Modelling - workflow
Greg Klassen Coffee Table
This asset was the most complex out of rest as it was a hard surface mesh with loads of organic curves and details. Here's a step by step break down of how i made the mesh.
1. Bitmap to mesh
- Gathered image references.
- Used Photoshop to separate layers and create black and white bitmap image using orthographic image.
- Used Bitmap to mesh in Maya to generate a quick and high poly dirty mesh on a plane using a black and white image.
2. Retopology
- Use ZRemesher and Remesher guides in Zbrush to generate to generate better, all quad topology.
- Manually perform re-topology in Maya to optimise and generate a base mesh.
3. Sculpting
- Use sculpting tools in orthographic view to align the mesh to reference image much better.
- Add additional edge-loops for to retain hard edges for Subdivision and Sculpt the details in Zbrush.
4. Export
Environment
Sony Projector
UV MAPping
UDIM Implementation
Since the Substance painter does not support UDIM tiles properly, I decided not to implement multiple UV tiles for the coffee table since I'd need to texture the whole object at once. As of now, you can only texture one UDIM tile at a time within Substance Painter.
For rest of the meshes excluding the coffee table, around 3-4 UV tiles per mesh will be assigned to maximise resolution and render quality. Some meshes with lots of close up parts such as the turntable had 6 tiles just out of necessity for higher texture resolution.
I'm aware in the industry the number of UV tiles used will be much higher, but due to the nature of Arnold, small updates to the scene causes it to remake the .tx files before rendering. Having more tiles mean much higher times to re-convert the maps into .tx files. 1 additional UV tile means 5 additional maps, a larger number would end up being impractical especially running IPR during render optimisation.
The UVs for the rest of the assets were done in Maya. There were more islands on these to maximise tile space efficiency with the cost of more seams. I spent less time on the UV layout as it didn't need many hand painted details from the 2D view.
Braun L450
Dayton Audio Sub-1200
Environment
Sony Projector
Texturing
TEXTURE RESOLUTION
Due to my relatively low number of assets, most of the maps are 4K as I feel it strikes a good balance between file-size and quality for 1080p delivery.
There were few exceptions to this, When things were extremely small or further away from the camera, I used 2K maps and when the geometry was huge 8K maps were used. Since Arnold uses Mipmaps there is the flexibility of doing wide shots and close ups using the same maps.
SHADING & PBR IMPLEMENTATION
Since I'll be using Arnold 4 for rendering, I'll using a Metal/Roughness workflow in Substance Painter since a metallic channel is required to convert it to a f0 Map, and all the other channels will be converted easily using the Arnold 4 preset in Substance Painter.
I plan to use AiStandard and AlSurface shaders. Both has the Same inputs except for f0, for which the Al Surface equivalent is Fresnel which is controlled by the IOR.
These are the maps I'll be using
- Diffuse
- Specular
- Roughness
- f0 (Reflectance at Normal)
- Bump Mapping
Greg Klassen Coffee Table - TexturingWorkflow
- Process images in Photoshop by Sharpening, Removing Noise and Jpeg Artefacts, to create high resolution images. Save as PSDs to avoid unnecessary compression.
- Bake the Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Curvature and Thickness maps using the high poly model within Substance.
- Use Bitmap2Map to generate 4K Base Colour, Roughness and Normal maps.
- Use the Generated maps from Bitmap2Map to project colour, roughness and Normal Information.
- Cleanup any gaps left in the projection by manually painting and using the clone-stamp tool.
- Export 4K maps for the Outputs mentioned above.
ENVIRONMENT
FLOOR
SHELVES