Rope is one of the more important items in the whole scene, so I learnt how to make a good rope, at first I used path tracing to make a rope, but the effect is particularly poor, in a conversation with the tutor, the tutor taught me to use maya’s deformation tool to make a rope convenient and fast.

At the beginning of Element 2 I started by carving the stone fox that I had drawn, during the sculpting process I still needed to find some references of real stone foxes in order to complete the sculpting, which was an important part of my workflow, after feedback from my two tutors when I returned to school after the first holiday I realised myself that there was something strange about the stone fox’s face so I searched for some other feline stone statues and reference pictures of real foxes to modify them.

After adjusting the overall effect in this step I used the orb brush posted by my tutor on moodle to add some bumpy effects to the stones and then rewired the model to make the overall wiring as little as possible. I was originally torn between using the zremesher for auto-topology or manually doing the topology (quad draw) because the model will be a static model, so I ultimately chose to use the zremesher for the auto-topology and then do the adjustments manually since the model will be static.

As a 3D artist, I will refer to different photos to explore and realise more ideas during the production process, so I refer to the scarf in the very famous Inari Taisha Shrine’s stone statue of a fox in Japan, and I add some of my own creativity during the production process. Before making the scarf, the tutor taught us how to make fabric using marvelous designer during the class, so I was able to learn how to use this software to make the scarf, and also create a good foundation of experience in using the software for the character in the later stages of the project.

During the UV splitting step I cut the entire stone fox into several different parts before proceeding to the next step of cutting and splitting, this allowed me to get a better idea of how to unfold and line up the UVs, I also spent some time in this step adjusting the size and position of the UVs so that the UV utilisation was as high as possible.

Making materials is a very complex process for me, before FMP I had been adding materials by using smart material balls from the substance painter repository and tweaking the colours a bit, but during the course of the FMP project I spent a lot of time learning about materials, I would analyse the references I was looking for to see how the colours of the materials changed, the roughness changed, and how some of the complex effects were achieved by overlaying and tweaking each of the layers. I will not directly follow my ideas when making the material of the stone fox, especially when making realistic scenes, I will first analyse the stone fox should be a grey stone material, so my first step is to make sure that the base texture of the stone is made first, the stone fox should be the effect of weathering and rain erosion, so I will start to make the texture of the stone after taking these effects into consideration. Then considering the stone colour should not just be simple grey is enough, the stone mixed with other colours will look better, considering the whole scene is a bit old, so in the production of moss I will use a lot of substance comes with noise, dirty stains and so on the effect for many times to superimpose, because in the analysis of the reference picture I found that the moss is not just green enough, should add some yellow and cyan variations in order to add I should add some yellow and cyan variations to make the moss look more natural. When making the material for the stone fox scarf, I considered that there should not be any moss on the fabric, and the scarf would be cleaned regularly by the local management, so the overall material of the scarf is quite dirty, but not that old. Because it took a lot of time to make the material for this object, and because similar materials can be used for other objects, I made a reusable material sphere with the overall material effect I made, and included it in my own material repository.

I spent a lot of time splitting the UVs of the entire shrine because I needed to manually cut and unfold the UVs, and

I needed to think about which side I should cut on so that the model didn’t have as many UV seams as possible,

but the entire model was unfolded correctly. After completely splitting the UVs I would choose to manually place

the UVs as flat as possible and maximise UV utilisation. Since the shrine is the visual centre of the environment

and the largest building, I’ll use the UDIM mapping method to spread the main body of the shrine across several

different UV sets, and I’ll add different colours to the models in the UV sets to make it clearer which parts are in

the same UV set. I wouldn’t have thought about these things before my junior year of college, and while they

probably won’t affect the end result too much, they are things I need to work out as I become a 3D artist, and

these small aspects of the process are a little bit of what I think I’ve progressed in this year, I guess.

Before I make the material part, I will spend more time to analyse these material references I found, what is the colour of the old wood, what kind of wood grain do I need to make to add more details, because the shrine is always on the mountain, its wood material will be affected by some environment, these are all things I need to consider, before I start the FMP, I have a very one-sided understanding of the material, and I won’t go to analyse I spent a lot of time during the making of FMP analysing the composition of the materials, the variations in colours, the composition of textures and other factors. So after analysing these factors, I plan to create some of the materials in the shrine first, I will combine them with the base material sphere that comes with the Substance Painter, and then overlay them. I will determine the base colour first, the base colour of the wood that I found for reference is not only a single colour, but it is also made up of a number of other shades of colours, which is one thing to take into account when creating a realistic style game environment. for example, I made sure the wood is brown, it also includes red and yellow hues, combining these to finalise the base colour of the wood, then I used textures to overlay the materials to make them more detailed, the most important point is to make dirty and worn out, the procedural smart masks can’t achieve the effect I want, so I will consider using my own brushes to draw in the worn out and dirty parts. So when working on the abrasions and dirt I will consider painting them myself with a brush, for example the edges and the parts near the floor will have more abrasions and so on, at the end I will paint some darker parts, the colours are usually darker near the floor. Once I have made all the textures for a section, it is convenient to make a smart material sphere for this section, I can apply this sphere to other sections and change the colours and wood grain to create the overall texture effect more efficiently. Through this project, I have a deeper understanding of materials, and analysing the underlying logic of materials is very important to me, because I can use the underlying logic of this set of materials to create other different styles of materials when I go into the 3D art industry later on.