320 MicroScene Week 6 (5/13-15/2020)

This week, I finished up my textures and put everything into Unity. I had both Maya and Unity up so I could set up the scene the way I wanted.

Scene Setup before textures were added

Soon after taking this screenshot my scene got deleted and I had to redo it. It put me back a little but luckily the scene is pretty easy to set up.

I realized after setting everything up, that I was limited to 9 textures, so I went and condensed my list of 23 textures down to only 9. This changed my scene up slightly, but I was still able to reuse most of the textures I had already made. I got creative with what textures could be passed off as what, but two of the textures were too unique for me to change. One was the sign that I made for the rickshaw, which is my favorite texture. It says "Blades, Inc." on it to create the idea that the blacksmith runs a company (which runs in line with DreamWork's comedic style of mashing together history with modern references; after all this is a How to Train Your Dragon inspired scene!)

Unfortunately, I was unable to add a ground texture, as Alchemist/Designer did not want to export my texture correctly, or Unity did not want to process it correctly. The image above does not contain this texture, as it appears bright pink and I wish to spare you, the reader, your eyes.

I will, however, include the sign that I created! Although it is quite simple, it is my favorite part of the entire project (yes, really).

I think this project was a success. Even with all of my issues, I was able to work around most of them. In the future I may revisit the scene and fix it up!

320 MicroScene Week 5 (5/6/2020)

For this week, I began texturing! It took a while for me to readjust to using Painter, but after reviewing a couple tutorials, I was able to get into a groove and finish textures easily. As I found creating entirely new textures a little ambitious, I decided to take premade textures and customize them to fit my needs. I decided on a specific color palette, using more grey tones for wood, darker and more aged looking metal, and reds if I needed a pop of color. This seemed to be in line with the idea I was going for. I just went in order of the file name, starting with the barrel. This was good starting point, as I covered two of the big materials I needed to in this session, which was wood and metal.

I took a wood texture, Wood Beech Veined, and changed the colors, then adjusted the dirt texture within the wood texture. For the Metal, I took the Steel Rough base material and added scratches. I imagine the barrel got a little roughed up in transport or something, so the scratches add a bit of realism to it. I imagine it is filled with some kind of fluid (perhaps oil) meant to quench weapons after forging and shaping.

For the furnace, I had to find a good stone texture. I originally wanted two different kinds of stone texture, however after working on it I realized it would look a little odd, so I stuck with one. I found this texture online called RedBeard_Bluestonewall (which you can find here). I decided the stone inside of the furnace needed to look used, so I added a charcoal-like texxture on top of the stones. To do this, I actually just painted ontop of the existing texture on a paintable layer. I think it gives the effect I wanted. Due to it not being a smart texture, it was difficult to really make this texture "mine", so I did what I could.


Texturing is my favorite part of the whole process, so  I found this part to be quite enjoyable! I think using my skills in customizing textues, I can make a project that fits what I imagined.

320 MicroScene Week 4 (4/29/2020)

This week I am finishing up my UVs. Since I got the hard parts out of the way, it was pretty easy to finish these. This process was long more than it was hard, but since I was kind of just breezed through them (slowly), I still ran into careless mistakes.

Weapons Rack UV, arranged

The weapons rack was one of the more complicated UV maps I worked on, simply because of all the parts I had to UV. It was more tedious than hard, and I ran into little to no problems with this one. I figured the rivets would all be a solid metal material and didn't need a very complicated UV shell, so I kept those as is (which saved a lot of time as there are a lot of them on this particular object).

The barrel, one of 2 types. This is the more complicated one.

The most complicated objects, however, were the barrels. There were several panels that I had to individually UV, as well as a ton of rivets, which also had to be UV'd (unlike the rivets on the weapons rack, since these were little octoganal cylindars). It was hard to UV the indivual panels, but once I realized I should probably isolate the panels, it made it a lot easier to UV. Other than a handful of misclicks and figuring out why some UVs were quite deformed, this was relatively simple to UV as well.

I also UV'd a single log, which I then duplicated to create a pile of logs with matching UVs. That trick saved me a lot of time.


I also am attempting to retopologize a dragon head, however it is proving to be extremely complicated and I may end up scrapping the idea. If I am able to, I will be including the head on the top of the stable/shed.

I think this week was pretty successful and although I have a handful of objects I have left to UV, they are all very simple. Due to my troubleshooting that I did last week, fixing my mistakes was easy.

320 MicroScene Week 3 (4/22/2020)

This week, I continued UVing my scene. I have 27 objects, and I was able to continue on the big structures, as well as one of the most complicated objects in my scene, the rickshaw. I started with these as they would take up the most time in my project, and it would be easier as I continued working to end on the simpler pieces.

Stable/Shed UV, arranged

Wood Shed UV, arranged.

The most difficult part of the process is actually arranging each piece and making sure they were all scaled correctly. Cutting and unfolidng the UVs is actually a pretty simple process. I broke down each individual piece in my mind as a cube of some sort, and used that idea to appply to all of the objects. For other more unsual shapes (like spheres) I pictured I was making a sewing pattern, and broke them down that way.










I ran into a few issues with my UVs. The biggest was probably trying to figure out what pieces went where - Some sections were broken down too much, so I spent a lot of time sewing edges back together in order to neaten up my UVs. I also realized halfway through that I should try to hide the seams where they wouldn't be noticed (i.e. under another section of the object or facing away from camera views), so I spent some time redoing the cuts.
The rickshaw had some of its own issues since it had so many components. UVing everything was a challenge in of itself, as most parts were of a unique shape. I spent a lot of time grouping UV shells together and arranging them in the UV space based on location from one camera angle to make it easier to figure out where each piece went when I would later texture it.

Overall I think this week was very successful. It helped me troubleshoot issues I'm sure I will run into in the future.