One of the delightful things about Project Titan was how non-stop it was. I got very swept up in working and wanted to keep going!

As a result, my usual in-depth 'how I did this' posts fell to the side. I'm setting this up as a placeholder so I can share how I made the tree from my challenge submission post. Spoiler, I used simulations, booles, sweeps, and all sorts of lovely reformers. I'm also going to share the Elephant Ear, which is a lovely hand-painted sort of foliage. Then as the finale I'll post the Goober Palms, so cute! I wish I had pillows of them.

Houdini arrives with this Donut, from a video series by Houdini Isn't Scary. I'm on video two and can confirm, that it is not scary.

It was enjoyable to make. Thank you to Mippithedork for encouraging me to start learning.

I've been contemplating gray. Gray, after all, is an elegant color, and I LOVE gray. This brings me to where I'm at in January 2022. I'm happy, I'm looking forward to creating new worlds, and new civilizations, to boldly go where no Camille has gone before. I am knowledge, ignorance, fear,  bravery, sorrow, power, and I am excited! I am gray!

Here is to 2021 on Artstation, and with a bright (light gray) heart I welcome 2022 :)

I was playing with an artmaker called Dream. Came up with this exhibit.

Curves...so useful and yet so frustrating to use. I am currently updating from Maya 2020 to Maya 2022 for the Sweep Curve command. Wish me luck, pray the bugs are rare.

I'm bringing my meshes from the asset gym to the origin, ensuring the pivot point is where I want it, and exporting to FBX one by one. I've heard OBJ is less error prone than FBX but it isn't requested by Unreal...so here we go again on the testing of the FBX versus OBJ.

I then started importing the meshes into Unreal, so that when I update the meshes with detail and material, it will easily repopulate my scene. I'm starting to really like the look of it. Unreal import in progress below, you can see the overlapping blockout and imported individual static meshes. 

A year ago, Maya crashed on me for the first time. 

A year goes by so quickly, and I'm grateful to you for helping me come so far. I've had a hard time putting into words without feeling cheesy, the emotion I get when I think of the awesomeness of the 3D learning community, and also of my family, and friends, and the artists who are long gone who figured out things like chiaroscuro, or perspective, or even the creators of procedural texturing and real time game engines. Thinking back on the day my mother stayed up late into the night programming the Commodore 64, sending a small boat floating up and down the screen, "Look what I did!" she said to my dad after hours of hard work, "Look!"

"Wow, that's amazing!" he said, "Now what?"

And because my mother didn't have a drive on which to save her creation, they powered it off and the boat is left only in my memory.

It is small victories, and small failures in life that stack up eternal, and, I know to my core that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

So when I say thank you for helping me grow, it seems barely enough. Thank you.

I decided to go with UE5 on this after listening to my teacher Peyton Varney's feedback on his tests so far. He says, overall pretty similar to UE4 with the exceptions of lumen and nanite. I'm still going to design this for games, so high to low poly baking etc.  I've got beautiful hanging colored lights in my concept and am excited to set up emissive materials for them, see how that goes. 

My scene block out is finally coming together!

In theory baking maps and UVs is pretty straightforward, especially when it is working as planned. Despite that, some light reading is in order.

Baking Maps for Games Reading List

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General 

The Toolbag Baking Tutorial by Lead Artist at Marmoset Joe Wilson
In-depth with examples. Read iiiit.

UV Mapping Beginner's Tips by RizomUV
In-depth with some nice specific settings info unrelated to RizomUV.
"If you have to stack and flip, make sure to use an FBX export with tangents and binormals checked."

Normal Map Specific

Bit Depth and How Compression Affects Normal Maps by 3D Artist at CG Cookie  Jonathan Lampel
Unity Focus - Dated but helpful

Height Maps vs Normal Maps (Video 03:22)
Illustrated Normal Tangent Space, Object Space, and World Space

Banding Errors

Banding in Games by Mikkel Gjoel

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Takeaways for my current Marmoset Toolbag 4 baking project with final render in Unity.

• Height Map - To ensure that your zero point is 50%, set the min and max values proportionally, for instance, -5 and 5
• Smooth the cage, get more skew, less crazy edges. Fix skew with skew paint.
• Try split uvs instead of continuous.
• Make sure to triangulate your mesh before importing it into Toolbag. (triangulation mismatch causes x-shaped smoothing errors )
• Right handed (OpenGL) for Unity (handedness can be overridden via the normal map settings in the Baker object by clicking the Flip Y checkbox )
• Dither Map
• 8-bit tga, 16-bit tiff (Unity alpha 2020.2.0a13 supports 16-bit formats as of June 2020)
  Baking to a higher bit depth (16-bit) helps to remove banding, and down-converting to 8-bit with dithers (in Photoshop) to more effectively cram the values into the 8 bit space. Screen captures from Bit Depth and How Compression Affects Normal Maps