Friday, October 31, 2014

Project 6 Complete!

Alright, I'm done!  As with any work of art, there is still so much more I could have added, tweaked, and refined.  But I need to continue pushing forward, taking what I've learned in this project and incorporating it into my next one.

You can view the complete showcase of this project at my website, here.

Here's what I got out of this project:


  • I got my feet wet with Unreal Editor 4.  It's leagues more intuitive than UDK.  I still prefer Unity I think, but I can use UE4 to toy around with custom materials.
  • I got a ton of experience with Substance Painter.  I'm pretty sure this software is going to completely replace Photoshop in my pipeline.  I need to try out hand painting with it.  Seems like it would be super easy, but we'll see.
  • Speaking of pipelines, I developed a new one that seems rather quick and streamlined. I recently learned a new trick in Maya that lets me retopologize super fast (not talking about Quad Draw).
  • Super-solid understanding of PBR textures.


Here are some issues I encountered:

  • The metallic surfaces in Substance Painter did not visually match when imported to UE4.  It was probably a mistake on my end somewhere, but it caused a bit of a slowdown in the polish phase when I had to tweak color values to get them to display satisfactorily in UE4.
  • GUV tiling in ZBrush is really iffy.  It took such a long time to do in many cases that I ended up just painting my own material masks in Substance Painter.  I tried doing GUV tiles on decimated meshes but it seemed to crash ZBrush every time.  Perhaps with the 64 bit version soon to release that problem will disappear.
  • I was a bit too timid when it came to jumping into Unreal Editor.  In an attempt to not derail my project by spending too much time learning the software, I modeled the majority of my assets in place inside Maya which led to some more slow-downs later in the project during the polish phase.
  • I was not able to implement some suggestions due to time constraints.  If those slow-downs I mentioned hadn't happened, I could have added a few more things to make it look better.







Now it's time for a break, I'll be back in a week or so to announce my next project!

View my previous completed projects here

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