Cyborg Project #5 - 3D Modelling

I found 3D modelling my cyborg to be daunting. I really enjoyed it though and have learnt much about what to do and what not to do. I went through many variations of 3D models but this was the first one I was happy with. I did not at first notice the black areas on the model. I later discovered what caused this.

I rigged and posed it and while the rig wasn't great I was happy with what I had.

Then I made a UV map but at the time it was not showing me the correct red to blue colours, so I got the sizing on it wrong. I found this out when I made 2048 maps and put them into Quixel. I do not have any screenshots of this but it looked poor.

The cause of the large ugly black areas was because I had a smooth mesh display on the flesh part of the cyborg. This is the bad modelling I had done that caused the smooth display to go weird. I ended up painstakingly making these one sided polygons 3 dimensional. The result was worth it in the end. No more black areas.

This is the ID map I made of the updated model. I also added extra polygons to allow for the yellow areas. I had to export this as an fbx and import it into a new scene because no matter what I did I could not get the bake of the map to not have shadows. Importing it into a new scene fixed this but meant the entire mesh was triangulated.

I updated the UV map so that this time everything was more or less the same size. Unfortunately, fixing the smooth mesh display caused my UV map to mesh up and I could no longer unfold things perfectly or symmetrically. So there are some slight errors in the mapping. None the less, doing this was a good idea. Also, I decided to up the resolution of the maps I made to 4096 to get better textures. This was a good idea.

This is what the mesh and final textures I made looks like in Quixel. I was not very adept at Quixel at the time but I am much more confident using it now. I really like the way this ended up.

Now. One of the troubles I had with putting the exported maps from Quixel back into Maya was that I must have exported them in the wrong format. When I went to put them into the DX11 shader I realised that there is no gloss map in it. I ended up using the gloss map as a reflection mask, using a forest picture for the reflection map. I am annoyed by this because it still does not look like it did in Quixel. I also tried putting it into Unity but it ended up looking even worse than this.

This time when I rigged it I made sure to do it properly. However, I made a mistake and the arms became attached to the waist. So it means I had to resize the bones for the final pose. This irritates me because I wanted it to be easy to use. On the other hand, this is the best rig I have ever made and I have learnt so much from this.

Here is the final pose in Maya with the textures applied. The pose may not look as animated as the first and this is because I had trouble getting all parts of the rig to work with me. The final model has 8552 triangles, which I am quite pleased with. If I ever figure it out how to fix the textures I will put this into a game engine like Unity or Unreal with a nice animation to boot. Overall I am very happy with this project went and can't wait to do more like it!