MAYA - Modeling

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setup

I have used MAYA for other modules, I already have a workspace set up before hand where I've changed the grid dimensions, (10, 100, 1000), changed the colours so I can see the lines better and removed some unnecessary tabs/panels that are in the default MAYA start up.

Setting up image planes for reference when modeling:

Camera view angle (front and side)

View -> Image Planes -> Import Image

To blow up the image planes to be seen, I set the initial dimensions for the first image to 35, 35 ,35 and then inserted the same numbers for the 2nd image to match up the two images.

I will change this once I get a 3D model for around 5'5" into the scene to get the height more realistic.

I imported a 5'6, 3D model for size scale into the scene and matched up the reference images as closely as I possibly could to make my own character about 5'6 in size when the modeling is done.

MODELING

Made a polygon cube,beveled it (2nd picture) with the "Bevel" function in the Modeling Toolkit bar on the right.
Set the cube's fraction to 1 and merged the Vertices (RClick - Vertex, Shift + RClick -> Merge -> Merge)
Smoothed the object by using the Modeling Toolkit again and reshaped it to look more like a head/face.
Selected the bottom vertex and used the option "Champfer Vertex" to made the bottom of the head "square"-shaped, selected the faces of those squares and circulized them into a circle shape instead, used the Extrude in the Toolkit to make a neck!

I used the front side view to properly line up the size and length of the neck to the character.

For the general torso shape I tried to use a similar approach as the head - I took a square and smoothed it out so the shape was more rounded, but I am not quite happy with how that turned out so I will try another method.

Instead of a Polygon Cube, I used the Cylinder polygon instead so that I can separate length/height into different subdivisions and resize various parts of it to match the shape of the character's torso very roughly.

progress video

Instead of modeling the clothes on top of the existing body, I decided to just make them a part of the model/body itself to save some tris.I wanted the shape of a hood around the neck/head space as well as give the idea of a puffed sleeve around the shoulders to make it more apparent what's clothing and what's a part of the body.

Progress as of 24/02/2021 after uploading fbx. file to blackboard

The last thing(s) I need to do is finish the head and hair before I can start UV-ing and Texturing.

Just to make sure the model is symmetrical before I started the hair, I cut the model in half and mirrored it again. I took a new sphere object and lessened the radius, and just dragged out some edges to make some hair pop up. I went for easy hair as I had difficulties using planes before.

UV-ing

For us to be able to apply texture and/or images to a model in general - we need to have the character UV mapped. Before we start doing it though, we need to check a couple boxes:

Check that our model doesn't have any stray verts or any other weird things going on after we've mirrored and such.
Move the object pivots to the origin of the world.
Modify - > Freeze Tranformations - defaulting the character's transform back to normal.
Edit > Delete by Type > History - removing our model's history so that weird interactions won't happen when we UV.

UVs are basically the two dimentional coordinates for each part of our 3D model, that allow us to apply a 2D image texture to it's surface.

When I started the UV-mapping I essentially just made cuts to my character where it made sense, especially when it comes to the clothes. But also some additional cuts as I needed to properly fill and place things around the 0-1 area in my UV editor.

I made cuts on the side of the clothing, I may have not needed a cut in the middle but in the type of clothing I felt it was necessary. Cuts on the side of the legs, and arms - cut up the belt into smaller pieces although looking back at it now, maybe I could've left it as a whole and maybe just had 1 cut so it was seamless.

It all eventually needs to fit in the 0-1 section, so we need to possibly resize and move things around for it to fit better.

I wanted to try and place things around where it felt "natural", like hair in one corner, arms and legs together so I know which are which, shoes together and basically "grouping" things to gether that fit together to make it more obvious as to where things are if I need to colour the individual shells by themeselves.

texturing - substance Painter

One we have finished our UVs we can export our character to Substance Painter for texturing. to import our exported character file we need to go to

"File -> New Project -> Open up our file directory and click our desired file"

Changed the "Document Resolution" to 2048 instead of 1024 (shown in picture) for higher resolution to our textures.

This is how the opened project will look like with a default workspace. Our Shelf, where our materials, brushes and the like are, at the bottom - and our layers, texture set settings and properties on the right. We can either use our UVs in the 2D window and paint on them, or we can use the 3D window to paint directly onto the model instead.

I used a mixed method of painting directly onto the model, using the 2D space and also using the option of "Polygon Fill" - this gives us the same lines that Maya gives us and when we have a material or colour selected, it will fill the specific area selected. This is really helpful if you don't want to accidentally colour over into another area and having to Undo or Erase your progress.

How it looks when you click on "Polygon Fill" (model already textured)

After leaving my model with base colours - I came back to it to see if I could make it more detailed as I discovered the power of "Smart Materials". This allowed me to add texture/detail to the skin and the clothing for a more detailed look of the model. I also forgot that my character is a bit darker toned so I had to change the skin colour as well.

Moving on I found the hair a bit too "dull" compared to the rest of the textures on the model so I created a "Stencil Layer" - where I could manually paint some hair strands onto the model's hair to make it look more hair-like. Also used the "Projection Tool" to project the image of the Cobra Kai doujo logo onto the back of the model's back.

Some final turnarounds below of my character fully textured.

End thoughts - I left my model without a face because when I tried (screenshots lost) adding a 2D face onto my 3D face/head looked a bit too awkward for my taste. I will however understand if having a face (eyes, mouth, nose etc) drawn onto a low poly model is needed in future projects, I will keep it on if I was told it was absolutely needed.

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