Conclusion

To conclude I'd like to say that I didn't perform nearly as good as I know I could have, there were several factors in this though, I lacked motivation for the first couple of weeks, and then when I finally gain some motivation my PC broke down for almost 3 weeks, I got really put off the project as a whole because I had no means of doing any work, all my work was in further versions of software that I couldn't open in college.
Yet that is still no excuse - I should've put more effort it when I know I'm easily capable of doing it.

As for the assets, all of them have one thing in common which was a distinctive lack of detail and finishing touch. They were all game ready assets but not one besides the hand I made had any true detail, they were just textured and I wanted my assets to be more important and act as land marks on our deserted island.
As fore mentioned there were many ways I could have done this better, whether it was just through texture maps, or going further into displacement maps and normal maps. The normal maps I did do were just exported detail from ZBrush which in most cases was just noise and alphas, they didn't appear in Maya anywhere near the level of detail they showed in ZBrush. This leads me to the next point of making low resolution models as a whole.

This was my first real venture into making game ready assets so I did have a lot of trouble with the process of cutting the polycount significantly while maintaining the illusion of the detail in the high resolution. The method I did was good enough for standard assets which was exporting objects from Maya with UV maps already made, and then imported into Zbrush to polypaint so I could export the texture maps with the same UV's as I originally made so that I could just add those maps into a blinn material in Maya. I highly doubt this was the the best or most efficient way of completing the process however half the project was spent idle for reasons that I didn't really have control over.

The only asset I was really happy with was the hand as I modelled it from scratch with mostly my own hand for reference, so in a way it was like a life sculpture. We also had trouble importing our assets into the actual map, actually, we couldn't import them at all, although it didn't matter marks wise we still wanted our finished product to look good with everything we had designed. We tried to export them as .fbx, in college, at home, and also to import them at home and in college but neither worked, with several options being tweaked in the fbx export settings.

If I were to do the project again, the first thing I'd do is try and understand and study the correct methods and procedures to obtain the correct amount of detail I want in my assets but also in a efficient amount of polygons. Then I'd go on draw up all the assets for concept art. I didn't do as much of this as I'd want to.
The project was overall enjoyable while I had motivation to do it, once my computer broke I really had lost my motivation to do anymore but I know if I was given another project similar to this I'd put a lot of effort in from the get go.

Nevermind that - Arch v2.0!

So after rethinking the design of the arch I decided that an arch wouldn't be enough on it's alone so I wanted an entire entrance-way with pillars, to give it a more epic feel. 

This was the design I initially came up with, and I decided to take it further into maya straight away, because I felt this was a much stronger design than simply an arch and centerpiece like my previous one.
It's also much more noticeable when you walk through this, compared to the original arch I made, although maybe there still could be a place somewhere in the map for the other arch to go, even though it wouldn't be as significant.

Modelling the pillars was the only object in the entrance that would not just be a default cube for example. I wanted there to be indents on the pillar so I just inserted edge loops and started to scale them in a little. There was nothing complicated about it, because I wanted most of the work to go in the texturing of these pillars and the rest of the model.

This is how it turned out, exactly how I pictured during my designing. I was happy with this and knew I could further this model and bring it into ZBrush to texture. I knew that I could also texture these things in Maya too, but I feel it's a lot more creative and free in ZBrush polypainting as opposed to making materials in Maya, so I choose to polypaint first.

Before I send it into ZBrush I'll need to UV map a lot of parts of this model, so I just did automatic mapping for the majority, just tweaking little bits as I saw fit, exported all the objects and put them into ZBrush.

As usual I'd have to subdivide the object up quite a bit so that I could actually paint it, then I just got stuck in, using similar techniques to the previous arch I made. More importantly I used the same textures - I wanted this to be consistent of me so that all my models and assets look like they belong to the same environment, the same game. If all my models looked different it would be a waste because they just wouldn't fit in the game as well as consistently textured ones would. 

This was the finished texturing on the pillar. Compared to the previous image it looked a little more varied. I added some more stone texturing to it and also the broken up rocks towards the bottom were too strong I felt so I used the same texture (Default in ZBrush), on a much lower RBG Intensity so that it wouldn't show as much.

Finally I wanted some displacement involved for a normal map I'd make so I used the blob brush on the spray function and just did it randomly all over. I also finished texturing the top of the pillar too. I felt this pillar fit well into the aztec ruins theme, so I kept to it and decided that I could export the textures out from ZBrush.

This is where those UV's I made come in handy now, because the object was exported from maya with the UV's, they still remain in ZBrush.

This was all I had to do to make my texture maps, create a new one from the polypaint I just did on the model. As you can see the UV's in that box are still there. I'll then click 'Clone Txtr' so that it moves into the texture palette on the left, but before I export it out, ZBrush flips the UV's from maya vertically for some reason, so I'll have to flip those again, and then export.
I did this for the rest of the objects but it wasn't as interesting because they were all just really simple cuboids. I did the same method to export the texture maps too.

In Maya I made a new blinn material and chose colour from file and just chose the texture maps I had exported from ZBrush, and then assigned the material to the object with the correct UV's.

As you see from the image above there is a file2 also allocated into the bump map, this was the normal map I had created from the ZBrush file too. For a long time I couldn't see what the bump map did at all, I thought it wasn't working no matter what settings I had it on, but I found out that I had to render the model to see what it actually looks like. When I put the bump settings on max it looked crazy so I toned down the bump values to this.

This is how the low res model actually turned out to look like. I think it fitted in perfectly with the whole ancient ruins theme, except I wasn't too happy on the level of detailing I put into it. I think I should have further studied different types of maps, for example displacement maps to really get finishing touches into the model to mimic an actual 3d object because when you look at it really closely you can tell it's all very flat.

Things I'll need to improve on for assets down the line would definitely be how to texture efficiently and use different types of maps to detail the object properly, including normal maps and displacement maps, they're also maps that I've never tried out like ambient occlusion and specularity maps too. Although I wouldn't really need specular maps for something so rocky and ruined.

The Staircase

The Staircase design was simple, although like my other assets I wanted it to be ruined and ancient, and all along the edges I wanted an extruding pattern just to give it that extra significance as an asset in the game world. This staircase would be huge so it would already be extremely noticeable, I just needed to add subtle details to it to make it a little more monumental than any old staircase that you'll find in this game.

I started work in Maya, and this was a simple design, it took around 10 minutes to do because it is just a staircase after all.

Once done in Maya, I exported one of the side objects, and the main staircase. I only needed to export one of the side objects because they would be identical and there's no point making extra work for myself when I can just duplicate it once the object is complete. As I've done with other assets I used automatic UV mapping on both these objects.

Once in ZBrush I followed the same techniques and steps to achieve my rocky and mossy, ancient look to the stairs.

It was the same process as other assets, turning the subdivisions higher, then using the same textures to polypaint all over the model. I did some deforming on the stairs too in the hope that it would follow over well in a normal or displacement map however this wasn't the case. I'm still new to all these different types of maps and how to use them effectively. 

I masked out a little pattern on the side object and moved it inwards a little using the transpose tool.

Once I was done in Zbrush I just exported the texture maps, and normal maps and moved back in maya to make the materials and assign the maps to the UV's.

 Unfortunately I pattern didn't follow over in the normal map and I didn't know what to do. I tried messing around with bump depth and some other options but nothing worked, it wouldn't show in a rendered version.

Although I was happy with the model as a whole, it really lacked detail I'd like to include, as mentioned in my first blog post I wanted the assets I made to be monumental in a way and definitely significant, although this staircase definitely lacked the detail needed to be something that significant, it was far too plain. I should have looked into incorporating patterns properly into the staircase asset.

The Hand?

So the pinnacle of our level would have to contain a relic of some sort, making a relic is one thing but presenting the relic in a way that it actually look significant is another. I had some ideas but my favourite was two hands from a pedestal, and the relic floating in between. So I had to model a hand (obviously the other hand can be duplicated and flipped).
I hadn't modeled a hand before so I started from reference and my own drawings.

I started to google hands and just generally look at how the lines work and what patterns there are in the hand, and of course, I spent a good time looking at my own hand in several positions as awkward as that was.

Initially I thought I'd start modeling the hand using ZSpheres, but I tried it for about 5 minutes and realised how irritating it was, so I started anew. I made a Dynamesh sphere and just started to mask circles on it and pull them out using transpose. This looked absolutely horrible to begin with, but I just kept working at it.

As you can see from the hand above, well if I can even call it that, it didn't look like a hand at all. Everything about it was wrong, positioning, the anatomy and the proportions.

Like I said I just kept on working on it. I used the transpose tool in correlation with masking a single finger to re-position them firstly, I needed to get the feeling they were grasping something and not waving hello. Using transpose to scale and position was amazing, I didn't need to figit with using the Move brush, or resculpt any detail, I could alter everything just using transpose.

So once I was satisfied with the positioning, I just had to add more realistic detail, but I did keep in mind that this hand wasn't a hand made of bone and flesh, it was one made of stone, so the detail I put only had to be significant detail, the detail you'd notice from far. With that in mind, and still looking at my own hand several times I feel I got most of the important details down.

A stone hand, wouldn't be so smooth unless it was just made, and this hand is supposedly thousands of years old, ancient. So I had to make it look ancient, and give it a stone texture. I just used the default alphas on ZSub, to get that stone texture right. I tried using spray as a brush stroke initially but it was way too overwhelming so I just chose drag rectangle, and did it little by little all over. Once I was happy with that I could move onto texturing it.

Again as I said before I wanted to be consistent with textures so I used the same rocky mossy texture I've previously used, this time I did use the spray brush stroke in conjunction with drag rectangle too so I could get some finer detail in there.

Eventually for the finishing touch I just added a bit of a 'rock' at the bottom of the hand, so you can really tell it's not supposed to be attached to any lifeforms or creature of some sort.
Now a problem for me at this stage would be how to correctly make this model a low game resolution asset. Previously I had always brought models in from maya and just textured and did finer details in ZBrush, but for this one I completely made it in ZBrush and had no idea how to make it low res.
After some research I found two options, Decimation Master and QRemesher.
After using the Decimation Master, well, what it did was a little too literal, it decimated my mesh completely, this didn't work so I tried the QRemesher option.

Target Polygons Count - This was the only option I messed about with, as it would affect the output polygon count of what I wanted. The high resolution model was 100,000 polygons, I didn't want to lose too much detail so I chose 3,000. I did attempt numbers like 1,000 and 500 but they destroyed the model losing way too much detail.

This was the outcome of using Qremesher, I found this to be surprisingly good and I decided to keep going on with it. I applied the same texture as the high res one on top of this but of course it looked way too low res, and I had lost all the important detail I wanted from the mossy rock texture. I had not done this before so I just thought I'd edit the texture map directly in Photoshop.

Once I was done I exported the .obj of the mesh, the texture maps and the normal maps too. I was ready to test out how it would look with the new textures I adjusted in Photoshop.

This is how the hand looked like after I exported and imported it into Maya. I was happy with the result as it had a relatively low polycount and still kept all the significant detail. Significant detail meaning the positioning and anatomy. You can look at it from far away and see that it is a hand quite clearly, so that was the job done with the model.

I finally applied the texture and normal maps to the model. As I did with all the rest of the models, I pretty much turned everything down or off on the Specular Shading panel, this is obviously because they don't shine or reflect, it's supposed to be ruined rock. 

The above images are how it looked in maya and two rendered out images. I was really happy with the result as this was the first time I had made something high resolution in Zbrush and successfully made a low resolution model of it with correct textures and mapping.
If I was going to do this again I would definitely do much more research into the process of how to turn a ZBrush high resolution mesh into a game resolution one, I sort of had to figure it out as I went along during this asset but I learnt a few new things in Zbrush such as Decimation Master and QReremesher, and of course modelling a hand! It was my first time doing any hand anatomy and I was happy with the result.
The method I used - Dynamesh, actually worked surprisingly well, I thought I'd just give it a go and see how it went but it turned out that would be the method I would use for the entirety of the asset.

The First Asset - Arch v1.0

So as fore mentioned in my previous post I said one of the assets I wanted to design was a entrance/arch. This was the first thing I needed to do and I did this all pretty quick so the results weren't very good. Despite this I learnt some things in ZBrush, like using Projection Master and Surface Noise.

The first step was to model a low res version in Maya that I would export into ZBrush for the more advance detailing. This was pretty simple.
I made a torus cut it in half, and added a cylinder in the middle. The plan was to make the actual arch itself ruined and mossy, and the centerpiece being the cylinder have a cool aztec-type pattern in the middle, just to give it emphasis that something big is coming up, which in our case was falling to your doom into a underground facility.

Next I exported both models as .objs and imported them both into ZBrush, I then opened one and appended the other, this works well in Zbrush because they'll be positioned exactly the same as they were positioned in Maya, so I wouldn't have to tweak the cylinder to be perfectly in the middle, which is a lot easier in Maya as opposed to ZBrush. I obviously had to subdivide both objects quite a bit so that I could polypaint and edit the surface properly without it having artifacts all over.

The first thing I did in ZBrush was add a surface noise using the following texture - as an alpha.

I did this on both of the objects using the same settings so that it would remain consistent.

Next up was polypainting the model to give it a stone-like, ruined feel to it. Before polypainting I filled the object with Matcap_Gray, I could've also used the plain white texture but I always prefer using the gray material. This is because I can add low and high values of colour well with having the middle-tone already set there.

I used the same texture as the alpha I used for the surface noise, turned brush on Mrgb, and colour spray and started spraying all over both objects, it didn't matter much about the positioning of the painting because I had to imitate the ruined look - which suggests the random element.

As for the centerpiece, this is where Projection Master came in. I imported the following image as an alpha, then turned on Projection Master for the actual positioning. I didn't need colour because I wanted it to slightly extrude from the cylinder and not be that different from the rest of the model. I used the following settings.

After turning that on, I just clicked anywhere on the front face of the cylinder and started to use the move and scale controls to perfectly align it in the cylinder and to be the right size, this is why projection master is so powerful.

The next steps would be to export the texture map, and also the normal map (for the bump map in maya), but I decided this asset wasn't 'powerful' enough to be an entrance to this ruined building.

A new project - Creating Game Assets!

For this project, we had to form groups that consisted of 1 designer and 2-3 artists. The designer would be the one doing everything map related (UDK work), which includes map design, cinematic storyboards, triggers and using these means to show a narrative. On the other hand artists had to design and model assets ready to be imported into UDK.

The level we had to create could be anything, so we chose a plane crash onto a foreign island which holds ancient relics and ruins. The level starts off in a jungle where the plane crashes. So I already had my theme and colour scheme in mind as I thought of assets to design for the jungle. I wanted ancient ruins, so mossy ruined rocks would be the most apparent design in my assets for the jungle.

As a group we thought of the story more and more and expanded on it, we wanted to make 'monumental' assets to support the narrative. Jack our other artist volunteered to model the plane, which of course is the first and probably biggest asset to model.
As you walk through the jungle you'll find yourself walking up a huge staircase, through an arch of some sort which leads to a door to this huge ancient relic of a building. I already knew which assets I would be designing, the staircase, the arch and the door.