Texturing the tunnel was when I began to understand more about how tri-planar projection works as well as more on customising the models using masks and materials. There weren’t many challenges I faced during texturing other than the dirt smart material would not load onto the model for an unknown reason, to get around this I decided to add a rust material and apply a ground dirt mask to it. I then changed the colour of the dirt to match the dirt from the footage I was using creating the effect I wanted.
One element of Substance Painter I wish I had realised sooner was that importing an object made up of several components, each with their own UV’s and material, would create their own layer to edit directly. This would have saved more time on my other models where I was masking out specific areas for textures instead of using these texture sets.
The Tunnel modelling I went into quite confident, As it was primarily basic shapes I was creating I was expecting more of the challenge to come from texturing. As I began modelling I quickly spotted time-savers such as duplicating my panels for the fence and stretching and reusing them for the door. It was a good learning experience to have a simple model to craft that allows as a refresher to what I’ve learned already.
The main challenge for this shot was the barbed wire, as I had no idea how I would go about creating it. I followed this tutorial here:
While this showed me the primary way of how to create a straight wire not the curled one I originally planned for, the 2014 version of Maya did not allow for the same method of following the curve when extruding. Online forums were no help, but I instead looked up a video on how to create rope in Maya for the 2016 version seen here:
The difference was instead of selecting the object, I had to select the faces individually, and then also select the curve itself while in face mode. After this, it was a simple case of following the rest of the tutorial for modelling the rest of the wire and adding the barbs. What I dislike about this method is the number of faces you end up with. This skyrockets into the hundred thousand extremely quickly especially for such a long piece of wire in my scene. It was potentially worth sacrificing the quality in order to have less slow down during modelling.
Finally, I decided that the fence was a little too boring being even, so I used the soft select feature to edit each edge to pull in slightly or be pull away from the centre as well as move some of the planks back and forth to make it look more poorly put together. Lastly I added a crack in one of the planks just to add to the poorly built effect.
This model looks almost exactly what I wanted to create from my concept art and should need a very small amount of refinement that I should potentially be able to do when compositing together in blender.
