Heavy Metal

It's holiday break for RIT which means I'm nice and comfy back at home in Maryland. Of course, just because I'm 6 hours away from college doesn't mean I'm 6 hours away from work.

This Christmas break I've been diligently working on my portfolio. I have about 8 projects I need to fix up and make shine before they are ready to be called "portfolio pieces." Overall, most of them are about 85-90% of the way there, they just need that last bit of polish before they are good to go. One or two of them are already in my portfolio but need turn tables or new renders and so on.

I spent a good amount of time last year putting my portfolio together for the Game Developer's Conference. I got a ton of great feedback from the people there, but haven't had a chance until now to actually start putting it to use and making changes. Plus I have a lot of new and far better work now (it has been a whole year afterall) that I want to add in.

I took the first  few days of my holiday break to relax so I don't have too much(at least in comparison to how much I have to do overall) done yet.

Today I just finished UVing and texturing a piece (left) I did earlier this school year for my High Poly Class.  Since it was a modeling class, we had to focus on modeling and nothing else and weren't allowed to texture any of our work except for the final assignment.

I started out laying out some of the UVs, not everything needed them, but some of the larger pieces
needed it. Once I got the UVs, I started making some metalic textures for it procedurely.

I thought I had done pretty well at first, because when I rendered close ups of the different materials it looked pretty good, but then I rendered the whole thing and quickly        
                                                                 changed my mind.

I'll be honest... it looked pretty bad (to put it lightly), haha. The colors were all wrong and the materials barely looked like metal. It was pretty clear that I had a lot more work to do if I wanted to make the materials procedurely.

I've had a lot of experience making my materials by hand in photo shop and painting the different maps and so on, but I have yet to fully master procedural shaders. I could've gone my usual route and done it all by hand, but that requires the UVs for everything to be laid out. And since this was a model for a high poly class my geometry was such that
UVing while not impossible, would be difficult.

I took a break from working and came back refreshed and ready to work. I managed to use the shaders I had in the image above, as bad as they were, as a starting point and kept building from there. For the most part I had things right, I just needed to tweak the values and some of the colors.  And once I got the hang of it with one of the materials I was able to easily adjust the others. Even though it took me longer than I planned, I still saved myself a few hours of work had I tried to UV everything and do it the way I usually like to.

After some playing around I ended up with this:

Overall it was a major improvement. Looking at this I honestly don't know how I got what I had the first time I tried. Maybe I just really needed to take that break and get away so I could refresh my thought process. I'm very happy with how the shaders turned out, especially since I haven't had too much practice with doing shaders entirely in Maya. I tried to make each of the metals look and feel slightly different so they wouldn't all look exactly the same.

Now that I have it textured the only thing left is to re-light and re-render it and I'll be all done fixing this project up for my portfolio!