MAKE A MODULAR PILLAR KIT - ( Part 1) -- [Maya][Zbrush][SPainter][UE4]

let's look at one possible way of creating a modular pillar kit so in this situation in this corridor that I've been working on I need to create some sort of pillar separated into a modular kit so it can be used in different scenarios throughout this level I have a temporary pillar placed in here so I need something now if it fit nicely into this theme and also be used in places such as the end here and further along we've have much larger versions where that has different options to support say the beams at the top and also I think how add some crumbled versions so broken versions of the pillar and this will help when it comes to set dressing or a different kind of scenarios I want some damage where this light shafts come through here so I probably will damage the pillars as well so basically I want to make a little kit for myself that has multiple uses now this is by no means the best way of creating such an object but this is quite a fast and easy pipeline and it's one that I use for a lot of my objects throughout this level and other things I make thing to do is to gather some reference so we kind of get an idea of what we want to create a good tool to use for a reference govern and what reference displaying is a little program called PRF now PRF is free to download and you can install it into an external hard drive or thumb drive so that you can save this file into your reference folders and take it with you wherever you're working from you can see I have a lot of reference gathered here from for various aspects of the level everything from textures to exteriors reference textures that I've taken myself to concepts I've covered from online interior and exterior so we have in this folder some pillars that are found on sites like outstation and interest saved them into this folder here and all we need to do is select them and drag them into PRF and it'll organize them and then if we hold ctrl + Alt + left mouse button we can scale them up and just left mouse button to drag and place them where we want I'm going to scale these smaller ones up to useful sizes and you can move the window of prf around just she holding left mouse click so it's middle mouse to zoom as well and middle mouse to pan around the canvas and you can right click the canvas and go to mode and you can have this in different options like always on top so you can always see your reference that's useful especially if you don't have a second monitor to use now I'm just going to leave mine in the background so I can click on it whenever I need to have a look Oh other than that I'd rather have it on a separate window so it's not obscuring any of my UI and so here I've covered a few different pillars concepts and models some real some realistically textured but mostly they're all in a kind of Darksiders slash world of warcraft style as my my environment is kind of a mix in between of watch and world of warcraft i don't want the pillar to be super detailed probably something close to this various sections so that i can pick and choose depending on the height of the pillar top and bottom caps may be a separate cap for the top in case it's holding say some beams or something and maybe one section that has a little bit more detail so looking at these I would say that closest to what I would like to make is probably this one and this one here okay so in this may it may have seen I have the dog and a mannequin model and these two are going to be used to use as reference for height and correct scale of the pillar okay so this mannequin is from ue4 and it's about two meters tall about have a look here we can see I've got my grid set up and we can see that this mannequin is one two hundred unit almost 200 years 180 so about six foot tall the doorway and wall is almost twice as tall as mannequin so I'm going to start off with a cylinder and we already have the grid unit set up everything snaps to the grid and I will want these pillars to start to the grid also so I'll start of a cylinder and holding X to snap to grid I want to drag this out that looks about the right size do it a little bit bigger than that yeah okay and then holding X to drag up we want this so difficult if isn't access to be stay 16 I like to if I can with the subdivisions of a cylinder to make sure there's a cross-section so it can be separated into four equal parts it makes it a lot easier for modeling down the road little changes and stuff it's a lot easier if you can separate off split a model in half perfectly in terms of subdivisions on a cylinder most of it depends on whether you can see the edge the silhouette directly like straight on to a cylinder you can't see the subdivisions when it's smooth you can only really see the polygons and the the simplicity of it when you can see the silhouette and for this you will be able to see the silhouette because it's gonna have a base on top now I could keep this middle sections quite simple and just add more Polly's to the base and the top but I don't I'm not 100% sure how this pillar will be used yet so just to be on the safe side I'm going to make sure it has a good number of radial subdivisions okay 24 yeah it's so pretty low poly but I think that will be adequate for what we need okay so if we go into the side view just see I think we need one section to be at least 100 units tall that way three of them will be the full height of the door and then I'm gonna snug the whole D and X and move down to snap that pivot point to the grid and the center of the pillar that that way they can be placed on the floor or on top of each other and be perfectly aligned mmm I might want a slight curve to each one of these sections to just make it a little bit more cartoony so if we go on the multikill tool and hold ctrl you'll be able to see the entire loop and then if you hold shift as well you can snap to a percentage off the edge and then double click that to select the whole thing and just scale after a little bit just to create a tiny curve and to make this a little bit smoother I'm going to shift left click and go to bevel edge and then put that on to sections and move the fractional now if this is moving quite fast you can hold ctrl and it'll move a much slower percentage and you can see that's just slightly curved this out maybe is I want a bit more of a curve than look you know me this bit bigger and again shift right click bevel edge two segments here we got a slight curve to that yeah and I'm also going to bevel these edges so they're not ninety degrees this first of all it adds the aesthetic that I'm going for nice chunky edges it helps when it comes to taking this into ZBrush and also adding that edge will help the normal maps and will also catch just a little bit of light when it's in the editor and make it just look a little bit more detailed okay and then I want another version of this that's half the size so when I duplicate this and I'm gonna move it up so I can see it in conjunction with the one below first of all and delete the edges I've just put in I'm going to go to vertex slap the top and bring that down to one two three four five so that's 50 units you can see my blue squares is a hundred units or ten units should I say so this is five units and you can change your grids by going right clicking right clicking grid options and you can see you can say you lengthen wait for the overall size grid lines every 100 and subdivisions of those grid lines to ten and then you colors for you grid I recommend setting these colors to something other than the wireframe colors of it when you have selected it it doesn't blend into the grid okay so again multi-cut called one in the center double-click your edges shift right click bevel turn the fraction down segments to - actually I forgot to extrude this okay so it's a bit of a curve and then shift click bevel segments - okay there we go back to perspective and we've lost our bevel at the top so I'm just gonna drag this down to add that back in okay so that's two segments done and these can be repeated and they'll snap to the grid and the snap to each other nicely because it's all modeled for the grid and the pivots in the correct place so now we've already already got some sort of modular pillar setup here so the next thing I want to do is create the base for the pillar so I'm just going to go to cylinder again snap into the grid by holding X and when I drag this out it's time slightly bigger than the pillar and don't need to snap the top to the grid as it's going to be intersecting with the pillar where it's placed and want to set this to 24 as well now as the radius of this gets out the polygons are going to be more and more obvious so you have to be careful you know this is this we extrude these you can see that that becomes lower and lower poly and you can see those individual Poly's in the silhouette much more clearly I think we'll be fine as it is so I just undo that extrude yeah always check that you've not done hidden extrudes or bevels or splits because when two edges are over the top of each other it's very easy to not be able to see it and it's common for that to sneak through right up to the point where you're sculpting or unwrapping or texturing something and you realize there's an error because you've got two pieces over the top a good way of removing things like that is setting your vertexes and weld in them merge vertex is just to delete interfaces like that okay so let's have a little look at our references again so again I don't anything detail I just want a slight taper to this I'm just going to isolate this it's like the top so I want to start about the center vertex vertex and hold ctrl + f10 or ctrl f11 it's like the faces get back our isolation and I'm just gonna make this so it just comes a little proud of their main pillar and then put a cot in here I'm making this up as I go along at not sure if I like this sometimes it takes multiple attempts to get something that you like and that's because I've not made a concept if I was going to do this as a you know a more detailed pillar and I had a bit more time to spend on it maybe it was for a portfolio piece or a proper game then I would probably take the time to do a concept in a company you probably get a concept off someone anyway in a studio you probably get a concept off someone to follow if you're making something for a portfolio piece I suggest making a concept from some reference you don't need to be a fantastic artist all you need to do is you could kick bash you on together you could take some references and chop them up and put them together or just give yourself a very simple diagram but it's a lot easier when you are following reference and not just making help but I wanted to do this entire scene in around about a week which means creating concepts for every single piece takes a little bit too much time so I'm gonna try and do a rounded edge here it's a weird angle some makes a little bit harder to do but using the scale tool and moving each edge can kind of go something like this okay and now I'm going to add another segment here but I want it to round between those two edges so I'm gonna go to gonna do is go to the multi-cut tool and then toggle on edge flow holding ctrl and shift to get the center there and adding an edge it will try to interpret the flow of the curve based on the previous two edges I want to be careful not to create something too detailed as generally the rest of the items in the scene of really low poly and I'm just going to bet on the bottom as well and on the top and I just want the whole thing to just stick out a little bit further and also be a little bit chunkier so by going to side you and select Oliver toises that's me about these as well that still feels a little bit fiddly this is meant to be kind of medieval so what I'm going to do at this point is model the rest of these simple sections up and then we'll move on to the other pieces I need for this modular kitchen [Music] [Music] okay so we have the main pieces of the pillar muddled so at the moment we have one two three four five six seven eight nine pieces I want all this to be on a single texture sheet a 2k texture sheet now the more pieces we have in this kit obviously the lower resolution that each piece is going to be because it's going to be smaller on the UV Channel now you could tackle this by tection them using tiling textures trim sheets but the problem with that is it doesn't allow me to really do some personalized sculpting on each one which is what I really want from this I want each one to have sculpting detail in it but for now we're just going to create a couple more pieces this is really going to be quite a packed UV island these are going to be quite low resolution but I want a few of these versions of these that are smushed broken and I probably going to do two maybe three pieces of smashed pillar I'll do these two and I will just do these too I think that's that's enough for now okay so normally when you're taking something like this when you create a base model and take into ZBrush and do a lot of sculpting you would then reach apologize that piece so you would draw the polygon as a low poly mesh directly onto the high poly sculpt conforming to all the different details that you've put in there but that is a stage that I kind of want to skip so we're going to try and get these as close to the sculpt as possible and the sculpting details that we put on these pieces are going to be limited so not too deep for example one of these pieces here I want to have a pattern on maybe some skulls or something like that and it would be nice to have these with the topology so that you could see the details from the side and the silhouette but that takes quite a bit of time and I don't really want to spend that much time on it so we're going to do with just doing the sculpting details and then baking directly to it and trying to keep the sculpting details not too protruding so they baked nicely so because these are going to be damaged pillows I need to chop off some edges and get them kind of close to what the final result will be and we can do some edits afterwards after we've done the sculpt but we want to try and avoid a full read apologize ation so the first thing I'm going to do is put this on an angle and then using the cop till I start cutting off some chunks of the mash and I'll just speed the video up here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so we've got the damaged pillars now some big chunks this is kind of the general shape I'm not really going to deviate much from this in the sculpt we've also made a little piece here I can do place scattered around the edge of the broken pieces so the next step now is to quickly unwrap these I'm not going to be super neat with the unwrap because they the shape of these they're not gonna unwrap completely Square to the grid so I just want to get kind of close and I'll be happy with that so I'll grab kneeling view shells on quickly lay them out you so at this point I'm going to go through each of these pillar sections and unwrapped them I want to keep it as simple as possible which will probably be chopping the top and bottom of each section and trying to unwrap the radius as flat as possible now when you unwrap something a cylinder of the shape because it's got a slight curve to it it will be curved in the UV editor so then I'll take each of those sections and create an cylindrical unwrap I'm wrapping them like this will cause a little bit of distortion but this is easy to fix or at least get to a point where it's not noticeable maybe the checker mark on these so I can see the distortion so I can unwrap these by cylindrical that way will keep it kind of flat and then if we select the shell and then just use the scale until these the checker plate are all even and it doesn't have to be exact freely but as close as I can do it then once a my favorite that I can just make those off to one side and will sort the overall scale out later okay and we wants the next one so I'm just going to put my initial seams in top and bottom and then a seam all the way outside to make the ones that go into the center and then shift right click cut it's like that she'll and I'll fold it then it's like the center one and then create from cylindrical okay and then to pull quick that in UV mode again just check in that these checkers are even actual actually come out really nicely okay and with the top pieces just quick on the fold make them across that cross okay then I want to just do is work my way through the rest of these using the same technique and then we'll carry on from there [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] now we need to make sure they're all of a similar scale so that the details on the texture will be even across them so pick one okay just like this one shout and then we'll go to transform and go down to get that size and then just about everything and set everything to that same size okay so all the tops and everything and all the sides that everything is of actual scale now and then we'll lay that out maybe it's slightly bigger in case I want to use the little prop at different scales and we'll set the pattern to be lower tools what if I lay out and she'll padding down to about five and apply later movies are again so tops and bottoms don't need to be quite as detailed so we can get these side pieces a little bit more space by butts in all these just scaling them down a little bit while they will up a lot of texture information on them they're less likely to be seen then the sides so I'm just scale them right down not too much okay then I select everything else I took my son lay that okay that thing isn't just make a little bit back up you can often get better packs by laying out by hand and then you can choose each piece individually and scale it up and then the importance and how much texture space you want that piece to have so for example I know there's going to be one with a little bit of sculpting detail in it so I could get this a little bit more room might do that actually so I could just move these down and then you scale out I ran for this somewhere else it looks pretty neat I think it's gonna be okay so I'll make sure you save your work next thing I'm gonna do is get these ready for going into ZBrush so I'm just gonna lay them out in what we call an exploded you and the reason we separate them like this because it makes it even easier to sculpt in ZBrush but also although we'll be separating in ZBrush anyway doesn't really matter but when it comes to texturing it and baking it it's a lot easier or cheap to do to bake stuff in a simple way in substance painter it's easy to explode them like this first so that baking cage doesn't intersect the other items so it doesn't cause any shadows or cross baking across each piece I'm just gonna cut that last bit right so once you've separated all your models select them all and I'll export selection and I want to put this in to Pillar and I'm just going to create a new folder just gonna change that to obj right then so now we're ready to go into ZBrush of this and begin the sculpting phase

Channel: RobotArmy

Views: 7,087

Keywords: Maya, Modular, Pillar, 3D, Modelling, Substance Painter, Zbrush, UE4, Environment Art

Id: fq3eDMa06rA

Length: 42min 41sec (2561 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019