Dominic Mathuse
Game Art Design
Style Matrix: Project #3
Gravity Karts
Name: Dominic Mathuse
P Number: P13197437
Email: dominic.mathuse@googlemail.com
Project Title: Gravity Karts / Stylised Prop
Overview: A set of stylised karts, modelled and unwrapped in 3DS Max 2016 and then textured using a mixture of Photoshop and Substance Painter following the PBR Workflow. Beauty shots taken from Sketchfab. The models have a total tri-count of 7,794: 2,592 for the first, 2,946 for the second and 2,256 for the third kart. Each kart has a total of one (1) 512 x 512 texture sheet with the following maps on all sheets: Diffuse/Albedo, Roughness, Metallic and Normal. Additionally, 1 sheet has an Opacity map (Kart 3).
Research/Design: For this project the research and design part had already been done for us and the focus lay solely on modelling the assets from the given concepts within the timespan. The challenge was therefore the short timespan and the fact that we had only been provided with a perspective shot of the kart(s) as a concept. Find the provided concepts below (These are NOT mine):
Click on images to enlarge them.
Viewer:
Sketchfab (Several options available using the 'Rendering Optioins' button in the bottom right corner)
Unwraps (Click on an Image to englarge it):
Textures (Click on an Image to englarge it):
Kart 1
Kart 2
Kart 3
Beauty Shot:
Conclusion: This project started out looking quite promising. After taking a bit to choose the right project I ended up choosing the gravity karts project as it seemed fairly simple. I am not too strong on concepting, so I decided to choose this project as it allowed me to focus on modelling instead.
Everything went mostly well until I finished my unwrap and noticed that a few things were wrong. First of all, the fact that I used symmetry on my models had left me in a bad position when it came to texturing. I originally did so to save on texture space and therefore overlapped the UVs from one half to the other and this caused a massive issue, as several textures from the concept in the middle of the kart were not mirrored. Unfortunately, I only realised this too late, leaving me with having to create textures which were mirrored and therefore leaving the karts looking different from their original concept.
Secondly, I noticed while I was texturing that I was missing several components from the third kart model. These included the little handles on the side, as well as the wooden bars in the middle of the barrel. Once again, it was too late in the process to go back to fix this issue, so that I had to leave out the handles completely and resort to texuring in the wooden bars, which gave a less than optimal result.
Finally, the texture size was quite low, and even though I sacrificed quite a lot by overlapping UVs as much as I could, I still didn't have a texture sheet big enough to include all the detail I wanted to, so in the end I scrapped a lot of detail and only included some, which resulted in blurry and plain textures, that I am not satisfied with.
As usual, you can find more about this project in the following blog posts:
Y3 Week 9: WIP (coming soon)