With the texturing completed in Adobe Substance painter, I could render Compton’s character model.
ZBRUSH RENDERING
I decided to additionally do some greyscale renders of Compton’s model in ZBrush to show the model without textures. Making use of ZBrush’s BPR render mode, I rendered a full turntable that can be seen below and additional BPR stills.
USING MAYA’S ARNOLD RENDERING
In Autodesk Maya, I applied the texture files taken from Adobe Substance Painter and started setting them up within the Hypershade material editor following Adobe’s guide (Adobe, 2021). I decided to follow Academic Phoenix Plus’ tutorial on setting up studio lighting (Academic Phoenix Plus, 2020), which I slightly edited for my model and prepared my model to be rendered using the Viper render farm.
Unfortunately, this did not work as intended, as every time I clicked the Viper shelf plugin to send the render job, Maya crashed entirely, leading me to record my character’s turntable by following a separate tutorial by Academic Phoenix Plus on rendering out a video (Academic Phoenix Plus, 2021).
USING SUBSTANCE PAINTER’S IRAY FOR RENDERING
The turntable successfully captures the character model, but for the close-up details on Compton’s model, Maya appeared to be struggling. I was unsure as to whether this was due to a setting in the Arnold render that was limiting the detailing, something relating to the hardware of my computer or just a temporary issue, which led to me using Substance Painter’s IRAY to capture the details that Maya was struggling with at the time of capturing the footage.
Rendering the stills within IRAY was relatively easy and took around 1 minute and 30 seconds for each still which can be seen below. As I still had the save files from working on Compton’s textures, I did not have to re-apply the textures to the model and could render from the point that I had left.
REFLECTION
Overall, I’m very happy with my design as I feel as though the character model that I’ve created fits the original design whilst additionally expanding on it further, such as adding indented sections to her body armour. I feel as though Compton’s character design fits within a dystopian/cyberpunk-inspired game and would be a character that the player could rely on during their experience. With the number of technical issues that I’ve had during this project, I’m proud of how I have managed to solve the majority of them and the final product created.
There are some areas that I would like to revise before animating Compton, such as solving why the pattern that can be seen when baking the high poly version onto the low poly version is occurring and redoing the retopology for the legs and the holster to make it appear smoother, which I feel would improve the model.
Referenced Material:
Academic Phoenix Plus (2020) Quickly Create Studio Lighting in Maya 2020 for Modern Furniture. www.youtube.com. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI81pK9KsME&t= [Accessed 16 Jan. 2023].
Academic Phoenix Plus (2021) How To Render High Quality Video in Maya (Basic). www.youtube.com. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ht_Gp6P9DY&t=737s [Accessed 16 Jan. 2023].
Adobe (2021) Substance guide to Rendering in Arnold for Maya on Substance 3D Tutorials. substance3d.adobe.com. Available online: https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials/courses/Substance-guide-to-Rendering-in-Arnold.