Pile1

Francis Bacon’s art studio, of which we are trying to replicate as closely as we can, has an extremely cluttered floor and tabletops consisting of piles of art supplies, boxes and books. We also needed to create these. The method in which we selected to follow was to first create the individual assets. I created variations of paint pots, paint brushes, books, containers, cardboard boxes, wooden boxes, paint rollers, roller trays, replacement rollers, open and unopened jars, tins, tubs of paint, paint tubes and spray cans.



Once these were done, I would arrange them into a fairly large natural looking pile, similarly following the look of a pile from the references. I also needed to apply new materials to different areas of which would be different materials when I eventually have it in Substance Painter. The colours would be used to create an ID map in Zbrush so that I can apply certain materials to groups of objects very quickly and not have to manually mask out every face.

Once this pile was arranged, I would take it into Zbrush in which it would be dynameshed and Decimated. As I had objects stacked upon objects, I thought it would be a good idea to create a plane in Maya underneath the pile. I then used soft selection to raise areas of the plane to intersect with parts of the pile in which I wanted to completely loose underneath detail as they would not be seen. Once it covered the entire group of objects, I extruded the plane downwards so that it covered all objects trapped underneath. I originally attempted at projecting them in Zbrush, however the models lost a lot of detail and I didn't manage to find a successful result. This was my alternative.



When brought into Zbrush and it was Dynameshed, the geometry of all objects trapped underneath the green plane were lost, and other objects that intersected now all shared the same geometry. This allowed for the entire object to be decimated using decimation master.

The first time I used decimation master. I found that although it worked well for most of the models, some of the smaller objects were completely destroyed, such as the paint brushes and thin objects like the open book and the lids of the tins. What I then had to do was find these objects in the maya file, and export the selection of them. And when bringing the low poly back to Maya to optimise, I could reimport them to add to the object, then delete unnecessary edges making them as low poly as possible. Often when the low poly was brought back into Maya from Zbrush, there was still a lot of optimisation to go through. There were many unnecessary verts, of which could be deleted or merged.

  Geometry that needs fixing in Maya

I could then delete the bulk of the extruded plane I used to capture unnecessary objects. During this stage I would also have to harden and soften edges. When this was done I would finally have my low poly. The original pile in the first Maya file would be used for the high poly, bringing it first into Zbrush, creating polypaint from Mats would then allow me to export it all as an FBX. This would give me access to the ID map of which would be crucial in the painting process, aswell as the normal map.

Before moving into Substance Painter, I first needed a selection of textures and logos that I could use on my model. I first went around my own house, finding surfaces of which matched that of materials I’d hope to create. This included wood, paper, artbooks, crumpled bags, cloth, paintbrush bristles and plastic. After making each one tiling in Photoshop, they were suitable to use as a base colour for the materials. I also used Photoshop to develop my own brand logos, similar to those that were shown in the references. Taking inspiration for colours, fonts and overall aesthetic, however making mine an altered off brand version of what I could see. After making the logo, I’d then have to create an Alpha vesion by changing the colours to only black and white, so I could paste them onto objects properly.



Examples of logos and textures

When in Substance painter, I baked the high poly model of my pile onto the low poly, giving the normal map and access to the ID map. This came in very useful. As, by holding CTRL and dragging a material, I could apply this material to a selection of colour ID’s.

   ID Map

I could then import my tiling textures into the base colours of the material and further adjust values to develop a correct looking material. Inserting a paint layer to these new materials allowed me to paste on the different logos that I had created, creating believable looking pots of paint, paint cans, tubes, tins. I also had an ID applied to pages that were scattered across my pile in the high poly, that were non existent in the low poly as they were thin enough to bake on. I needed something to fill these pages, so went back to taking photos. I found my old art books from school of which included numerous rough sketches and photos that looked suitable enough to be scattered around an art studio. I used these to paste onto the page ID’s and the end result worked well.

To finalise the textures of the pile, I needed to make it look very rough and discarded, with paint drops which had dripped onto many of the surfaces. To get some nice overall wear and paint, I used projection and different grunges to cover certain areas. This seemed to work very nicely to provide a base layer of paint and dust. I could then go in and manually paint on areas that needed it.