Postmortem

I started off this project all other the place, switching ideas every week from asset creation to character design back to asset creation. I feel that if I hadn't been so unsure of what I wanted to do then I would have been able to get a lot more work done earlier in the project and hit all of my milestones. But there was always one thing that I knew I wanted to do and that was modelling and texturing.

When I settled on character design I was looking forward to it as Warframe is a game which I enjoy, this however turned out to be a burden as I would find myself getting distracted by the game itself. Also wanting to learn ZBrush to create the character was a bad choice as it is a very complicated program that would take years to perfect my skills in.

After the first presentation I was recommended to scale back my project and focus on single assets. This recommendation allowed me to focus on a more constrained goal and complete the project on time. Shortly after setting these goals however I found myself disliking anything that I made and I just didn't want to carry on doing something that I didn't like, which caused me to prioritise my other assignments over this one. When i did finally concentrate on this project I ended up really enjoying what i was doing and that in turn helped me create assets that I liked.

When setting out to texture my models I originally thought that Substance Painter would be amazing as on the surface it looks simple to use and the Warframe developers use it. However when it came to me actually using it to texture my model I just felt lost and confused. This is where I reverted back to doing things the way I know how and not trying to learn something new, but this was kind of good as it allowed me to regain some knowledge that I had forgotten.

What I think went well:

• Learning how to sort the UVs for characters.
• I have refreshed myself on how to make certain materials for textures such as normal maps and specular level maps.
• I have leant to become more patient when texturing as now I know the more time I put into unwrapping the UVs the easier making each material will be.

What I think went bad:

• I was not consistent with the blog as there was a few large gaps where there was no visibility.
• I realised how much I had over scoped far too late and had to cut out an asset that I was going to make.
• My research was very weak which caused many problems for me such as not creating any textures in substance painter in the end.

What I will take away from this project:

• If you don't plan and research carefully you will have many problems.
• If you aren't consistent you will fall out of the habit and get less done.
• I found that once I had started working it was easier for me to keep working, I just found it hard to get myself to start anything. I will definitely remember this in the future.

I am quite disappointed by the fact that I couldn't get any in-game screenshots of any of my work due to steam workshop not allowing me to put my assets in the game, but this is okay as everything can easily be viewed in the Warframe TennoGen.

I feel that I could have pushed myself harder to keep on going with this project rather than leaving it on the back burner for so long, this would have allowed me to create better quality models/textures and be able to create all of my intended assets. Overall I think that if I was more consistent with blogging my work I would have realised my mistakes sooner, allowing me to move forward in the right direction instead of wasting as much time as I did fixating on the wrong things.

- Peter Howell

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- Peter Howell

Texturing the Mag helmet

Here are what  the UVs came out like on my first try, I thought that they turned out quite well but then I struck some problems in Substance Painter.

As I drew onto the helmet I noticed that a certain area didn't look right, its just at the bottom of the visor on either side. It turned out that the UVs were all messed up and needed fixing, looking over the specifications for the texture sizes again I realised that I rendered the UVs in the wrong size anyway.

Here are the revised UVs for the helmet, in the correct aspect ratio and no overlapping UVs.

I the put the helmet back into Substance Painter and applied the shader to it.

Soon after applying all the materials in Substance Painter I noticed that creating the textures this way is a lot harder than it previously seemed. I was unable to successfully apply any working materials, looking on line I couldn't find any fixes for this either. I then loaded the UVs into Photoshop and started to make the diffuse texture.

I started by getting a base colour down on each segment depending on where it would be located such as the back of the head, underneath and the visor are dark  where as the outer shell is light.

I then added wire around the texture as wires can be seen on pretty much all warframes within the game.

I added this texture as an overlay to give the helmet a gritty look as if it has been in battle recently, I think the effect worked quite well.

After applying the over lay i decided to create the normal map needed for the model, I did this by using a high pass filter to get the texture of the overlay to become prominent. Then I used the NVIDIA normal map tool.

I then removed the overlay from the visor and created another normal map as having the gritty visor looked wrong, I also toned down the overlay as the marks looked too deep.

Next i desaturated the diffuse map and moved around the levels to create the specular map which is then used as a metal map in the TennoGen. I also toook some time to create the ambient occlusion map in 3DS Max.

Here you can see that i have added the emissive map as the dots on the front have lit up, I also added the emissive map to the vents on the back of the helmet.

Finally I created the tint mask to finish the helmet.

After the problems that I had with creating the texture for the helmet I don't feel as though it is necessary to create a Syandanna as I have learnt how to create all the needed materials. Also creating the materials this way took up a great deal of time.

- Peter Howell

Warframe. (2015). TEXTURING GUIDE. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=texturing-guide. Last accessed 5th May 2015.

Warframe. (2015). SUBSTANCE PAINTER SHADER. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=substance-painter-shader. Last accessed 5th May 2015.

stpetersburgart. (2016). Dirt Texture Black And White. Available: http://stpetersburgart.com/dirt-texture-black-and-white. Last accessed 5th May 2015.

Liset Skin

Just like with the Excalibur skin I looked at the current skins for the Liset and decided I would be changing the tint mask of the Liset to create a new skin.

My initial thoughts for a Liset skin was bubbles inspired, so I knew I wanted to have multiple round shapes of varying sizes.

I started by taking away a lot of the lines and extra parts to make more room for the shapes that I wanted to add in.

Here is what the final skin looks like and the tint mask.

- Peter Howell

Warframe. (2015). CREATING LISET SKINS. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=creating-liset-skins. Last accessed 29th Apr 2015.

AlphaBest. (2016). Bubbles Engineering. Available: https://www.alphabest.org/bubblesengineeringenrichment/. Last accessed 29th Apr 2015.

Creating Excalibur Skin

To start creating a skin for Excalibur I looked at the skins that were already in the game, I noticed that the skins were mostly tint mask swaps which have some kind of theme to them such as fire.

I had an idea of plants or roots grasping the character so I started drawing wispy lines which had little offshoots to try and replicate what a root looks like.

I did this over the majority of the body until I ended up with this as the tint mask that would make up my skin.

Unfortunately I have been unable to get any screenshots of the skin within the game due to issues with the steam workshop, but I have got a preview of the skin in the TennoGen using the colour palette shown in one of my previous posts.

- Peter Howell

Warframe. (2015). CREATING A WARFRAME SKIN. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=creating-a-warframe-skin. Last accessed 17th Apr 2015.

Creating an alternate Mag helmet

One of my goals set is to create an alternate helmet for a Warframe, so I imported a model of Mag into 3DS Max to create it. I have a budget of 5000 tris to work within but I don't think that will be much of a problem for me though.

To start with I duplicated the original helmet and sliced it in half as I wanted to create a symmetrical helmet. I didnt want to stray too far away from the original helmet as then there might be problems when it is put back on the body.

I then cut the gas mask bits off of the front of the head and covered it over and smoothed it up a bit.

I gave the helmet a more prominent ridge around the visor and ear covers, I also added a raised parting down the centre of the helmet.

I added a piece which has a gap between the helmet and itself to give the impression of the helmet being held together by the magnetic powers of the character.

I then added little over hangs on the back of the helmet which are going to be vents.

Here is my finished helmet next to the original that I started with. The final poly count was 1190 polys.

I will create another post about the texturing of the helmet as I ran into a few problems.

- Peter Howell

Warframe. (2015). CREATING AN ALT HELM. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=polycount-creating-an-alt-helm. Last accessed 5th May 2015.

Substance Painter

After reading that Digital Extremes, the creators of Warframe, use Substance Painter to texture their models I decided to try it out. Substance Painter allows you to paint directly onto 3D models while applying all of the textures that are used on the models in Warframe.

After opening up the program and selecting the model that I want to paint this is what the UI looked like. At first I found this very overwhelming as I didn't know what anything was at first but I messed around with some of the settings and quickly learned what each window had in it. On the left you can see the model and on the right you can see the texture, you are able to paint directly onto either of these and it will affect both.

The paint properties window was in my opinion the most useful window, it allowed you to change the colour of the brush, the height of the brush strokes (I later realised this is the Normal map), the roughness and how metallic the colour is. In this window it is also possible to change the brush shape or even use a stencil as the brush.

I noticed that there was a guide for the shaders that are used in the creation of textures so I followed their guide and put them into Substance Painter. This shader tries to emulate what the object will look like if it was in the game. I will show this later when I am creating the textures for my models in Substance Painter.

- Peter

Warframe. (2015). SUBSTANCE PAINTER SHADER. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=substance-painter-shader. Last accessed 17th Apr 2015.