The Art Test Adventure!

Hello, you lovely people! This post is all about my second and third milestones for the art test I am currently taking this month! Now for those of you who don't know how Full Sail's Computer Animation program works, in order to do a certain discipline (ex: modeling, animation, rigging, ext...) you must pass an art test for which one you want to do. I personally wish to pursue environment modeling. So this month I took on the task of adding another class to my already hectic schedule so I could get this test out of the way.

Now onto the model!

Reference Image

This is the reference image that I was tasked with matching in two weeks. The first week was modeling the pot itself and matching the lighting. 

First Try

The above image is my first attempt at creating the model and the lighting. To start it off I used a curve to create a revolved polygon shape in order to get the base shape of the pot. This worked well, up until I got in ZBrush. Now I used Zbrush to create the paper on the top because they were folds and things I personally am not able to achieve in Maya. It was going well but I was struggling with matching the reference. The edges are very soft and not distinct. I had a deadline to meet, though, and pushed on to try and get it decent. The poly count was incredibly high and not up to my standards, so in an attempt to get lower poly's I tried baking the normals. I tried for hours. My efforts were fruitless. Midnight was clicking closer so I did my lights, turned it in with a heavy heart, and vowed to fix it with the critiques I would be given. But I wasn't given critiques. 

Second Try

So once I wasn't given a critique, I took it upon myself to fix what I thought was wrong. I remodeled the entire pot. I started with a different base mesh, took it into Zbrush, and lined up my reference images in a completely new way. 

I took all my references, cut the tops off, and put them together in photoshop so I was basically "rolling" my pot across it as a sculpted to get it all in the right places. It took hours to get correctly but I was so incredibly proud of this. But the next issue was poly count and topology. It was all really shaky and not working well for UV's, so I made an executive decision and decided two pieces of geometry would be what I needed. I used the base mesh for the bottom section because it had such clean edges, and cut off the top of it when it reached the part I had sculpted. I also deleted all of the lower half of my detailed pot so it fit snuggly on the base mesh. After a few hours of quad drawing to fix edges I finally had a good model to start texturing. This is where my Milestone 3 started.

Texturing was something I really had to be strategic about. It wasn't mandatory to hand paint textures so for the actual pot color I could have used the pictures put together to make it. I chose a different route, however.

Layered Texture

I decided a layered texture would be better to do so I could avoid seams, repeating textures, and blurring that can commonly occurring when you do textures from a photo. To start, I used a ramp shader in my layered texture with the colors the pot needed. I did lighter in the middle and darker towards the top to give it the glazed look it would need. Next I started playing around with noise in a different ramp texture to kind of break apart the solid colors. Following that I did a marble texture to give it the over lapped/ not perfectly glazed texture I knew it would need. After that I tried a mountain texture to get the yellow flakes in it, but opted out of that when it wouldn't work right. I ended up finding a paint splatter like texture online, creating an alpha map with color, and doing it that way. I did that for the yellow flecks of paint and the black, to make sure they didn't overlap I gave them an offset with different repeating limits. Lastly I gave it a ramp to clear off the paint spots from the top of the pot. I followed that layered texture with another layered texture on a Mia Material so I could give it a fractal that broke up the colors in a cloud like pattern so it wasn't so perfectly colored. 

After I had that done, it was time to do the top of the pot. I clone stamped out certain areas to make it as seamless as possible and not shaded in weird places, but it wasn't enough. That is when I found the 3D paint tool in Maya. This magical tool allowed me to clone stamp directly in Maya on the model so I could clean up seams flawlessly. I spent a while working that but it was nothing too spectacular. 

Texture Test

My next step was to create the stickers on the pot itself. I spent a few hours trying to create them as projections, even going back to my Visual Development class files, but nothing was working. I then went to a back up plan. Look up how to make cards and make them all in 40 minutes because thats how long I had until my deadline. I researched and watched videos and I finally had it! I had made stickers out of cards and was proud! I finally imported it into my lighting scene and BAM! I had my final result!

Version One

Version Two

These are the final results of my Milestones. I did two different renders because I wasn't sure which one looked best, but I am so incredibly proud of both. Thank you for reading along!