WatchTower Project

For this project, I was tasked with creating both a high and low poly model for a watchtower from Age of Empires. The low poly model also had to be textured and baked. The low-poly model had a maximum limit of 1,200 polys. The high-poly model had a minimum limit of 12,000 polys.

I chose to recreate on of the Indian watchtowers.

The process to create it was simple. Create a cube, extrude, edit the edges/vertices, repeat.

For the parts that needed to be symmetrical (such as the walls with windows, I just created one side, and, when done with it, duplicated it, rotated it 90 degrees, merged the vertices of the two wall corners, and then repeated the process to create the main structure.

I focused on the low-poly model first since it was the base for the whole project. Conserving the amount of polygons I needed to use was difficult, and I had to sacrifice modeling out a few details here and there as a sacrifice.

In the end I ended up with this:

with only 1186 polys

The high-poly model was a matter of dividing faces, insetting those faces that needed to be bricks (or boards in the watchtower's upper floor) , and then extruding those faces. Other features were simpler to make, since buildings are very geometric and angular.

the high-poly model at almost 70,000 polygons

I didn't worry too much about overlapping faces here and there, since this model was going to be used mainly for baking.

After finishing the high-poly model, I went into unwrapping. This was one of the more difficult things to do. Even though it was low-poly, the windows (and figuring how to unwrap them properly), gave me the most trouble. 

After many hours, I settled with using the cylindrical wrapping for them and the other walls. It seemed to work at first, at least until I realized that Maya hates overlapping UVs during the baking process.

In the end I just separated them and used the unfold tool:

Unwrapping this was a long process of relearning what I had forgotten from the pluralsight tutorials.

Later, I would find out that keeping different meshes separate allowed for UV overlapping in the texture maps. When I found that out, I separated the model into 3 groups: the roof, the midsection, and the bottom.

Baking was a whole different story. I followed the procedures I learned from making the well and the treasure chest, but corruption after corruption kept occuring within the texture files.

As it turns out, Maya REALLY hates overlapping UVs.

Also, in order for the texture to appear properly on meshes, you need to convert the object's normals into soft edges. I'm not sure why this is, but it's what Maya wants.

Baking took up most of my time, and, until I discovered the two thing above, I almost gave up on it. It wasn't until the early hours of Monday morning that I figured everything out.

the strange corruption for the bottom piece. this was solved by making all normals soft edged.

the better normal map after fixing it

Though some texture corruption still occured during baking, the results were far better (and any mistake can be fixed in photoshop)

The strange original corruption of the upper balcony's normal maps

the newer one, having been edited in photoshop

With UV mapping and baking done, it was time to create the diffuse files! 

As I mentioned earlier, I found it easier to separate different parts of the model. Thus, different diffuse maps were made for all the models:

the bottom and middle sections

upper floor

the roof.

Creating the roof was both easy and extremely fun to do!

In the end, this is what I made:

And here are some renders in Maya

aaaand here are some of the ambient and specular textures as well, to show that I did use them:

ambient for the roof. the errors were fixed in photoshop

ambient for the front entrance

ambient for middle section

the spec for the bottom portion. Since it's mostly bricks, most of the model is not shiny.

Baking A Pistol

The process of baking is not the hardest thing to do. The most time consuming thing about it is waiting for the actual textures to bake. Once again, I chose the 3Ds Max tutorial as modeling out the well seemed to cover that aspect of Maya pretty well.

the original model, with checkered textures and a simple animation that separates the different pieces

The first step is to color-code the high poly model. All you need to do here is create new materials that are different colors, and apply them to the selected polys/parts.

like this

It's easier to use the soft select the different pieces (like the bolts) when assigning the materials.

After that comes grouping the high and low poly models into their own groups and then selecting the low-poly group, pressing the ATTACH button in the toolbar to the right, and selecting the low-poly options.

Then, with the low poly group selected, you press 0 to open the render option toolbar:

From there you  assign the renderer to the LP_group (scanline) in the render settings and under the Renderer options select Hammersling for global supersampling.

You can add or delete what type of maps you want to make under the output list (diff, normal maps, ambient occlusion, etc).

Under projection mapping you go and select all the high poly objects.

A bounding box will appear. You can edit it under the "projection" modifier of the object. Make sure it is larger than the actual models.

After that you select the image settings you want for the group and then press bake.

And then you wait.

tah-dah!

With ambient occlusion, you create a global lighting object in the scene and repeat the process:

which will give you something like this for the low poly model

For whatever reason, when switching to ambient occlusion, my renderer settings refused to acknowledge that the low poly group existed anymore:

I couldn't find a fix for this, so I had to switch to the tutorial instructor's sample model instead. It worked from there. Aside from that small hiccup, everything went smoothly.


The process for baking in 3Ds Max is very similar to that of Maya, though Max feels a bit faster (though that could be the model in Max being lower-poly than Maya's well), and it's really cool to see the texture being baked onscreen instead of just a simple loading bar.

I feel like I could easily switch between Max and Maya when it comes to baking.

UV Unwrapping a Raptor

For the UV unwrapping tutorial, I decided to choose 3Ds Max since I felt comfortable with the process in Maya. After going through the videos, I learned that UV unwrapping in 3Ds Max is actually more automatic and easier than it is in Maya.

The process of unwrapping in Max is simple: you can choose from various different perspectives, such as planar, cylindrical, box, or spherical.

Inside the UV editor are tools that you can use. In this tutorial, the stitching tool was your best friend. It allowed you to select edges/seams and connect them with other UVs.

your best friend (along with the relax tool)

For the first step (unwrapping the tail), a cylindicral perspective was used.

With cylindrical unwrapping, a rounded object's UVs are spread out in a line, and are separated by a seam. For the tail, the bottom was used as the seam, since it is less visible.

After that, pressing the "relax" button in the UV editor was all that was needed to make it presentable.

After the tail came the body, which was slightly more complex. For the body, you had to select the loops around the neck and limbs (as well as one at the very bottom), and create the seams artificially (which was done by simply pressing a 'create seams' button in the UV unwrapping panel).

the blue lines are the seams

after that, you just peeled the UV with the peel mode button:

this is also where you create the seams

Though, unlike with what happened in the tutorial, my bottom seam was not as neat as the instuctor's:

I'm not sure why this happened, but it can be easily fixed within the UV editor by manually manipulating the UV vertices/edges. I would experience this problem with the other parts of my model's body, unfortunately.

The process for unwrapping the legs, feet, claws, arms, neck, and even head were very similar.

The peel tool was used for both the arms and the legs.

the arms before being peeled

the arms' UVs after being peeled. They were stitched and relaxed after this

The process had additional steps though, such as the fact that the peeling of the legs and arms around their seams separated some UV faces. This was fixed by manually stitching and merging them back together.

the legs after being stitched together and relaxed

But for the most part, the program did the unwrapping for me, which was nice.

The neck was a simple matter of creating a seam down the middle, selecting one side, and doing planar projection to unwrap it. The two sides were then joined together through the stitching method.

The face, eyes, and tongue were done in the exact same way.

The feet and hands were slightly more challenging to do, but they worked in essentially the same way as the neck and head. Instead of using box selection though to select only one side, you had to select all the faces manually, and then planar projected them.

When you were done, you should have had something looking like this:

All that is left to do is to resize all the UVs and fit them together in the UV map, which is something that I have already been taught to do in the Maya well tutorial.

In all honesty, I prefer 3Ds Max for unwrapping over Maya. As I said earlier, the program does most of the work for you, which is far different than Maya. It's automatic, easy to use, and, if there are any errors, easily fixed.