Coffee Cup
The purpose of this post section is to highlight the reference images used in creation of the coffee cup asset, the process of making the asset in Maya, and my overall thoughts and improvements on it.
Reference Images
I really like how the edges of this particular cup has some bevel touched upon it, as there are no hard surfaces especially on the lid and it’s cylinder coat in the middle.
The textures on the coat of the cup is something I enjoy about this image, as it has a grainy and noisy feel to how they look. You can also see the vertical lines so faintly into the design of it too. I’m hoping to recreate that in Maya.
What I like about this image is that the coated material around the cup’s cylindrical curves has a pattern that I really like. I’m hoping to put something like that into the design of my own coffee cup.
Process
I got started by creating a basic cylinder polygon and scaling it so that the faces in-between the main circles wouldn’t be seen. What I needed to do first was delete all of the edges on top of the cylinder so that only one face remains and selected all edges to extrude them upwards to look something like this.
I then moved all of the edges away and scaled the object in the shape of a cup. I then made another cylinder polygon and extruded the faces on top, extruding them and giving them an offset of 0.15 to look like this.
I proceeded to make a little extrusion on the front of the lid to act as where the person would drink from the cup. I achieved this by selecting where I want the edge loops to be and selecting the new faces to extrude them down a little. You can just see where the cut-off point is here.
However, before I could do more on the cup lid, I selected the faces from beneath the shape and gave them a 0.15 offset before extruding them in to make more of a realistic looking lid. I retracted back up to the top and carefully made two manual edge loops across the lid. I ensured that it wouldn’t be in the middle, just somewhere where the polygon edges on the wall-like structure can intersect. I selected every face on the uneven side and extruded them downwards to give the lid more detail. It should look something like this.
When someone eventually takes off the lid to look at the liquid contents, I wanted them to drink the cup with a smooth surface instead of sipping on a hard surface. The way I achieved this was by making a taurus polygon and scaling it down and changing its radius to make it more thinner. I then used the scale tool to get it to the right shape and once I was satisfied, I scaled the whole thing down to fit in with the edges of the cup.
The last thing I had to model for the cup was a cylinder that would act as the noised coat that would encompass the majority of the coffee cup. I basically scaled down a cylinder polygon and gave it a tiny offset number so the side faces wouldn’t be shown to the average person. I scaled the polygon down and aligned it to where I wanted it on the asset, making sure I frantically fit it on the cup. I finally got it to where I wanted it after some time. Here’s what the polygon should look like after it’s isolated.
Once that was finished, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do now, so I went ahead and exported it as an FBX to texture the asset.
Substance Painter
Before getting started on applying the texture to the cup, I searched in the Texture Set Settings and included the ambient occlusion map for the detailed shadows on the asset. This will make the cup more nicer in the render. I went ahead and baked the asset before looking in the materials shelf for a soft texture that would act as the body of the cup. I settled on an artificial leather type of material that would be displayed in the image below.
I also had to make the lid a separate material as I didn’t want it to blend in with the leather, so I assigned a plastic stripes texture onto the mesh and scaled the attributes down to a size I was comfortable with while also showing the faint lines of the material, like here.
Now it’s time to texture the cup’s coated polygon. I wondered how it would look as I scanned the reference images I have used to see how it should look like. Alot if not all had the same hard leather texture that was typically for the polygon of this design. I ultimately settled on a leather bag texture and ensured it’s scale and rotation was satisfactory scaled down to make it more like a coat for the cup more than anything else. I also complemented the final design by giving the polygon a beige colour to keep in line with the reference images.
One more quick glance at the asset and it should be alright for me to export the textures into Maya. I hopped into the Output settings and ensured to include the ambient occlusion as I will need that for later. Once everything else was double checked, I exported the textures and went back into Maya to plug them all in.
Bringing Into Maya
I assigned the coffee cup an AiStandardSurface shader and ensured to follow the steps as I did with the previous assets, by clicking on the checkerboard options in the BaseColour, Metalness and Roughness nodes you see in the image below and plugging the right texture maps in. I did the same thing with the Normal map, though I had to select the drop down to use Tangent Space Normals before I could plug in the required map.
The output result should look something like this. Fair to say is, I’m proud that I’ve pulled this off. Not only does it look clean, but you tell where the textures are shown in the image.
The next step was to test how the asset looked in the IPR render view. I made a camera and an Arnold area light, pointing them both at the coffee cup and changing the light’s exposure and intensity to make the cup look nicer. I saved the image and had a look at it, but something I did not know was that by enabling the Color Management option in the save settings, the asset would turn out the way you have set it rather than it being dark. I made sure this was turned on for all of my other assets too.
Now that was out of the way, it is time to light the coffee cup up in different lighting techniques.
Evaluation
In terms of difficulty, this was one of the more easy assets to make. I wish there was more to say other than it looks great for a design of its type. The only minor gripe I have is making the texture on the lid slightly bigger for it to see better in the viewport. I’ll take notes of that in future improvements. Other than that, it looks fine.
Support Bollards & Rope
The section of this post is to detail the reference images used to support the creation of the support bollards and rope asset, the process of me developing the asset and the thoughts of what went well and what didn’t go well in addition to what could be improved upon in the future.
Reference Images
I quite like the design of the bollards itself in this image. They don’t have the typically ball-shaped ends at the top like most do. Instead, it’s more of a curved polygon resembling sort of a small cup. That will be taken into the notes in my version.
What I enjoy about this image is that the bollards appear to be coated in a golden-like texture with its reflection being its most noticeable feature. Another thing to point out is that the right-most support at the bottom of the asset appear to look straight by this angle to give you the illusion that it’s modelled that way, while the left bollard’s support looks completely fine without the illusion. If possible, I will try to emulate this with my design.
I quite like the colour choice of the rope. It goes to show you can use various colours with whatever you can choose for the rope. I also like the reflection that the bollards give off, especially towards the top of the cylindrical object. You can make out where the image was taken if you look at the reflection close enough. This will give me an idea on how rough I want the final design to be.
Process
I got started by dragging in a cylinder polygon and scaling it to be thin. I selected the faces on the top half and extruded and scaled the asset to make some sort of a flying saucer shape. Another extrusion allowed me to make the start of the long support leg that would act as a barrier for the asset. By extruding the faces and dragging the new polygons upwards, I was able to create a small obstacle for people to watch out for. It should look something like this.
I stretched it out as far and extruded the top faces to make a larger cylinder for the end. I then extruded those faces and scaled it inwards a bit. What you also see is a ring orbiting around the end of the leg, which was possible by making a taurus polygon and scaling its size and radius down to a small and comfortable size to make a ring. I then positioned it around the end point of the leg to make the asset look nicer upon the final stages of rendering.
Back at the top, I then made a spherical polygon and placed it in the center of the gap face from the cylinder to look like this.
I then duplicated the support and the ring and moved it along the X axis as to connect both with the rope. Speaking of which, I had never actually made a rope prior to doing this, so I had to check how to make one. I found a method used by an expert on how to create a rope. I basically made my own take on this using this method. This was achieved by making four cylinder polygons and ensuring they had a single polygon face like so.
I then grouped them together and created a CV Curve Tool after I snapped the polygons to the center of the grid and clicked above them to make the start of my rope. I wanted the length of the rope to be moderate, so I hit Enter after I had finished to outline the rope path in green. Once I was done tweaking the path using the vertex mode for a path I was happy with, I jumped back into the main viewport and selected the faces of the circles and the path. I then had to get the cylinders to extrude outward to follow the rope path I had created, so I went to Edit Mesh and clicked on Extrude for the cylinders’ start and end points of the rope path where I wanted it to be.
From there, I increased the subdivisions on the rope for the cylinders to follow the rope path to create a nice looking flow around the path. However, it didn’t look much like a rope rather than four cylinder polygons all heading toward the end point in a straight flow, so I enabled the Twist option and put a very high value, presumably between 1,000 and 2,000 to get a nice look rope. Now all that was left to do was to move and scale the end points to a comfortable distance and size.
By that, what I mean is creating a suction cup for the rope’s end point to be encapsulated in. I basically scaled a cylinder polygon down and extruded its faces to make a curved, doing the same thing again for the walls. It should resemble something like this now.
I wanted to make this suction cup polygon look nice, so I created another taurus polygon, scaled it and changed its radius to attach to the cup. I extruded the cup’s bottom face scaled the whole section. I repeated the process until the cup’s attachment was completed. Now I had to created a new face with edge loops around on the flat surface and extruded that outwards for where the ring was going to be attached. It should look like this now.
I carefully and slowly aligned the end of the rope with the inside of the suction cup to ensure that the polygons stayed inside and also had to make sure that they don’t glitch through the cup. I found this to be a comfortable size. I also needed to delete half of the rope and mirror the whole thing to get a perfect result on the other side.
I had to change the ball top’s connection with the bollard because I now know that parts of the ball would be glitched inside and with a keen eye, wouldn’t look good in the render view. So I had to move the ball upwards and delete the downward faces. Moving it back down, I selected vertex mode and merged the verts with the ball and the bollard on each side to get a satisfactory result.
The asset should be all ready to texture now. I went into the UV Editor and laid out all of the UV shells for the asset. What’s interesting that I have found a trick with how to UV the sphere’s correctly. I unitized the polygon so that there wouldn’t be seams across the top half of the sphere. I manually had to select where the seam was going to go before stitching the ball together and UV’ing along the U and V lines to get a perfect spherical UV shell. I also applied the same method to the rope polygons so that the criteria would be met. Now I had to export the asset as an FBX and I’m all set.
Substance Painter
Once I was in Substance, my number one priority was to make sure to bake the asset with the ambient occlusion channel set up with the rest of the output maps. This is what is should look like.
I coated the two bollards in a nice and rough aluminum texture to give off a neat reflection upon looking at the object.
Now it was time for the rope. I spent some time on this one figuring out what texture to place on these polygons. It had to be fabric, as I scanned every fabric material and settled with this one because the two colours can be changed to whatever is preferred. I’ve focused more of the colour red and a lighter shade of the same colour as you can see below.
I also gave the suctions cups and it’s attached ring different textures and coloured them in black and light grey respectively. This is how it looks now.
I think that’s all that there is needed for the asset, so I exported the textures and ensured that I included the ambient occlusion output map in the templates like so and set it to grayscale as with the other assets I have made. The output should look something like this.
Bringing Into Maya
Like with all of the other assets, I assigned a new AiStandardSurface shader to the asset and began with plugging in the BaseColour texture by selecting the checkerboard option, then file, and choosing the output file I have saved into my C: Drive. As with all of the previous assets, I made extra caution as to back up my textures by storing them on Box and on the lab’s network drives within my student account so I would know where to find them when I needed them. Next up was the Metalness, so I repeated the process again and changed the colour space to Raw so that the texture would look nicer in the render view and stayed consistent throughout.
The same applied to the Roughness map, as I selected the file that matched the attribute and selected Raw as its colour space. The Normal map was also the same but with the usage as Tangent Space Normals selected as an addition. Finally, I had to plug in the ambient occlusion. I jumped into the hypershader and dragged the AO map in to convert it with the BaseColour. For this, I’ve adopted the same principle by creating an AiMultiply utility and connecting the two texture maps to plug into the shader’s Base Colour. That should do the trick.
The asset should look something like this now. A quick fix to the bollards as the roughness was not displaying correctly which meant that I had to apply a Blinn material to both to capture the same roughness even though it felt of a lesser quality render. It should be fine for me to put some lighting effects to it now.
Evaluation
I think the simplistic design of the bollards and rope went pretty well from what I can gather. Though as previously mentioned, the roughness texture for the bollards after plugging it in was a little shoddy and pretty much disabled the requirement for the shiny rough material to be applied. As an alternative, a Blinn material was used since that was also shiny. I think for a lesson for next time, I will look into the fixes of when plugging a texture in can go wrong. That’s pretty much the only major issue I had with the asset, it looks fine nonetheless.
Leave a Reply