This week, I have been starting to develop my assets in Maya and texturing them in Substance after a few weeks of pre-production. My main goal was to make them look as faithful to what the team wants from the game ‘Prescription Grade Spooks’ by making them look like they were abandoned in terms of their location. I have started with the treatment couch asset and illustrated my journey into making it.
I began by making the black tip of the table supports by scaling a cube polygon into the desired shape that I want it. I thus duplicated the polygon with CTRL + D into four pieces and spread them out in the X and Y axis, like so.
My next step was to select the top faces on all parts and extrude to make the top part of the support, where the soft couch surface would lay, I also went a step further and created edge loops towards the bottom of the polygon and extruded to make a beam that further holds the supports together. This is what it looks like now after joining the top areas of the two polygons to make more beams that ensures the couch would stay on top.
What I did here was select the top faces and hit CTRL + E to extrude just a little to make sort of a outward crop to make the asset more accurate to the reference images. I did this effect on the other edges as well.
Next was the couch that would form the basis of the asset. I created a cube polygon and scaled it to a rectangle before ensuring I create edge loops around the edges of said polygon before beveling it to smoothen out the edges. I ensured to tweak this after taking this image, but it looks good so far.
I ensured I would align the polygon perfectly with the table support, as this would come together nicely in the IPR Render. The scale and the position plays a huge factor in this in terms of making sure the edges sticking out are balanced and even to avoid inaccuracies.
My next objective was making the headrest that would act as the cushion for the people that would lay down on the asset. The same thing applies to the previous polygon as in duplicating the asset and rotating and aligning it to ensure it fits its purpose as a headrest before smoothing it out. This is what it should look like.
I also had to make sure the two ends of the two assets would not clash with one another, only slightly as to not cause any major friction between the polygons.
The next thing was to create the section that would bolt the headrest support beams to hold the left-most section of fabric that the couch will have. I started with creating a cylinder polygon and scaling it down. I basically had trouble at first with the Booleans as I was trying to create a hold within where the bolt was going to be situated, like so.
The result would look fine, but the problem is extruding the face as this would hide the extruded face with the original face scaled or moved and that wouldn’t be ideal for the bolt’s creation. This is what the bolt looks like with the extrusion in place.
The best way to go about this was to make the bolt separated and then place it within the Boolean. I extruded the cylinder inwards to make a bowl shape within the main face, then extruding again to make a little bit of an inward wall before it touches the center circle. I then applied the Boolean technique in the place where I was going to put it originally.
The next step was making the beams that the bolts were attached to. The way I achieved this was by scaling a new cylinder polygon to a small size and aligned it from the created bolt and the duplicate version on the other side of the asset. This image of the beam going through the bolt would be fixed after to accommodate the backside of the headrest.
I placed two rectangles behind the headrest to act as the foot to where the support beams will be attached to in order for the section of the asset to be movable with ease.
These beams are created individually with cylinder polygons, with both sides of the bolt area with regards to the sides of the internal sides of the asset. I wanted to make it nicer with a bonus addition of another polygon between the two upwards supports to hold them in place even more.
Now with that addition out of the way, I think it’s time for me to UV the asset in preparation for texturing. I opened up the UV Editor and selected Automatic, making sure each shell was devoid of any unwanted seams. The most amount could probably be derived from the support beams, which I had to fix in order for the textures to appear nice and smooth in the render.
I also had seams running across the main bedsheets of the asset, from both the headrest and the main body. I selected the edge mode and made sure each face didn’t have any seams, as not to ruin the asset’s texturing process. The image below are the seams of the headrest presumably before I got rid of them.
Once all of the uninvited seams were gone and the UV sheet was layed out professionally, I went ahead and exported the selection to an FBX Export. I also made sure to include Smoothing Groupss, Smooth Mesh and Referenced Assets Content selected before I exported to the Assets folder in the asset’s directory. Now it’s time to open up Substance and bring it in for texturing.
Substance Painter
Opening the asset’s UV sheet in Substance Painter, we can start to get the right layout and materials needed for the asset to look nice in the render view, and possibly in the team game as well. The first thing that was required was to bake the asset. I hovered over to the Texture Output Settings and ensured I’d include Ambient Occlusion for the shadows to appear more detailed in the asset, in any asset that I create for the game to be fair. This image shows the ambient occlusion included within the texture channels.
Once that was out of the way, I basically got started with the asset’s appearance. For starters, I selected the fabric as that should go well with the smooth sheet of the top of the asset and scaled down the texture so that the appearance would look as nice as I wanted it to be.
I therefore expanded on the idea of the fabric by splashing some dust, dirt and dry mud on the texture so that it should give the asset some backstory and character. I repeated the same for the headrest too.
I also gave the table support an iron look and feel so that the polygons wouldn’t look out of place and untouched when it is time to apply these in Maya. I gave the table some character by adding some dust on them too, along the length of the support and across the middle where the bed would rest upon.
To give an idea of what the layers tab would look like with this asset, the image below is an example of the use of layers and black masks to organize the asset’s appearance to look right.
I also applied a coated metal texture to the beams that hold the headrest upright. This will give the asset more flare than it already has.
Once everything was alright and some tweaking had to be done, the next step was to export the textures and include the AO channel by creating a gray channel and dropping the Mixed AO converted map, changing the output name to the respective texture map. I made sure to do this on all of the other assets too in order to maintain consistency.
Here, I also made sure that the output directory for these textures should always go in the sourceimages folder in the asset folder so I would know where to find them when applying them in Maya.
Bringing It to Maya
I jumped back into Maya after that and selected the asset and assigned a new AiStandardSurface shader to it. With that now confirmed to the asset, I have options presented to me in the context of applying the different texture maps, including the BaseColour, Roughness, Metalness and Normal maps. This image show the former output map that I should always start with.
Next was the Metalness plugin. Starting with this output, I ensured to always check the Color Space and select Raw for these textures to appear nice for the render view.
With the Normal Map however, I hovered over to the Geometry tab and made to sure to select Tangent Space Normals for usage. From here, I repeated the stage-by-stage process to plugin the texture asset in the appropriate areas of the shader.
Now it is time to plug in the ambient occlusion output map into the asset. For this one, it’s a little different than doing it in the shader. I had to open up the hypershader and click on the shader for this window to pop up.
I hovered over to Utilities and selected an AiMultiply node to convert the BaseColour and AO nodes to the BaseColour of the shader. Here is the image of the shader’s connected, with the red line stretching to said shader node.
Once that was out of the way and the asset was looking as better as I wanted it to be as if it was viewed within the game, I only had to do one last major thing to it within Maya before exporting the whole asset as an FBX to Teams along with its texture maps. I created a plane polygon and moulded it in the shape of a photography screen and created an area light and a camera. I ensured myself to check for the Overscan and Resolution Gates features by going into the orthographic view and changing it to the camera perspective. From there, it was all about positioning the camera to where the asset was more detailed and suitable, and changing the area light’s intensity and exposure to something more manageable and clear to get the best result.
With regards to the render output. I implemented the Rembrandt Broad technique by positioning the area light to the right of the camera and asset, pointing directly at the latter with the shadows more noticeable on the left side of the asset.
With the rendered output out of the way, I deleted the camera, light and wall so that the asset will be the only thing on the screen. I selected all polygons within the asset, made easier by combining them, and exported to an FBX just like how I did it with the non-textured version. However, for this export specifically, I ensured the Embed Media option you see here is always ticked for the export to work fully with textures included.
Here are all of the textures for the asset on Teams for the team leader to include in the game along with the FBX that I have posted in the files.
Evaluation
Overall, I think this is a good start to developing the game’s asset in the artistic vision of the game world and settings. If I could do this again however, I would make sure the headrest is more smoother, especially on the edges as it appears sharp and jagged. I made sure to smoothen them out by pressing 3 on the keyboard, and somehow forgot to reapply the same structure back. But other than that, it’s a solid start.
How the rest of the team is doing
Beside working on the asset above, I have also checked back on my teammates to see if they have made any progress. Granted, it was Academic Support Week and not alot was going on, so it was kind of difficult for me to get in touch. I’m guessing they were busy updating, but on a small scale for this week only.
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