Traditional Japanese Tea Set

Venomfly

Hey Guys!


I am working on this traditional Japanese  tea ceremony set and Chashitsu (tea room)for my thesis, and I needed some overall and detailed critiques and some advice on techniques on how to make it better. I have modeled everything in 3DS Max 2016 and am texturing it all in Substance Painter 2 with combination of Photoshop for making custom alphas. For presentation, my advisor is pressing me to work with Sketchfab for the note clicking function but I have never really used it (I have Marmoset Toolbag 2). Overall I think things are going pretty well, but there are some things I really need help with and am very eager to learn new techniques and things I can do to improve my skills. Lighting is definitely one of them, I really have no lighting experience or knowledge, and I want to make sure my scene is lit well. I will update screenshots as well as references as I go! (since these some of these are pretty unique objects that most people aren't familiar with)


Right now I am currently struggling with getting the texture on top of the Futa-Oki (bamboo rest) to look like a real Futa-Oki. It has a gradient fading circular pattern that is tighter at the outer edge and looser at the inner edge. I am not as concerned with getting the fading color because that isn't as difficult as the pattern. I am not sure how to go about getting that pattern in an efficient effective way. Does anyone have any ideas?

FourtyNights

The problem is that you'll never get good results without high poly model where you bake all the maps from (including the most important map, normal map), that help you to build your textures from the ground up.

You can create a subdivision friendly HP model in 3DS Max and sculpt necessary details in ZBrush by following the references you have. At the moment you seem to have a decent low poly already, but you can duplicate that and transform that into your high poly model by tweaking the topo and adding support loops etc. so that the original shape holds when subdivided. Basic sub-d modeling, you know.

Venomfly

FourtyNights said:

The problem is that you'll never get good results without high poly model where you bake all the maps from (including the most important map, normal map), that help you to build your textures from the ground up.

You can create a subdivision friendly HP model in 3DS Max and sculpt necessary details in ZBrush by following the references you have. At the moment you seem to have a decent low poly already, but you can duplicate that and transform that into your high poly model by tweaking the topo and adding support loops etc. so that the original shape holds when subdivided. Basic sub-d modeling, you know.

Unfortunately I don't have Zbrush and can't utilize it and don't really have the money to buy it. I have access to Mudbox, but from what I have used it doesn't seem to have nearly as much capability and depth as Zbrush unfortunately. I can try creating the entire pattern and bake in 3DS Max though, I can think of a way to do it with the array function. but i still feel it will be insignificant. Hmmm.

FourtyNights

Mudbox is fine for that. Since this project of yours isn't inclduding the most complex organic sculpting, you should be alright with this. Just try it out.

OR you can just model the base high poly and "sculpt" those details in Substance Painter 2 on top of the baked normal map you baked from your high to low. I recommend using either SP2:s baker, or the free xNormal.

aclund3

My first thought is to create a custom alpha in photoshop for the top circular patterns and then stamp or project it in SP on the height channel. Then, export the normal with height info added, reimport the new normal map into the normal channel and rebake the other maps with the new normal. You can turn off the extra height details at this point because they'll be in the normal, AO, curvature, etc. maps now.  Then proceed as normal with the other channels and paint/mask away!

Hope that makes sense. Good luck!