07: Game ready 3D asset

Game ready asset

To push my skills practice further, I decided to do a test by Room 8 Studio. 
They have roles available for Junior environment artist however they are only available for other countries like Ukraine, Spain, Poland... I decided to take part in the test as it would be great practice. 

The test consists of creating a photoreal game ready asset for environments. They give you specific guidelines that you have to follow. Such as:
Using software like Maya, Substance Painter and Zbrush. 
Blocking out, creating a low and high poly version of the prop and baking Normals. 



 3D Photoreal Environment Open 2021 (room8studio.com)

This is the reference that you have to create your prop from.


I started blocking out the Mortar following the reference, leaving other parts that I knew I was going to duplicate and that were going to share the same uvs.






As I continued modelling, I created duplicates of the model in case I needed to go back.
In the end I was left with a low poly version and a version with good subdivision levels and holding edges, so when I subdivide it and take it into Zbrush, the shape stays the way I want it.





In order to stay close to the 6k triangles or less, I constantly duplicated the parts that I was going to be needing later and checking the poly count. That way I was able to slowly delete edges that I didn't need and therefore reducing the number of triangles.
In Artstation, I noticed many other people have done the test. This was great as they had images of their process that I was able to take tips from, for example triangulating certain areas a more effective way. 




High poly - Zbrush
In Zbrush I added more details to the mortar. I first separated the meshes into their own groups, subdivided and added scratches, wood and metal like marks and features.



Baking
In Maya I named each object with a suffix, _low and _high. I wanted to try baking in Marmoset Tool Bag, so I imported everything in it first. After adjusting some of the settings I baked my mesh, I really liked the results at first. I encountered some issues with the way the Normals were facing, luckily Marmoset allows you to manually edit this. 





When I imported my passes into Substance, I noticed there was something wrong with the Normals again. As I kept going back and forwards between software, I decided to bake it in Substance Painter instead, I would say I got the same results as in Marmoset, however I found another issue.
This time the high was not baking properly although I kept adjusting the settings and rebaking. Looking for a solution I went back to Maya and edited and re-exported my asset and continued to try different settings in Substance. 

In the end, I decided to manually paint what I wanted to be the metallic part and the wood part in areas where the baking process didnt work as well.
As I learned from the Jason and Chun, I created different folders for the different materials and kept them organized in the layout tab. Using grunges, generators, filters and masks I was able to texture the Mortar following the reference.

Final result rendered in Marmoset



Room 8 mortar reference


Conclusion
This was a great exercise; I was able to follow a studios specification to create a game ready prop. It was challenging to achieve the number of triangles they wanted, however through extra research and finding other artists' work I was able to stay within the requirements.
While trying to figure out how to fix the issues I encountered, I didnt realize I missed bolts at the bottom.
If I had to do this again, I would try Marmoset again as I figured the Normals were inverted and all I had to do was, to use levels to invert the green channel just like Jason in his tutorial.



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