! In fact, I only had a few polys coming into ZBrush, just the planks, corners, and borders. That was it. Because of that, my model was getting mangled instead of sculpted. 

No worries, though! We always persevere! At least, I try to! I was able to give this model waaaaay more polys thanks to Dynamesh and subdivisions- with my high-high poly model sitting somewhere around 5 million polys. I ended up narrowing the high-res model down to 1 million polys, which is still a lot, but allowed me to keep a lot of the details. 

In addition, I was able to make my low-res model teeny tiny... It is only 3,000 polygons (I say only as if 3,000 is a small number). Silliness aside, I'm happy that the model still retains a slight level of detail at that size. I was really happy that it turned out the way it did! 

Overall, I'm really grateful that I was able to figure out workarounds for my issues. I want to thank the resourceful, kind people in my Cohort who are always sweet to me when I have questions. If you all are reading this, thank you! You are the best and you can get through whatever challenges are in your way! 

I had a few more roadblocks, though, namely Substance Painter. That program makes no sense to me- probably because I've never used it before. I was able to import my UVs into it, but then they disappeared, leaving me confused out of my mind. The only thing I was able to get out of the (limited) UI was I could export my normals, which I used as a base for my texture map. 

That's right- ladies and gentlemen... I did what you probably think I do every assignment... I hit a roadblock, was unable to proceed, so I used a creative solution (MANUAL LABOR!) to get out. I hand-painted and mapped my textures. With a brush. And not in Substance. 

After about an hour of wrangling with Substance and replaying Nick's video on it over and over, I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to navigate the program. The thing with Substance is- while Maya and ZBrush are overcomplicated and cluttered, Substance is minimal and vague. It is the exact opposite, yet managed to be harder than either of the above programs. 

So in a fun twist, I had to do my texturing by hand! It was a fun experience, albeit a slow one. But it taught me a lot about patience and keeping calm in even a situation that I can't navigate. 

So, that's why I took so many pictures of my model. It's a test! Did I pass or fail? Does my hand-painted texture look okay? I really hope it does- I worked hard on it because I wanted to give my last assignment for 3D Bootcamp my all. 

Here's a Bird's Eye view for all you avian aficionados!

 

And another. 

And we're officially back to Earth again! And we're nearing the end of this post. So, let's wrap up with some stuff I learned. 

For one, 3D Modelling is hard. And very time-consuming. It's much different than the Paint 3D and Nomad Sculpt that I know and love (can you make game models on those- I sure hope so!).

For two, I'm doing better under pressure. I just need to keep learning all I can and moving forward. 

And lastly, I'm happy that I was able to proceed with the assignment despite my complications. I'm proud of myself for moving forward, no matter what grade I get. 

Anyways, thanks for checking out my Grand Finale post! I hope it was everything you've hoped and dreamed of! 

Just kidding, it's a crate. I hope that's not all you're hoping and dreaming of! 

Alrighty, bye for real!

See you soon!