Reply To: Collab2021 – WIP – navik

Hi again people!

Time has been limited these days.. But, I still managed to put a few hours into Blender 🙂

First things first, I fixed the part of the roof that was asymmetrical based on the information given by @blanchsb on Discord. That was easy. But of course, things wouldn’t be interesting if everything ran smoothly :p

I realized there was actually a whole part that I missed:

But, that was alright. Not that much time was spent on that.

Then I decided to check @andybegg ‘s WIP thread, as his work pretty much guided me right from the end of the first week, to see if there was anything I should be aware of when it came to the whole baking/texturing process. I’ll admit, it was with a little frustration that I discovered I did the exact same mistake and forgetting the sculpting for some meshes:

I think it’s simply because contrary to the wooden planks and tiles, there are none that are duplicates, so I did not have them in my Base_Meshes collection (the group in the background). 

Anyway, I decided to put that aside for now, and give the baking a try, so thanks to the streams being recorded I went back and checked the week3 livestream.

At first I made the mistake of UV unwrapping all the meshes into one textures, which gave less-than good-looking normal maps, with really not refined details . I kept going back into the stream to see if I had missed anything, and at one point it clicked: my meshes’ textures were lacking texel density. So, I tried to separate the wooden planks’s UVs from the other meshes, giving this normal map:

There are those bad spots on the right side, but after checking where they were on the mesh and thinking about the fact that the camera would probably never go up close to the planks, I figured it would be okay to leave them like so. Of course if you tell me I should go back and fix those I’ll try.

But hey, here’s what it looks like it rendered !

And thanks to the linked duplicates (probably one of the best things that I learned about since the project started), without additional work, here’s how it looks on the roof itself 😀

I think that’s it for this update. 

I’m sorry that it’s taking me so long to progress, but between my day-job, working on the take-home project/preparing additional interviews for the company I applied to, and just life in general, I don’t get as many Blender sessions as I would like to ^^’ 

Not giving up on this though 🙂 I’ll try to complete the sculpting for the outer planks, and make the rest of the textures for next time.

(not mentioning @Kent as it’s not the final update)