For my Time Machine brief, I came up with the idea of a floral time-travelling ring with a watch-like face. I theorised the ring to have space for the 'petals' of the ring to function, so that they could close over the watch and reveal it when it was ready to be used. I imagined it to be used by some kind of nature-loving culture who rely on solar power.
My idea included many parts that could move, for example the petals surrounding the face, and a rail within the watch face itself that the face could be pushed around to 'lock' the time it was supposed to take the user to.
I started off by creating the base shape for the ring in Maya. I used predominantly cylinders, adding some other shapes in to create the watch face, surrounding petals and ring part (underneath the face).
I found this very difficult, as there were a lot of small parts (the faces on the clock hands, the sides of the petals and the spheres connecting the ring to the face particularly) that were hard to fit around the larger parts while using as much space as I could. In moving them, I also lost track of the areas a lot of them correlated to, which made it incredibly hard to create my Albedo map without frequently going back to check which parts were which. Even then, I made a few mistakes that had to be fixed later.
Although there are some errors in this model (I feel like having seen it all together, a couple of the edges on the Normal map are a little messy) I'm really satisfied with how it came out! I feel like it looks accurate enough to how I originally planned it, and creating all the maps eventually proved fun (although I thought it was going to be very tedious at first).
My idea included many parts that could move, for example the petals surrounding the face, and a rail within the watch face itself that the face could be pushed around to 'lock' the time it was supposed to take the user to.
I started off by creating the base shape for the ring in Maya. I used predominantly cylinders, adding some other shapes in to create the watch face, surrounding petals and ring part (underneath the face).
Following this, I moved to ZBrush to add some details and create my high-poly model. For this model, I didn't really change the silhouette of the original model at all, so it wasn't necessary for me to bring a decimated version back into Maya to stitch to my low-poly model afterwards.
After the high-poly model was done, I created the UV map in Maya.
I found this very difficult, as there were a lot of small parts (the faces on the clock hands, the sides of the petals and the spheres connecting the ring to the face particularly) that were hard to fit around the larger parts while using as much space as I could. In moving them, I also lost track of the areas a lot of them correlated to, which made it incredibly hard to create my Albedo map without frequently going back to check which parts were which. Even then, I made a few mistakes that had to be fixed later.
However, I eventually managed to finish my Albedo map. The leaf texture used for the petals is sourced from bgfons.com.
Although it looks messy to me, it functions well and all of the colours appear to be in the correct locations. After this, I created the cage for my low-poly model so that I could bake the Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps.
I had some issues with this, as I had made some mistakes while modelling that caused some N-gons to exist (For example, two faces sharing exactly the same location). Fortunately, these were easily fixed by putting a little bit of time and effort into checking each face and using the Cleanup option frequently to find out which faces had N-gons. With minor tweaks to my earlier work, I was able to fix all mistakes and successfully bake my Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps. However, after checking, I noticed that some of the leaf pattern had been baked onto the watch face by mistake. This was fixed by separating the watch face and baking it separately, then combining the two maps so that the new Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps were used for the watch face rather than the old ones (on which the mistakes had been baked).
After this, I made my Metalness map. I had never made a metalness map before, so I was a little conflicted over what to do, and had to use trial-and-error in order to figure out which colour corresponded to metal and which corresponded to a non-metal.
To create a slightly grungy/scratchy effect on the watch face, I used a rusted metal texture from wildtextures.com. I desaturated this, then inverted it.
After this was done, I was able to bring everything into Marmoset Toolbag to see the finished product.
Although there are some errors in this model (I feel like having seen it all together, a couple of the edges on the Normal map are a little messy) I'm really satisfied with how it came out! I feel like it looks accurate enough to how I originally planned it, and creating all the maps eventually proved fun (although I thought it was going to be very tedious at first).
