Seeing how long this process was going to take me, I cut back the pillar even further to just three cubes and a small section of tree. After decimating and retopologising the medium-poly damaged sections into the cubes, I retopologised the tree using the quad draw function to ensure nice, clean edge loops and to cut out unnecessary triangles. This took some time and I was glad of the fact that I had cut the model back so much - this section was only about a third of the original model, if that.
After this I UV mapped and baked each of the cubes and the tree separately. While the texture distribution wasn't perfect - I would have liked to assign more detail to the tree - it did break up nicely into four 1024x1024 maps. There were some brief issues I encountered where there were n-gons on the low-poly models that I hadn't seen, and another when maya was exporting .mtl files as well as .objs which confused me during the baking stage, but both were quickly resolved.
At this point I ran a little over time into the next week, as I needed advice on how to get the normal maps to work properly in UE4, the issue being that I needed to assign different materials to my models in maya before exporting. After that however it was a quick task to bring the assets into the engine and get everything working, including the third person character for scale, and I think the final model is really effective - especially after I added some diffuse colours and adjusted the roughness values.
If I have extra time in the future, I would maybe look at making some more maps like albedo or ambient occlusion to pull everything together, but for the time I had for this project I'm very happy with what I produced.
(I also had a look at some of the engine's particle effects to see how I could make use of them to make an effective scene.)
Life drawing
A fairly standard session this week, trying to focus on being more decisive with my lines and keeping things loose. To that effect I used charcoal for this session to force myself to commit to what I was doing, and I think I produced some nice work, although I still need to be faster with these quick sketches.
The next two studies were focusing on experimenting with mark making and being a little more expressive with the pieces. I found the first one to be enjoyable and it helped me to loosen up and stop being precious about my drawing, but the second study threw me a little, using only vertical lines. I usually start with a base skeleton and gesture lines when drawing, and not having those I feel like my proportions were very out. I also like to be fluid with my mark making, and this went very much against that. That said I recognise the merit of being pushed out of my comfort zone, and it did force me to think about how I draw and how I construct my figures.
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