And we're back to the Watermill...

Hola  :)  Project Duality is losing a wee bit of momentum for the time being because we just can't seem to find a steady programmer.  So I'm going to take a break from trying my hand at things like programming and scripting and instead try to make some progress on my actual skill set.  Duality is still alive and well mind you, it's just taking a nap.

So it was suggested to me to pick up the Old Watermill project back from where I left off (thanks Rachael!) and I thought that was a great idea.  As it's been a little while since I last worked on it, I thought I should jump back into it by creating an environment prop asset list and get warmed up to art again on things like barrels, grain sacks, bear traps, etc.

I decided the first asset to attack would be a simple barrel and I'm fairly pleased with the result:

My modeling skills are rusty but still very weak so I opted to model a High Poly barrel, transfer the Normal and AO maps in Maya, and then texture the Low Poly with Allegorithmic's Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Bitmap2Material.  Have I ever mentioned how much I love Allegorithmic?  Yeah, they're awesome.

I won't bore you with the details of the modeling process since this is a pretty simple object.  Here is the High Poly version.

And the High Poly wireframe.  I did a mini kit-bash for the rivets after re-watching some great tutorials on 3dMotive.  I will be getting more in depth with that technique in future projects.

For the Low Poly I didn't bother re-topologizing because the object is so simple.  Instead I just modeled it in ortho view from a cylinder.

And wireframe.  A little heavy on the polys but meh.

Transfer mapping took me a couple hours to figure out good settings and to get the best UV unwrap to maximize my texture space.  This is the final HP Normal map.  There are some odd artifacts on the top and bottom of the barrel and the rivets kept baking into the Y plane of the metal bands.  I couldn't figure out how to stop that from happening completely, but I did reduce the problem by tightening up the Low Poly mesh to the High Poly.  I was taking too much time on it though so I eventually opted to move forward with texturing.

And the AO.

I purchased Substance Painter when the Beta was first released earlier this year but had yet to really dive into it.  This little project seemed like a great way to get my feet wet in learning the software and its possibilities.  After a few hours of tutorials and some research, I downloaded a couple textures from cgtextures.com, adjusted and tiled them in PhotoShop, refined and baked Diffuse, NRM, and Height maps in Bitmap2Material, and then imported them as stencils in Painter.

oldWood_Diffuse

 rustedMetal_Diffuse

And then Substance Painter: import

 After two passes at base texture and materials:

And a quick worn paint and dirt pass:

It took me 2 days to model, UV unwrap, transfer maps, and learn Substance Painter.  Actually texturing and taking Marmoset renders afterwards took only 2 hours.  I gotta say, I'm becoming an Allegorithmic fan-boy  :)  There's a good possibility that the 3 products I own from them will replace all other software in my pipeline with the exception of PhotoShop -- still gotta edit images...for now.

I will cobble together the maps I created for this asset in a finalized format soon, for now it's late and I gotta work early tomorrow.  Till then thanks for reading and it's good to be back!