Kilan Larsen
Dagger
*Model created by Frank Pereira
In this project I started with a low poly model of a dagger in Maya, and modified it to be exported and textured in Substance Painter. In order to bake the necessary maps for the model (ie: Normals, Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, etc.), I duplicated the dagger and smoothed it to create a high poly model with which to draw rays in the baking process. I also UV mapped the different shells of the low poly dagger, separating the blade, hilt, and handle and arranging them so that they filled a 1 by 1 space with no overlaps. Following the UV mapping, I duplicated the dagger once again and applied some brightly colored lambert materials to the blade, hilt, and handle of the dagger to prepare for the creation of an ID map in Substance Painter. Before exporting the models from Maya, I made sure to name the different pieces of each dagger with
_low, _high, and _id, and then set each model back to the same world space within the scene. This was done so that when baking in Substance Painter the rays will be drawn properly between the different models, and only the parts of the dagger with matching names receive rays from each other. This helps prevent unintended baking and artifacts between geometry that are close together without needing to explode the model.
Once in Substance Painter, the high poly model was used to bake most of the maps, while the ID model was used to bake the ID map. This allowed me to quickly apply new materials to the dagger, and mask them to certain regions using a color filter. After applying a wood texture to the hilt, it became apparent that the direction of the grain of the wood was different on either side of the hilt, due to having one UV laid out vertically and one laid out horizontally. To fix this I went back into Maya and re-oriented the UVs making both halves of the handle and the hilt vertical, and then I re-made the ID model with the same materials applied as before and re-exported. After baking again in Substance, the textures were fixed and I decided to apply a leather material for the handle, and change the hilt to the same steel as the blade.
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I painted the steel rivets symmetrically on the handle using a negative height to make them look indented in the handle, and once I was happy with the overall look of the model I exported the different textures maps for use in Unity. The finished result is as shown below:
