Star Wars Mini Scene

The final project of the semester combined the Sci Fi assets that I textured with 10 new additional props and a base. No tutorials were provided and we could use two materials for the props and a third one for the terrain platform. We also needed to make or alter a substance designer material and one from alchemist. Anchor points and emmisve channel needed to be applied as well. I continued to use Unity to render and used the the sci fi scene as a prefab to provide continuity between both projects. 

The final project was a lot of work! I wanted to make a gritty black market trading post that the imperials want brought to heel. For references I used some Star Wars lego builds for inspiration as well as concept art from the movies and various spin off series. I created a new crate, a canister, 3 buildings, an exhaust pipe, a tent, antenna, satellite dish, and 'top hat' for the buildings. It was a significant amount of work but was fun to do some serious modeling again. I ran into consistent issues when modeling with ngons and triangles which slowed down my process but I got better and using the bevel and extrude tool and being mindful of when it might cause issues. I had to ditch a cool addition to my antenna object because it was becoming too difficult to redo.

I wanted my objects to convey their personality without having too much complicated geometry because generally a lot of ground level objects in Star Wars are made up of relatively simple shapes.

Prop References

Structure and building References

The UVing for my project was pretty simple and did not run into major issues after fixing ngons and triangles. The satellite dish really came to life in painter even though it was very bland looking in maya. I made each building modular which saved space in my UV sets and I was particularly proud of my exhaust pipe and 'top hat' for  the buildings. I really felt like my skills came together on this project especially my modeling and UVing.

 I struggled again to get the vertex snapping on some of my modular pieces and I am still unsure why it works sometimes and not others. I filled up the 0-1 space well and kept everything at uniform texel density for both materials.

My second set was a bit worse in terms of using up space and this was because I kept the texel density the same as UV set 1. And while everything fit it was too small and the resulting textures were not as nice or crisp as I wanted, I'll need to keep that in mind for future projects. 

Time management for the project was middling. I got a good jump on it but then lost about half a week due to other projects and not coming back to this one. For the future I just need to space out my time more and be ok with only getting a little work done at a time because that is better than none at all. 

Inside painter things were a bit below the bar and I did not like a lot of the textures I choose. I still feel a bit lost in painter sometimes especially if trying to replicate a specific look. This is due to not giving myself enough time and not reviewing say, the amp exercise, that went over a lot of good techniques. 

I did run into issues in painter too. I had some bad artifcating due to a tiling issue that I had to redo back in Maya and I also had bleeding of textures because of baking AA onto all the maps, which is really necessary. I removed the AO entirely because it was causing issues. Luckily, I was able to get some great help from a friend who helped me troubleshoot and I got back on track. 

UV set 1 buildings

UV set 2 props

By using my previous scene as a base I was able to build around the scene that was already there and it came together nicely, sort of a rusty sandbox that played off the Lego ideas. I duplicated accordingly and added variation with my antenna locations and supply crates. I did not have time to change the red crate which I was planning to do. It turned out really nice and the satellite dish really came together with the use of alpha stamps for depth and anchor points for grime and dirt.

Time management was the biggest issue on this assignment because when I got going on my asset's things went pretty smoothly and with more time, I really think this could have been my best project to date. The emissive channel really brought out my crates and canisters. A fun project to put together that could have really benefitted from a bit more time.

Unity render with antenna dish

Wireframe of my low poly objects

Final render from the ramparts