Excalibur Revisit

Research Project - Crease Plus

Crease+ is a Maya extension created by Baidhir Hidair for hard surface modeling and a more substantial boolean operations.  Here I'm going to break down all the major functions of the extension and how it can help you improve your hard surface workflow.

Toggle Boolean: Shows you your boolean objects, either with a bounding box or with the full object

HBevel: Bevels all hard edges on a mesh, can be used specifically on faces but not edges; Frustratingly this will crash Maya if you undo this, which is annoying because Maya really doesn't need any more reasons to crash.

Get HardEdge: selects the hard edges on a mesh, pretty useful for determining if you want something to be set up as a hard edge.  Generally you can follow this up with a bevel to give you the curves you're looking for on a model, or just take the "computer" edge off a mesh.

30 Smooth: Applies the Harden/Soften Edge with a smoothing angle of 30.

 Bool: This is somewhat the bread and butter of Crease+'s pitch but to be honest I'm really not impressed.  The boolean operations are definitely better than Maya baseline boolean operational stuff, but if I'm being honest I prefer Zbrush.  I can see this being useful for setting up basic shapes and moving that stuff to more advanced development, but over the course of my project I couldn't really find a use for it.

Panel Bool: If you need to take multiple, identical indentations or cuts into an object, panel bool is the tool for you.  It creates a tillable boolean shape you can use repeatedly across multiple boolean operations.

Shapeshifter: This seems to be another program or extension designed to interact with Crease+ but it's not included so not much to say.

Hard Display: Creates a highlight over the hard edges present on a mesh.

Keep Bool: Keeps the Boolean shapes after the operation for use after

Mirror: It's an X mirror that detects where the object you're trying to mirror, pretty basic but nice to have on a button.  It will carry things over from other side though, so it's kinda weird to use if you're used to the standard one.

Zbrush: Sends the object into Zbrush and fixes Ngons

Mesh Slicer: Slices your mesh across a curve, pretty useful for shoring off sections of your mesh.

Crease 1 - 3: Sets edges to one of three hardesses, useful for cultivating rounded edges, somewhat hard edges, and hard edges but never leaves them totally "computer" sharp.  These and the next tool are mostly what I used on my own project.

No Crease: simple, uncreases your selected edges

Weight Tool: again, fairly simple, brings up the crease tool with updates.

Physical Crease: So far as I can tell this is just a bevel. 

SmoothSG & SmoothOS: both apply a smooth, SG stands for smoothing group, so you can set up the creases in the crease set editor and then work off that while SmoothOS runs the Convert>Smooth Mesh preview to Polygons operation.  It runs this fairly quickly, maybe even faster than maya.

Draw Curve: Selects Curve tool, thusfar it doesn't actually make any curves, only straight lines between points.

Close Curve: Closes Curve

Champfer Curve: I couldn't get this particular tool to work at all so I can't really report much on it, sorry

Curve Intersection: Traces the path of a curve till it overlaps with another curve, then discontinues

Attach Curves: This may just be human error talking, but I'm not sure this fuction does anything either.  The tooltip says "attaches selected curves" but they neither bridge, merge, or get stuck on a mesh they intersect with, so I'm not sure what this is supposed to do.

Mutliply Curve: Increases Curve Resolution, but again this weird straight line curve doesn't do what it should, this whole panel doesn't really work how I would hope.  

Week 4 - First Pass Materials

Ada 1 Concept

I'm definitely not satisfied with this one yet, I'm going to be taking some time over the course of the Venture track semester to fix this up and really get those materials and little details in the gap between the head plates (with the red light) to be articulate and interesting but for now it's a bit too vague to develop on my own with the time I have left.  I wanted to give myself a lot of time on the sculpt because if the sculpt is bad then it's all basically for naught and you'll have to do everything over. 
The materials are pretty basic for now but I'm hoping to take a deeper dive into substance designer over the break and I'll get the experience I'm hoping for in that to really get this project to where I want it to be. 
The high poly itself is actually pretty good, the only thing I'd want to develop more is the mantle piece and the attached cape and shoulder metal bits.  

Week 3 - Zbrush Hard Surface

Week 2 - Ada All Maya hard surfaces

So! I had to cut my progress on this short for the last two days because my hand was really starting to hurt, and I didn't want to injure myself.  The shapes are all done, I just need to do some sculpting and extracting of tiny details in Zbrush, then move on to my low poly!

Ada-1 Schedule and Week 1 Progress

Schedule:

Week 1: Front Face Blockout
Week 2: Maya HP
Week 3: Full HP
Week 4: LP from Maya, Bake, Materials

Ada-1 Concept Bust with Crease+

I'm going to be modeling a bust of an early iteration of the Destiny 2 Black Armory Character, Ada-1.  Ada is a exo you encounter in one of the recent expansions to Destiny, and since she's both one of my favorite characters and a robot, she'd be a great change to learn Crease+ and do some nice hard surface modeling.  One thing I actually noticed about Ada's final design is that her face plate is sculpted in such a way to convey emotions with the angle of her head which I thought was very interesting.
I'm going to be doing an exploration of Crease+ in this project, examining the plugin and how useful I find it when constructing hard surface objects and breaking down how it is used.

Excalibur Texture and Lighting Pass

Alright! Here's the marmoset Renders of the Excalibur.  I think I might have to take another pass at the dirt distribution along the handle, it feels a little heavy but we'll see how people feel tomorrow.  I added a polish to the edge of the blade to try to emphasize it but I don't think it worked out the way I wanted it to, I'll take another pass at the lighting setup to try to catch that better.