For this project, I originally had ambitions of rendering out my assets in the Unreal Engine and Blender in the form of still images. I found this to be a little too ambitious to learn on top of Substance Painter and Maya. I have used Blender in the past but did find that the node editor overly complicated when compared to Blender’s fairly simplistic approach to applying textures.

Luckily for me, Sketchfab provides a good look at the models I’ve created in a similar manner to a video game engine. Because of this, I found that using Sketchfab to showcase my work is the best course of action, besides being interactive for viewers and assessors to look at and analyse.

Following my electronic press kit, I decided that the best place to showcase my work would be on ArtStation as it allows artists to show their work in a professional manner without the need to have a fully created website. It also allows for Sketchfab models, pictures and videos to all be shown in one page.

Link to the final output Artstation page.

In order to bring the textures from substance painter into Maya and apply them to the model for rendering, I used the Arnold renderer. For this, I started by applying an Arnold standard surface material to the barrel.

From here, I could input the texture maps into the subsections of the material. I found Maya to handle this really easy as a lot of the sections were easy to find and allowed for me to easily input the maps.

After this, I added an Arnold skydome light. This provided a plain white background for the renders as well as evenly lighting the model. For the render settings, I used png as the output with Arnold renderer being selected for use.  I also selected 1920x1080p resolution to provide a high quality still to display my work.

When texturing in substance painter, I would start with my shape in Maya, normally starting with either a cube or a cylinder and extruding faces until I was happy with the result. Here I have created a barrel for my ship corridor scene using a cylinder. It’s not majorly intricate but with the use of substance painter, it can look a lot better and provide a sense of realism.

As someone new to UV mapping, I found that Maya’s automatic UV mapping provided a good enough UV map for the assets I was creating. Here, this is exactly what I’ve done, other methods such as cutting along vertices, however, I found this to be too time-consuming for the number of assets I was looking to create.

With the UV map done, I exported the object as an fbx file. I then opened this in Substance Painter and baked the curvature map. Baking the curvature map allows the user to add edge wear to the assets with a realistic look. Finding out how to do this changed my approach to texturing.

Here’s what the barrel looked like on a basic level. I used the base colour as being black and added the rust above it as an edge wear generator using the curvature map. Although the results aren’t the best, they’re still satisfactory for what I’m wanting to do. I can also export the textures in a higher resolution from Substance painter.

As part of the project, everyone doing the media production course has had to produce an electronic press kit. EPK’s are produced in order to show investors how the project is going, to try and secure funding on a project or in order for news outlets to be provided with something that they can showcase when talking about the project. For mine, I created a title card with a description of the overall project, that being the game as well as a short video showing off my assets.

Link to my EPK.

From establishing the backstory for the game/film, I have compiled a mood board for the tone I want to establish when developing the items. I want settings to look as though they were reclaimed by nature, bricks and buildings slowly being torn apart by growth. I think this gives me an opportunity to consider how life and construct interact with one another. Having a setting densely populated with trees and humidity can cause the metal to rust and break. Choosing a setting like this was intentional as it gives me an opportunity to explore conditioning on items and props.

I’ve also decided to look into concept art for alien technology and weaponry. Smooth surfaces and curves, bringing an overwhelming sense of futuristic to the world. Alien technology can be created from elements not known to Earth so coming up with a set of rules for the elements to follow will give me the chance to really explore fantasy and really practice world building.

Artist Simon Stalenhag typically explores themes of alien arrival and how their technology interacts with our own. It creates interesting narratives in simple paintings that say everything and yet nothing. In one frame, ten years of narrative can be constructed. He is definitely someone I want to analyse to assist with world building. If he can create a whole story in one painting, analysing how a prop fits into the bigger picture and how it influences other things is exactly what I’m trying to do.

I have assembled a Pinterest board to use as  reference material, making sure that I can keep referring to it when I construct the items and make sure they are in touch with the themes and narratives I want. Pinterest board