BREAKING DOWN THE X-WING
Adam Hernandez takes us through his X-wing process
Adam joined the team to get some practice working on hard surface models and using Zmodelling tools: “I started with a Qcube for the body. In Zbrush, for pushing and pulling verts. I would isolate the verts I wanted to move by masking them, and then inverting the mask. Then using the transform tools, I could position them where I wanted.”
Adam explains his Ztools process: “The Zmodelling brush is really nice. Assign it as your active brush, mouse over your active Subtool and press the spacebar, you’ll be presented with all kinds of familiar polyediting tools.” Adam then blocked in the body and used a second Qcube for the wings, and a Qcylinder for the engines and wing lasers. “The main goal of this stage is to get the silhouette and proportions locked down quickly,” says Adam.
When Adam got to a point where he was happy with the blocking, he exported the model from Zbrush into 3ds Max for clean-up and detailing.
“The work in 3ds Max consisted of cutting in the panel lines and building out the surface details. I knew that I wanted my model to look turbo-smoothed, but it was going to need to be able to run in our real-time environment,” says Adam. He also needed to consider how the X-wing would work in the environment: “Since Jason’s Falcon was running great in the scene at 700k verts, we knew that 350k for the X-wing would be a nice target and allow us to place two of them in the rebel docking bay,” says Adam. “To get the look I wanted, I needed to model the pieces out with a single smoothing group applied and cut in edge loops at the corners to get the bevels I wanted. Placing the edge loops closer or further from the corner controlled how tight the edge bevels looked. This gave me nice crisp edges, but without all the extra verts
AUTHOR Adam Hernandez adam has worked in video games since 2002. www.bit.ly/216-adam
of just using a Turbosmooth modifier. When I exported to Unreal, the model looked just as it did in 3ds Max.”
To get the body panels Adam used a combination of 3ds Max’s Slice and Cut Face tools. “Once I finished cutting in where all the panels would be, I pushed the body over to Maya and used the Bevel Face tool there to get nice and even panel lines. The detail on the body and wings of the X-wing consists mostly of simple primitive shapes.”
He used 3ds Max’s Autogrid function to align the surface details to the wing and body panels. “Then I cut in the extra edge loops and applied the single smoothing group. For a few of the more curved detail pieces on the top panel, I started with basic primitives and applied the Turbosmooth modifier set at 1 or 2 levels and deleted out any extra edge loops that I didn’t need.”
The engine details needed the same look, but on a curved surface. “To achieve this, I used a slightly modified variation of the process. I modelled them out as flat sheets, like the wings and body details, but used 3ds Max’s Bend modifier to get the round cylinder shapes I needed. This required cutting in extra edge loops along the bending axis in order to allow everything to bend together nice and smoothly in unison,” explains Adam.
UVS were done in 3ds Max, along with baking out a material ID map that used in Quixel Suite to assign my materials. Adam baked a base normal map, an AO map and a curvature map in Xnormal which he then used as his base maps in Quixel.
Texturing was completed in Quixel, using ndo for adding additional normal details and 3Do for the metal, glass and various painted metals. “Having the baked maps from Xnormal was helpful for getting wear, dirt and grime into my textures,” reflects Adam.
“due to our project timeline, i didn’t want to build something so high poly that i would then need to build a low poly to bake down to, i needed to do something in between,” says adam