Baking But Not The Good Kind

 The second week of the sentry gun project meant lots of modelling! So that's exactly what I did.

To start of I made a really quick block out of the sentry gun. I did this so I could do a super fast paintover so I could see how the design looked overall and to also show to others to explain my idea.

 For the paintover I made a colour block out which really shows the silhouette which is an important part of the design, looking at this it shows how strong the design is as if the silhouette is recognisable then it is a strong design.

 

First I had made the umbrella of the cart in Max, as it was very low poly it didn't look too great, so I ended up going through many iterations. A few attemps in Max proved that scuplting would most likely be the easiest way to make the folds and creases look realistic.

umbrella in Max

My first scuplt wasn't too good as a final outcome. As it was my first time using ZBrush I wasn't very aware of the all the different tools that could be used so after watching a few tutorials on the Pixologic website I had managed to understand the majority of tools I needed to use. 

first iteration

My second attempt was a lot better but not quite right still so I went back into ZBrush and played around some more. My third iteration was getting there...

second iteration

third iteration

Finally the fourth iteration was the best so far and I decided to use on the model. 

fourth iteration

What I had to do next was to bake the normals for the scuplt so the normal map can be put onto the low poly model to make it look like the umbrella I scuplted in ZBrush. It's ingenious however baking in Max was very confusing and to be honest I still haven't quite grasped it but some tutorials on YouTube are really useful like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LGMq4y--Eg

Moving on from the horror of baking, one of the tutors had given me the idea to use and alpha on part of the cart to show the ice cream in the tray below. I plan on testing this out and seeing if everything will work together. So far everything seems to be ok, just a matter of making sure all the materials are  assigned correctly really.

I have started texturing, the albedo is basically finished there's just a few details to add then I'll move onto the roughness, metalness and normal maps and all the maps for the projectile.