Pipeline

Today I wanted to sort out my pipeline and see what sort of problems there could be with it, I still need to create a nice looking version on photoshop but I tested my pipeline today and everything works quite well, there will be alterations depending on what I'm modelling depending on whether its organic or manmade but the bulk of the process is shown here.

Maya

For the sake of speed considering this was just a test I didn't draw the piece before starting to model it which I'm aware is bad practice and the concept drawings will be an important part of the actual pipeline, basically the idea I wanted to present was a planet much like earth being split in half with an oozey lava centre representing how we stretch and strain the planet we live on.

I created this first by creating a sphere and maneuvering the vertices and adding edge loops, then extruding every other row in the centre keeping in mind how this would translate into the other programs and how it could be used with a twist later in Cinema 4D.

I then mapped the entire model before exporting it as an OBJ in to mudbox. 

Mudbox

This was probably the most lengthy stage and is where all the detail on the model was sculpted and textured, as I mentioned earlier the process would vary depending on the model, but because this piece was organic most of the work was done in mudbox.

 

I sculpted out the geometry of the planet intentionally making it exaggerated, I then used grab to alter the middle sections to get a shape I was happied with though in hindsight it would have been faster to do so in Cinema 4D. I then painted the whole model starting with the base colours (orange and blue), then I painted in the other major colors (green, brown and white) using a smaller paint brush and the drybrush tool, once this was done I simple went over the whole model adding in more detail with the airbrush and blur, both are very good tools for finalising the colours in a scene and adding little pieces of detail. below is the finished texture map.

Normally I would then take this into photoshop and fix anything messy and play about with filers and different layers to achieve a look that I liked but in this case because I wasn't even sure that the texture would work properly I was happy enough to just continue and get it into Cinema 4D. I exported the model as an FBX and exported the texture as a JPG.

Cinema 4D

At this point I opened the model in Cinema 4D and started to play about with it, first I tried variations of connect and poly reduction, unfortuneately poly reduction completely destroys the texture map no matter what way it is applied but luckily connect does not.

 poly reduction

 poly reduction and connect

connect

I then started using various effects to start achieving the visual design that I wanted the labeled results are shown below.

 Wind

Twist

 Twist + Displacement 1

  Twist + Displacement 2

Glow and Bulge (inward) 1

 Glow and Bulge (inward) 2

Here is the final Cinema 4D render where I have added a Sun and Moon, this may not seem necessary for a test but it was also to see if when exporting multiple objects in a scene how they would come across in UDK. I exported the scene as an FBX.

UDK

Finally I imported the scene into UDK content browser and was surprised to find that everything imported fine with the only error being that there was no smoothing information but this was expected since I deleted the smoothing information. The only problem was that It did not export the materials or textures properly, meaning that I will need to always create my textures on mudbox and photoshop.

To get around the texture problem I simply imported the texture seperately, above you can see the broken materials that are shown simply as block colors, you can also see that the sun and moon have also imported correctly and seperately.

Although there were some errors when building the scene most of them were light related, one problem that I notice was that some faces have their normals reversed but only odd ones here and there, to fix this off the top of my head I would bring the model into maya and correct the normals but there may be a more efficient way. below is the piece in UDK, I was pleasantly surprised by how it looked I was very worried there would be more issues and that the faceted abstracted 3D would not look good in engine.

So in summary my pipeline is:

1. Concept drawings (visualise piece)

2. Maya (mock up the rough form and map)

3. Mudbox (sculpt and paint until the desired model is achieved)

4. Photoshop (polish texture)

5. Cinema 4D (convert to faceted lower poly model and shape it using the various tools available)
6. UDK ( place object within engine)

and heres a render I did for fun