Module 2 Week 06 (Simple Crate and Barrel)

 

 Game Asset Creation 101

High Resolution Sculpting Initial Map Baking 

 

Beauty Shots

 ZBrush Sculpt

 

Game Resolution Mesh

Bake in Substance Painter

Process

GAC 06 - Importing Into ZBrush

GAC 07 - Sculpting in ZBrush

 

GAC 08 - Exporting From ZBrush

 

GAC 09 - Resurfacing in Maya

GAC 10 - Game Resolution in Maya

GAC 10 - Extended Cleaning Up NGons

GAC 11 - Creating UVs in Maya

GAC 12 - Exporting Our Models Into Substance Painter

GAC 13 - Baking Maps in Substance Painter

Tech Art Homework #6

 

Game Animation

 

Demon ROM

First, I went into Maya and made a simple animation showing 4 different poses to display the range of motion of my Demon rig from last assignment. Once I finished, I exported the skeleton and mesh and imported them into Unreal as a skeletal mesh. Then I baked the animation to the skeleton and re-exported the skeleton and mesh with animation and imported them into Unreal with animation, making sure to make the skeleton the one from the Demon skeletal mesh.

 

Retargeting ROM and Mixamo Animation

Then I downloaded a character model and animation from Mixamo and imported them into my project. Once they were in my content browser, I set up an IK rig for both the Demon and my downloaded character, Michelle. After that, I created IK Retargeters to put my ROM on Michelle and the Hip Hop Dance animation I downloaded on the Demon. Then I exported those animations with the prefix retargetter_. I put the skeletal mesh of Michelle and the Demon in the scene and then changed the setting to get animation from an animation asset and chose the animations I exported. After that, the retargetted animation started to play when I pressed play in the viewport.

 

 

Creative Animation in Maya

 To create the creative animation, I found a reference video of a break dancer doing a head spin and then went back into Maya. I recreated the basic poses of the head spin in a loop-able animation using my Demon rig. Once I was done, I exported the animation and imported into Unreal using the same process of before. 

All Instances of Animation

 I placed an instance of the Demon doing the head spin after importing it into Unreal and then created a new retargeter to retarget the head spin animation to Michelle. I followed the same process to export the animations to make it play in the viewport. Then I set up a little scene for the presentation of my project and lined up all my animation instances for easy viewing.

 

 

File Directory in Perforce

 

Use of Perspective

 

Death to Dorothy

 

Dorothy's Basket 3D/2D Concept Illustration

Pureref Board

 

Dorothy's Basket Maya Render (One-point, Two-point, and Three-point Perspective)

 

 

 Creating an Illustration using the 3D Render Passes Technique

 

 Perforce

 

Module 2 Week 05 (Simple Crate and Barrel)

 

 Game Asset Creation 101

Proxy (Block Out Mesh) and Game Resolution Model Creation 

 

Process

GAC 01 - Establishing Scale Relationship

 

Putting Image Plane into Maya

Image Plane Image

GAC 02 - Creating a Proxy Object Pipeline

GAC 03 - Modeling in Maya Part 1

 

GAC 04 - Modeling in Maya Part 2

GAC 05 - Exporting from Maya 

Reference

 

 

Beauty Shot

Tech Art Homework #5

 

Basic Rigging

 

Basic Skeleton

To build a skeleton, I used the Create Joints tool in Maya and started with a root joint and then laid down a pelvis joint; three spine joints; a neck joint; a head joint; left upper arm, lower arm, hand, and fingers joints; and left thigh, calf, foot, and ball joints. Then I used the Mirror Joints operation to mirror my left arm and legs joints to get my right arm and leg joints. I made sure they were in the proper hierarchy before moving on to skinning.

Basic Skinning

To skin the joints to the meshes, I selected all the meshes in the Demon geometry group and then selected all the joints in my joint hierarchy and performed the Bind Skin operation. Maya did okay distributing skin weights to some areas of the model, but the legs needed a lot of work because there was a lot of influence on vertices from the root joint. The torso and pelvis also needed a lot of manual painting because the meshes of the upper body and pants didn't deform correctly when I rotated and moved the joints to test the skinning. Below is an image of a pose I put the model into using the joints as a test of the skinning when I finished painting skin weights for it. I put all the rotation values of all the joints back to 0 afterwards.

 

Simple FK Rig

I started the FK rigging process by creating templates for a circle control, a box control, and a box control with offset. Once I had those templates, I created a unique control the root control by box modeling a simple silhouette of a demon head and then using the EP Curve Tool to trace the shape I made. As a result, the root control for my rig is in the shape of a demon head silhouette. I also created curves from text saying "Demon" and used the MEL script "parent -r -s" to combine the Nurbs curve shapes with the demon head curve.

 

For the rest of the controls, I used my templates and modified them to fit the body better. I used my box control template to make the pelvis control. I used the circle control template to make both spine controls, both clavicle controls, and the neck control. I used my box control with offset to create all the controls on the legs and arms. To get the controls in the correct positions, I put each control in its own group and then used a parent constraint to constrain the group and the joint, deleting the constraint once I was done. Once each control was in the right position and oriented the correct way, I used a parent constraint to constrain the joint and the control so that the control would move the joint. As I did this for all the controls, I made sure to make the control groups the child of the correct previous control in the hierarchy so that the forward kinematics would work, the previous control in the hierarchy controlling the controls that come after it in the hierarchy.

Below is an image of the pose I put the model in to test the functionality of the rig.

 

File Directory in Perforce

Use of Basic Lighting

 Dorothy Must Die

 

Scarecrow Concept Illustration

Modular Environmental Creation Part 3

 

 Stage 03 Sculpting Phase

 

Process

Using Reference When Sculpting 

 Rendering Shots in ZBrush

 

Importing from ZBrush Into Unreal (Nanite) 

 

 

 

Adding Complexity to our Sequencer Shots

 

Movie Render Queue Set Up

Beauty Shots

 

Tech Art Homework #4

 

Intro to Blueprints

 

Dynamic Material Blueprint Actor

 To invent a Dynamic Material Blueprint Actor, I started by creating a blueprint with the SM_machinery_circular mesh from the Harbor Pack and making a duplicate of its material to use as its new dynamic material. Then I changed I created new parameters for a new base color and the amount that new color would affect the overall color of the asset, renamed them, and plugged those nodes into the A and B pipes of multiply node and then plugged the output of that node in the B pipe of a multiple node that already existed in the graph. 

 After that, I went to the Event Graph of my blueprint and set up a "Get Keyboard Control" graph and a graph that would make it so that the pink base color would become brighter when the "G" key was pressed, which I labeled "Dynamic Base Color" in the image below.

 Then I set up timeline for this effect, called Pink Value, so that it would take 3 seconds for the pink color to return to it's original value.

 Once the blueprint was ready to go, I compiled and save it and then played the level to test it out. It did what it was supposed to, the pink color gradually increasing in brightness over the course of 3 seconds and then gradually returning to normal after I let go of the "G" key.

 

Blueprint Activated by a Trigger Event 

 To invent a blueprint which is activated by a trigger event, I created a new material called "M_SimpleBox" to apply to a box asset from the Harbor Pack. In this material, I created two different base color notes and plugged them into a Lerp node with a parameter plugged into the Alpha pipe to control the amount. I also created parameters for both the Metallic and Specular amounts.

I applied this material to a box and then added that box to my blueprint. Then I added a Collision Box in my blueprint and changed the scale to surround the box.

 Once this was done, I went over to the Construction Script section of my blueprint and created a graph to make a Dynamic Material Instance.

 Then I moved on to the Event Graph, where I created a graph that would change the values of the Metallic Amount, the Specular Amount, and the Lerp Amount parameters of my material once the player entered the collision box area and would return to normal once the player was out of that area.

 After compiling and saving my blueprint, I tested it out and it went from purple to a shinier green once the player entered the trigger zone and then return to normal once the player stepped out of that zone.

 

File Directory in Perforce