This week, I continued the trend of making another asset for Prescription Grade Spooks as this week marks the milestone for which the game needs to be fully playable from start to finish. Obviously, I was more focused on completing another asset in this for this occasion and settled on making the old hospital bed asset I had collected reference images for from the other week. I jumped straight into Maya and got started by making a cylinder polygon and stretching its Y axis to mould something like this.
I then duplicated the cylinder and aligned a much shorter one to the top right of it. The plan is to make a perfect 90 degree turn with the cylinders so that my asset could look as accurate as the reference images.
After some digging around, I stumbled across a video that explains how to achieve this task. My first step was to make one cap on each affected ends of the cylinders to look something like this.
I selected edge mode and clicked on the ends of both cylinders to bridge them. I also had to include how many segments to ensure it keeps in line with the images I was using to construct this.
Mirroring the asset gave me the ability to repeat the same process for the end of the hospital bed, but this time, I had to lower the polygons so there wouldn’t be equal sides. These should form the proposed shape of the hospital bed.
I also gave the headrest bars some extra cylinders to mimic the vintage bed style of the asylum setting, even if I had to repeat the mirroring process to give the other end the same treatment. Here is what it should like now.
I added a basic cube polygon and scaled it to a rectangle to fit within the borders of the asset. I also applied some extra supports that end up touching the length of the bed polygon. This is to help keep the bed up and not fall off. You can see one of them clearly in this image below.
I also went the extra mile to ensure that the bed polygon was beveled to make it look like a mattress.
Now that the actual bed is out of the way, I think it’s time for me to make the pillows that would go on the bed polygon. The way I did this was by creating a cube polygon and scaling it to a rectangle before increasing the subdivisions so that the pillow would look detailed.
By adding an nCloth to the polygon, you can see the nucleus attached to it. That is the indication that it’s worked. This next step requires animation, as I wanted the asset to be pressurized. I went ahead and increased the pressure of the pillow to something that would be comfortable and would resemble more of an actual pillow. As I pressed play on the animation, I watched as the polygon became bloated and would typically be associated with being more like a pillow, which is what I wanted.
Freezing the transformations allowed the shape to stay still upon resuming the animation, which is perfect since we want this shape. The next thing to do is to make some piping on the edges of the pillow to make it more nicer. I started by selecting the faces of the edges and beveling them to do the same to the faces.
Upon repeating this process on the bottom edge of the width sides, I hit 3 on the keyboard to get this nice looking result for both edges.
Once that was done, I carefully positioned the pillow where I wanted it to be on the bed. Duplicating the asset allowed me to place another pillow next to it, effectively covering one side of the bed like in the image below.
Once that step was done, now is the perfect time to export the FBX into Substance Painter for the textures. I had to carefully UV the asset first, and I had some trouble exporting the FBX with the pillow assets as they would just end up being rectangular in Substance and that would look really weird and out of place, so I had to do the long way and export the bed and pillow separately in order to get a desired result. Other than that issue, there really wasn’t any more problems with getting the assets into Substance.
Substance Painter
The first step I would always go for is baking the asset for the shadows to appear more detailed as with the previous asset. Just like last time, I ensured that the ambient occlusion is included within the baking channels so that there would be a texture map dedicated to the AO.
You can see the extra output map being baked in this window as the baking process has been finalized.
Now is actually the time to get down to texturing the asset fully. For the bed polygon, I went with some kind of a rust coarse kind of feel to give the asset some abandonment and played around with the colours and the scaling of the texture to get a good looking outcome. I also attempted to give the polygon some character by adding in some dry mud. You can faintly see where I placed the brush on as you can see dark smudges.
Upon looking back and noticing a few unwanted seams, mainly on the headrest bars, I quickly repeated the process again after inspecting the UV sheet and fixing the seams before re-exporting it as FBX and starting again. That was the only issue with the bed texturing as the pillows were untouched by this issue.
I had to do the same to the pillow. Even though the rectangle issue persists when it is separate, I still pushed forward knowing the textures were going to work on the real pillows when I bring it into Maya. I’ve added the same dust and dry mud onto the asset, but the surface is a fabric texture this time to give the pillow a softer feel to it.
Here is the texture in the layers tab along with the paint layers I used for the extra detailing.
Once both assets were finished and detailing had been applied to both, I went ahead and exported the textures, making sure the Ambient Occlusion output channel was created for the shadows to become clear. I made sure to do this for both assets and also set the output directory towards the asset’s sourceimages folder to keep the space tidy.
Bringing It Into Maya
Back into Maya, I selected the hospital bed asset first and applied an AiStandardSurface shader to it, making sure to plug the texture maps into the BaseColour, Metalness, Roughness and Normal maps within the shader window in the image below. The AO plugin should be done within the hypershader anyway, as I had already done it multiple times to know the basic process of plugging the shadow detailing in granted it will work. I also made sure to check the Colour Space for Raw on every one of these maps except for the BaseColour.
I also assigned the shader to the pillow and repeated the process like with the other asset. I ensured that it would look just right, with all of the texture maps plugged in. Any maps that will end up making the asset’s appearance worse will be left out, just like with any other assets in this game.
For the Ambient Occlusion for both of the assets, I had to follow the same principles of the plugin setup by creating an AiMultiply node and converting the AO and BaseColour to the shader node, like so.
A look back into the Maya viewport and we see that the asset’s textures have been applied, including the pillows, which is excellent. Now it’s time to take a look at it in the render view.
As you can see, this was made possible by lighting up the asset and getting rid of any shadowy areas that might make this render look incomplete. I used two lights to bring as much light as possible without sacrificing the authenticity of the asset. This technique is akin to the key and fill technique used in professional photography. The front side of the asset has much more light than the back, giving it a much more appreciated look as well as shadows creeping in to the left of the image, also filling in the loop technique quite nicely.
Like last time, I deleted the camera work and left the asset in the viewport once finished. My only other option was to export the model as an FBX to post into Teams and make sure Embed Media is checked. I also made sure to do this with my other upcoming assets too.
Evaluation
Looking back at the asset, I have made a decent looking attempt at emulating the asylum bed feel of the model. However, one thing that could be an improvement for future attempts is the minor inconvenience of the pillow placement, as the far pillow in the render above seems to be clipping into the bed a little. Having insights like that could make or break a 3D artist, as the professionalism needs to occur within to make a good impression. Other than that, it’s a really good attempt and one that would be the team game.
How the rest of the team is doing
This week, the deadline for the alpha build is upon our reach and the team have been busy too. Max and Jack has expanded the game by adding in functional keys to open doors and new rooms respectively while Kameron and Ben have maybe made some new assets alongside me. I hope that their assets could be in the game, which I am hoping for.
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