Day 14 – SF Sharabha unwrapped

12/02/2020 – I’ve gotten the Shivan fighter, the “Sharabha”, to a spot where I’m pretty darn pleased with it. Click the link below to view a p3d of the ship.

The big task that consumed much of the last two weeks was a lot of learning the old fashioned way, by making lots of mistakes. I’ve always wanted to combine my models down to a single mesh – as if I was going to 3d print it. This was an opportunity to learn a whole lot about Maya in a big hurry. I had to spend a fair amount of time going back through my incremental saves to rebuild parts of the geometry as the unwrapping had gotten too complicated where the components had intersected one another. A key part of unwrapping is trying to group like components so that the same texture can be painted onto all of them – but I’d made it much harder for myself.

The next big task was shaking the rust off of my UVing skills and tactics. Maya has a number of useful tools for this but its tendancy to remember the full history of what has been done to an object meant that I’d bring my computer to a halt by having it remember 40 hours of continuous UV work. Regularly deleting history is important.

Crashes also claimed more than their fair share of my time, so a summary of lessons learned:

• Do not boolean any meshes together unless necessary
• When sub meshes are complete (gun muzzles, wings, aerials, small repeating details) they should be unwrapped. Then they can be duplicated at will across the mesh without disturbing any of the unwrapping
• If lights are going to be baked into the textures, then any of these sub meshes are going to be affected by the lighting need to have their own dedicated unwrapping. Imagine a row of identical houses, some in the shadow of a mountain and some not.
• Always Be Saving

Of the other November projects I worked a good deal on a pair of detail modules for the big Shivan worldship, meant to be an eldritch alien crystal and an industrial facility. Renders to be posted below – clicking should show nice big 2048 renders. These two objects also are their own tales of woe – they’re designed to be tiled out, but the method I was intending to use for duplicating this geometry across the worldship will not duplicate lights – so just like with the fighter, these will need to be unwrapped (at least somewhat) and textured to get the sparkling lights visible.

The objective with these modules is to use a common rectangular baseplate that will tile nicely and provide a variety of recognizable and alien shapes and lights. I have planned a few more variants – shipyards and major docking bays and residential modules. Due to the sheer size of the worldship, it’d also be good if the geometry was compelling enough to be a setpiece for a level, so that’s another reason to ensure that they’re interesting to look at.