Modelling Minar-e-Pakistan Star
This week I was asked to add some damage to the Star on Minar-e-Pakistan. This was at the base of the tower. This was to add age to the structure and to make it blend into the background. For this I again downloaded some more brushes for ZBrush to start playing around with. It is super easy to get brushes for ArtStation or Gumroad. I used a combination of Dannie Carlone’s Brushes and Michael Vincent (Orb) Brushes along with the normal standard brushes that come with ZBrush.
We already had a model of the Minar-e-Pakistan tower that we had purchased, so I just imported it into Maya and then exported just the star in to Brush. I feel like there may have been an easier way to import the model into ZBrush and just “hide” the tower so that I was just working on the star, but when I imported the model into ZBrush, it came in as one whole mesh and couldn’t work out how to separate it. This was the only way I could work out how to work on the star by itself.
So in ZB I did the same process as I did before
The meeting: Final Tweaks
This week all the models were complete and we were doing the last minute touches. We added animations of the chameleons and adjusted the colours.
There were a few tweaks we needed to do with our UI. It was being a bit glitchy. We try the headset on to test the starting page to see what it is like as a user. It was difficult to select the next and back buttons and the part to select which country we wanted to travel to first. Ria went in and adjusted some of the settings such as the distance of the player from the buttons.
This was our last meeting there the UI was adjusted some more and we added the extra elements, like the stick to help the user select the buttons. We did some screen recordings of us walking through the scene to use it for the final video.
Adjustments
This week we found out that Ria and Neeti got feedback on the project and to fit the VR criteria they had to make alot of adjustments. In response to this, they adjusted the lighting, the side of the mushrooms and creatures and laid out the tomestones differently. Because of this we needed to create an animation that fit our criteria. Donatella put together a video for us to act as a trailer using the screen recordings we did in the last meeting. We ended up loving how the trailer came out.
Reflections
I was happy again with the damage texture I was able to add to the star on the Minar-e-Pakistan model. I really feel like I am able to work around the interface of ZBrush now. I definitely need more practice but the time it took me to finish the star compared to the other models, make me think that I am getting the hang of it.
I am really happy with how the project is looking now and the trailer looked great. In terms of the team aspect I felt a bit out of the loop this week because I couldn’t get into uni because of the train strikes.