Mount Olympus - Destiny Smith

Blog Post 9 - 4/6

This week I focused on getting my buildings textured and finalized. I am a little behind on my plan because I was sick for 2 days this week but I still managed to get two of my buildings textured, Artemis and Apollo. There were a lot of issues that arose with my UVs and after going back and forth from Maya and Painter, I was able to resolve them.

Artemis

I started with Artemis and created a brick texture in Painter that I saved as a smart material. I used a fill layer and used a negative value for the height channel to make the brick pattern. I used a photo of a brick wall I found online and did some saturation and levels adjustment in Photoshop and then inverted it. I added a few grunge maps for roughness and height and dirt generators. I wanted blue hues for Artemis to fit the theme of the building but stuck with white and gold for the overall theme of the scene. The stone parts are the same brick smart material I made but without the brick alpha channels.

The roof I decided to use a glass texture to give the affect of glass panels. I wanted the building to resemble an observatory to fit the the 'moon goddess' theme. The gold lining around certain parts of the building were easily applied using an ID color map. I applied these colors in Maya and when baking I changed the Color Source to Vertex Color. I applied a black mask to the 'Gold Damaged' smart material I used from Painter and add a color selection effect on the mask. I used the same smart material for the deer and moon statues.

For these details. I created two alphas using images I found online (see below). I drew an outline for the wolf and inverted both images to create the alphas. I added paint layers and imported the alphas to paint them on individually. I used a negative height value for the moon design and a positive height value for the wolf.

Last minute, I added these deer. I found these originally as an animation and posed the deer how I wanted in Maya and positioned them around my building. I would have used the original realistic textures but since they wouldn't be animated, they would have been too rigid to be realistic deer. Therefore, I made them as gold statues.

Apollo

I used the brick smart material I made for Artemis but changed the concrete base to a marble base and the colors to have a yellow hue instead of blue. I also made the scale of the bricks a bit larger. The top uses the same material but without the brick pattern. The columns, doors, windows, and statue stands were made with the 'Marble Fine White' smart material in Painter. I used the same color ID technique I did with Artemis for this building. Some parts were the normal 'Gold Damaged' and some parts I changed the gold to a more orange color. The orange marble parts on the top were just a fill layer with a 'soft light' blending mode.

The swans and pendant were added inside of Maya. I used an outline of a swan that I put into Illustrator to make a 3D object. Then I put it into Maya and retopologized it for a lower poly count and cleaner topology. The pendant is a cylinder with some extrusions around the edges. I created an alpha map that I used in Zbrush to sculpt the Sun God design onto it and exported it as a high poly. I baked the design on as a high poly in Painter. The sun logos wrapping around the building was an alpha map I made and painted on individually.

The roof I used the original brick smart material I made but changed the pattern to the stripped lines above to make it look like roof tiles. I also changed the color to red and added some dirt generators.

For the 'Know Thyself' design on the side of the building, I used a polished metal material and changed it to custom and the color to black. I applied a fill layer and used an alpha map in the greyscale to create the tile design.

For these details, I used a alpha I made for the Greek letters. In English, it says "Apollo, god of light and the sun". I used the same sun design alphas I made for the door and statue stand. I also used a color ID for the gold and black metal tile material I made on the door. The statues, sun pedant, swans, harps, and weight scale all used the 'Gold Damaged' smart material in Painter.