ArchGnomedes
For our final project of the Diploma at AIE, we were tasked as a group to create a game meeting certain parameters (one of which was creating an FPS). Below are some of the assets I created towards this project.
Because the playable character was a gnome, I tried to give the hand a more stout proportion, particularly shorter and stubby fingers. The brief also called for more of a steampunk approach, hence the gears and pipes on the gauntlet.
I was tasked with creating the skeleton and organs for the Orc which was originally sculpted by my teammate Grace Callaway. Due to the approaching deadline and relatively minor role of the bones and organs, I managed to create and texture the assets in a day.
The best thing to come from this project was my discovery of how to create breakable versions objects like the barrel, crate and pots seen below while maintaining the original objects UV coordinates. To achieve a seamless transition between objects we needed the broken version of the objects to be indistinguishable from their whole counterparts.
My process for this method was the following:
-Create the watertight low-poly ‘game ready’ model
-UV unwrap the object
-Duplicate the object and break it into pieces using the Multi-Cut Tool in Maya (making sure not to move the duplicate or original model). Fill the new empty spaces using the Quad Draw or Bridge tool
-Transfer the UV attributes from the intact object to the broken
-Using Substance Painter, bake the standard maps and texture the intact object
-Apply these textures to the intact and broken objects in the game engine and they should look the same! The inner walls of the fragments will look strange but will look acceptable in motion.
While texturing in Substance painter would work in the method I described, in order to meet the more cartoonish and ‘hand painted’ aesthetic of the brief, I decided to try Dustin Smither’s method of utilizing a normal map’s information in Substance Designer to drive an albedo.