Planning and Research
For my environment piece i brainstormed some ideas for what to do initially, i had an idea for 2 themes/Sub themes and did some research with moodboards and even modelled a few just to get a feel for which would be best.
The first idea i had was Historical/Beauty and would be set in a Roman Garden with a fountain in the center, it would have been a courtyard in the center of a villa, with columns on every side, with foliage and the fountain in the center, it would be a garden of an afluent Roman Citizen so decor such as marble statues and vibrantly coloured mosaics would decorate the area, which means the fountain would need have to match this level of decour, it would inlcude aspects such as gold trimmings, colour and intricate stone work in order to fit in.
The moodboard above shows the designs that i found the most interesting to me due to their form, patterns and colours, what i planned to do is combine features from each different fountian to create my own design, the fountain i chose for the base is the one pictured at the top second left, with the two stautes standing eithr side, this fountain is a rendition of a structure discovered at Corbridge England, this one i started playing with first as i was going to base my environment on this location and rebuild it slightly.
I did some quick sketches of what designs i could pick and evolve, howver i ended up choosing a different theme and idea instead after further reflection, the reasons i have decided on a different theme is due to new ideas that i feel are not compatible with the model i have in mind, and so i’ve sidelined it for now.
The second i have chosen is Historic/Decay, for this one i have the idea of a greek temple worshipping one of the gods, with offerings strewn about infront of an altar, i’ve thought of some kind of plynth with a valuable offering or maybe some kind of Brazier on top, whether it is lit or not i am not sure but i went and sourced some images to see what kind of Brazier or offering designs could inspire me.
I’ve used the same process as the last theme and done some sketches mashing different designs together to jog my mind and see what i can come up with, i decided to incorporate some patterns into my designs just to add some more character and surface detail to the asset to make it look closer to the period i’m trying to emulate as most Braziers throughout time look the exact same.
I made a couple of varinats for both the base and Brazier of the model and then took some though as to which combination i would us, i settled on the 4th brazier design and the first plynth, i did initially consider the second brazier design for the second plynth design however the end result would have left the model looking rather elongated and freakishly high, i liked that the first base was blocky and wide and the round body of the 4th brazier countered that with it’s round base to make a more pleasing form, i think what makes the design unique for the theme is the foliage for th base to indicate overgrowth, the chipped paint on the pattern for the brazier to show long term wear and parts of the brazier missing or chipped, i wanted to convey looters that have come to plunder where the brazier is located and people have taken treasures and pieces of the altar to sell or use for other purposes, the materials for the model will be, Marbel for the base, i am thinking of some white marbel with black veins with the marble being scuffed to show weathering, for the Brazier i am thinking of making it from brass as from my research, greek braziers were commonly made from brass like many other creations of the time.
I’ve made this model a center piece as it will be placed in a temple devoted to Zeus, with offerings strewn around it, it will placed specifically in the Adyton of the temple which was an area at the end of the cella, the Adyton was a space where only priests, priestesses, oracles and Acolytes could enter, members of the general public could not enter this space, depictions of the god being worshipped such as a statue was typically placed in front of these spaces.
Before finalising my design and moving to the technical stage i did some more planning on what kind of Greek Key Pattern i would have for my brazier, as well as what specific kind of marble and such i would choose for the main body.
For the pattern i chose this wave form.
For the marble i have chosen Blanco Cararra an Italina Marble, it fits the description i had in mind when concepting the asset, for the Brazier i am settling for brass howver due to the age of the brazier and it’s condition i would need to add some edits to the texture such as decreasing the specular as aged brass has a matt appearance due to it’s dullness,
Modelling and Texturing
To begin i started with the base of the model by creating a primitive cube, i then used the extrude face tool and extruded the top face inwards and pulled it up to create the first base step, i then repeated this process once more to create the second level of steps, once the steps were created i extruded the top face upwards to create the basic body.
With the base body extruded upwards i then started face extruding each side of the body and scaling them down to create the rectangular indentations on the model While doing so i added some bevelling on the sides as some of the dges will be used for the gold trimmings i have in mind, the faces i have extruded inwards will be gold as well while the steps will be kept as marble.
For the upper section of the model i added some bevelling to the lower half of one of the sections and then increased the segments and the fractions to curve it inwards, i then addes some edge loops in certain areas to improve the curvature and make it cleaner and more curved as it lookd a bit uneven on some of the sides, this section will be marble textured, i also extruded a face close to the bottom and extruded it and added some bevels as this section is where some of my gold trimming is going to be textured in substance.
I added one more extrusion close to the top and then one more set of rectangular faces for the coloured lining i’m going to be adding and then that is the body of the model done and ready for the brazier model to be added on top, i was ready to add the foliage that i concepted in the concept however it was a technical challeneg i wasn’t sure how to accomplish to a competent standard and i did’t want it taking too much time off my process so i had to cut it from the design.
For the Brazier i selected a primitive sphere object and then entered the side view perspective and cut off the top half in face mode, this left a hollow bowl shape that i could then start sculping with, i extruded the top edges for the fins of the brazier and rotated them backwards to give them that maluable metallic feel for when i add The brass texturing.
I added the grill holes on the body and then used the edge loop tool to add some vertexes to some of the top edges of the fins so i could then manipulate the edge to make it look chipped and damaged, once that was completed i selected all the faces inside the brazir and extruded them inwards to add thickness to the model, this inverted the normals o the model entirely leaving it black, to remedy this i selected the whole model and used the Reverse tool to reverse the normals entirely leaving he model looking normal again.
I added some divisions near the top of the brazier where the pattern is going to be, i extruded the shape of the pattern on the mdoel and the deleted the excess faces to save poly count and uneeded topology for when i start the UV Mapping process, the last part of the model i needed to create was the feet, i flattened the bottom of the brazier dince it was a sphere and then extruded a ring shape for the bottom base, i then extruded three legs from the side and finnished off by beveling the legs and all other parts of the model, i also did some further work on some parts of the body just as some bit of polish to make it look metallic with dents and ueven surfaces.
Before exporting to Substance i UV unwrapped the model and started organising my UVs for texturing, i used the 3d cut and sew tool and started cutting the faces and laying them out on my UV Tiles, since i wanted high quality for the textures and didn’t want the textures in substance looking blurry i created multiple UDIM tiles for the model so that i could increase the texel density for certain faces, the more squares there are the more detailed your textures will be.
This part of the creation process was quite fiddly and took a lot of my time to get right as i wasn’t too aware of Uv mapping principles and so made a few mistakes when creating, i for one forgot to increase the number of tiles in the setting that would allow me to black mask textures onto the model since i had unwrapped shells on maps that substance coudln’t detect becuase i hadn’t set up multiple UDIM Tiles, i also neglected the texel density stage at one point and so all of my textures were at different resolutions when i imported into substance painter, all of these isues i worked around just looking further into the resources more but i feel it is worth mentioning what i struggled with during the process.
When importing into Substance i selected the 4K resolution option for the model and then ticked the use UV tile workflow so i could work on multiple uv tiles that i created, once the model was opened i began setting up the texturing by firstly baking the texture maps, i set the resolution once again to 4K and also increased anti aliasing to higher quality, once done i baked the model and then i could begin painting.
Most of the texturing i did was via smart masks as i wanted the best quality placement technical wise, howwever i didn’t just place them and call it done, i modified the smart masks to my liking changing colour roughness and dirt levels, the first mask used was the gold, i used a damaged gold texture and started modifying the dirt and roughness levels, i increased roughuness as well as slightly increasing dirt and scratches since my environment for this will be in a cave environment.
I black masked the texture on the model which is basically a way of choosing what on the mdoel gets textured if you want it in a specific place, i want gold on the trims and edges as seen above so the black mask was very useful in achieving this.
I followed this same process for all the other textures until i got the finished piece, this piece once finished i exported to Maya through the export option in the file menu, i exported the model with it’s textures and UV tiles and once back in Maya i imported the textures from susbstance and began applying it to my model.
Maya Renders and Wireframe
When making the video render i ran into issues getting the 20 second mark and i’m not sure of what’s caused the hitch, when making the render and testing it in FCheck it runs at the designated 20 seconds however when exporting to video software the time is much longer and each still frame is 5 seconds each with 600 frames total, i’m not sure what the fix is and have tried looking and investigating but i unfortunately couldn’t find a fix for this and so the video is way over the requested time.