Kilan Larsen
Automobile
*Model provided by Connor Zelinsky
In this project, I was tasked with UV mapping the provided automobile onto three 1k tiles in Maya, and then texturing it in Substance Painter. I started by separating the meshes of the car so that I had many individual objects to work with, and then I grouped and labeled the objects in the outliner to organize things. Then, I chose an object to work on and used the 'isolate select' mode to view and edit one particular object at a time. To create the UV map of each object, I set up a workflow where I would generate a camera based UV and then use the 3D cut and sew tool to slice it up into unfold-able sections. From there I unfolded and straightened the UV shells, and made sure that each shell shared the same texel density. One of the headlights is shown below:
Once I had finished UV mapping each of the objects on the car, I needed to lay them out on three different tiles in order to maximize texel density. To keep things organized, I grouped the objects that were to go on each tile. The 'front' of the car had the hood and headlights, the 'under' section of the car had the tires and axels, and the 'back' of the car was the large carriage with windows that a passenger would sit inside of. From there I selected each group individually and did an automatic UV layout (without rotation), and with some padding between each shell. Once I had moved the UVs from each section onto their own tile, I used the 'shaded' view to identify any flipped or overlapping UVs, and manually fixed any errors.
To check whether the texel densities of each section of the car matched, I applied a checker-box pattern and re-grouped certain objects so that the squares were about the same size across the model. The final step before bringing the car into Substance painter was to create a "clown colored" version for an id map to make masking out materials easier, and a high-poly model of the car to bake high quality normals and ambient occlusion.
Last but not least, I brought my low-poly model into substance painter and began baking out maps and adding materials. I masked out most of my materials using the id map, and adjusted colors and grunge values until I got the look that I wanted. I also decreased the roughness of the glass to get some shine and reflections in. To make the car look a bit more unified in style, I added a layer of dust across the entire model using a generator. I also added an alpha stamp of some diamonds on the side of the vehicle to style it up a bit, and added another mask to that to make the diamonds look a bit faded and worn. With that, the car was complete:
