Week 7

 This week was successful, in that the entire project was completed. 

I started by putting dust in my scene using a Niagara System and Emitter. This was something I was extremey unfamiliar with, but was able to figure out simply by toying with the settings on the Emitter; the trial run I did before incorporating dust into my final scene being below.

But then once that was done, and once the settings were how I wanted them to be, I was done. 

I added a cinecam actor, pressed 'G' to enter game mode, and set to work gathering beauty shots for my Artstation, toying with lens effects to get as many dynamic shots as I could, which I then brought into Photoshop to Watermark.

I also made a start midweek on another project, more for fun than anything else. I chose Jinx's Grenade from Netflix's 2021 series 'Arcane: League of Legends' simply because the design was fun and interesting, and it was something I could really sink my teeth into as far as texturing was concerned.

It was also different to what I would normally make, being more stylized than realistic. 

So, as per normal, the first thing I did was to compile reference. My method of reference usage is... different than other people's, in that I find myself getting overwhelmed if I try to use too much. So I try to find a few good references, and then once I compiled them, I blocked out wich part of the models would be separated into smaller pieces, too, to try and help me streamline my building.

From there, it was the same workflow as I've been using. Build a piece, test bake, Unwrap, move on, rinse and repeat until finally i had a full model.

I then duplicated the model and decided to subdivide the mesh in order to sculpt using Maya's sculpting mechanic. I found this to be  the best choice, especially as it is just to get dings and dents on the surface of the grenade. I could have used Zbrush, but sometimes I feel that it's easy to overdo damage if you can't see the original model. I also find that the texture achieved from Zbrush is unsuitable for hard surface models.

Then, it was time to texture the asset.

It's become clear to me that I find this process to be enjoyable, especially when it comes to more damaged, gritty assets such as this. 

I looked at the original asset and made a quick material reference sheet, in order to constantly refer back to.

The key to any stylised asset is layers. So that's exactly what I kept in mind through the entire build. Each different part was given a base, on top of which I added a lighter curvature generator with a mid-to-high blur to highlight the edges subtly without making it too obvious. In some cases I would add in an edgewear generator to highlight where it would be damaged or otherwise dinged that I hadn't already covered in my High Poly bake. 

Once I'd moved onto texturing the eyes, I had to change the settings in my workspace editor to add emissive and opacity channels. This was easy enough, as all I needed to do was change my Shader settings to 'PBR-metal-rough-with-alpha-blending', up the Emissive to an appropriate level, and then add the channels in my Texture Set Setting panel. 

After that, I used the Glass Visor smart material and changed both instances to utilise the Emissive channel, which in turn makes the material glow. I got the exact shade of green for the eye, and then moved onto the neon splatters. 

These were made by using a Mask Editor and using two grunge generators. I applied a black mask and then used a brush that looked splatter-like, which I used to paint neon blue and pink across the metal jaws and the bottom of the grenade itself. 

I inverted the grunge maps, which gave me the rough splatter effect I was looking for, and that was the final step I took to get the outcome that I posted to my Artstation and Sketchfab.