Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Firstly i did make a low poly model prior to this, i took the model i used earlier and stripped it down, trying to minimize the poly count, however... when trying to unwrap the UV's i realised a had a lot of problem areas that was consuming alot of time to go through so i have opted instead for a slightly "messier" route. Here are at least the screenshots from the attempt to at least show i did something prior to this; Shame this didnt go far, i managed to get it down quite a bit by shaving off edge loops and faces. So the other route; Firstly in Zbrush i had to merge down my model so it was all one component and then decimate it down. this was quite.... rough on my model, mainly because of the shaping, so this mangled the shape a fair amount, but i was able to export this to maya and then start quad drawing over the top of it to create a simple version of my model. so by this point i've completed anothe...

So after a couple of failed starts at this, This is the portion of the model where i am applying texture to the model, this effects that make the model appear like they are made from a specific material. For this i have exported all of my parts from my model as their own OBJ files, and then started importing them in. For now i just started testing the application of an alpha to my main piece of the gun. to get the right kind of effect i used an iron texture (mainly for the brush like strokes through the material) but the texture wasn't quite right so i had to alter it slightly to meet my needs. In the surface section there is an option for noise, and that allows for the application of alpha's onto the model, by playing around with the scale and strength of the metal texture i managed to get some of the brush stroke effect onto the main piece, giving it an effective metallic feel.   For the importing I selected one and then created subtools for it, allo...

Short on words for this post, the process here was to UV unwrap my higher poly model so that i can import these parts into ZBrush to texture individually. UV unwrapping is rather like doing the reverse of those paper craft boxes you got when you were a kid, instead of folding the edges and connecting edges of the paper to make a box, you're instead separating zones of your model in order to flatten it onto a 2D plane, this is more important when you need to map things like textures, colours or text onto the model. The method i am using here, works from the automatic unwrapping, then selecting edges that i want to combine and sewing them together, for the bits that came out well, they ended up nice and tidy like some of these, and means i can nicely apply a texture onto them, as well as count on them mapping well. As a note not only do you sew edges and unfold them, but also use the layout option to make them take up the optimal space on the UV editor. ...