Y3 Week 3: Project Finished!
It's the end of week 3 and we have finally hit the deadline for this project. It was only a short one, but I got quite tired of it in the end and just wanted to get it over with. I don't know why since when I started it I really looked forward to it, but something in the process just made me go off it. But nonetheless, it's done and dusted and I am happy to say that I am quite pleased with the outcome.
You can find my submission post by clicking on the following link. Make sure to take a look at it, as this is probably the first piece of work that I have done which I am proud enough of to include in my portfolio.
Looking back at the last week of the project I once again encountered some problems and learned quite a few new things. I started the week by going straight into texturing after spending most of last week unwrapping my model. For this I decided to try out Substance Painter, since I've been wanting to give it a go for quite a while. It's an amazing piece of software and it makes texturing a lot less painful, which I was grateful for.
However, I quickly realised that my textures weren't going to turn out as good as I wanted them to be. Several bits that I wanted to be quite crisp were simply blurry and it almost looked like it would end up being bad texturing job, so as a change and because I was still quite far at the beginning of the process I decided to take a step back and re-arrange my unwrap, making sure to increase the size of the UV islands that I wanted to have detailed textures on and shrinking down some of the UVs that weren't as important. It didn't take too long and I was able to have another shot at texturing using substance painter. This time the results were a lot better and I was quite pleased with the way things started to turn out.
Using Substance Painter allowed me to combat problems that I previously encountered when texturing, such as being able to add tiny details to the texture, as well as seams. The interface of the software is really easy to learn and it only took me a short while to get used to it. It allows the user to paint straight onto the model, as well as painting on several maps simultaneously, e.g. painting on the height and roughness map at the same time as painting on the albedo. Using those little tools I was able to efficiently create a great looking texture sheet in a lot less time that it normally would've taken me.
I am quite pleased with the end result, however I can't include a viewer in this blog, so please use the link above to check it out. As you can see by the lack of me mentioning it, I haven't really followed along with the last bit of feedback I had received, which was to create a little style sheet before texturing, so that I would know kind of what I was going for with my textures. This was simply because I wanted to focus on texturing to get some good results and I simply thought it was a bit too late to work on planning. I would've probably included this step a bit earlier in the process if I were to do this project again.
The next week will bring along a new project and as it looks for now I will be doing the stylised environment project, in which we have to design and create a small stylised 3D shop front. I can't say I am looking forward to this brief, as I am horrible when it comes to designing anything, however I wanted to push myself with these briefs, so I will just go with it and see what I can come up with. I will include more information in my blog next week.
