Viking Table 2

I have completed the shield, by adding sea deposition, a faded strapwork ring and refining the paint wear. The sea deposition was created by making a masked group with the dirt mask and a dark green fill, and adding another fill with a more sparse dirt mask.

The table retop is almost complete, with just a few adjustments left to do. I imported the high poly from zbrush and used the freeform 3DS Max tools to manually retop the tabletop, as the shape of the high poly had changed considerably from the base mesh. I decided to keep the elements separate, so baking errors would be easier to fix, and I can unwrap them individually while isolated. 

I will have to do a test bake to see how the smoothing groups will look, as most of the polygons use the same group.

The planks took a lot of editing and conforming, but they should bake well. The loops are denser on the edges and corners because they have a more condensed form and detail to comform to.

The metal sections were awkward, as they needed to be perfectly aligned with the wood edges and the thinner metal bands. I had to manually adjust a few loops to stop any gaps forming between each element.

Just the table legs and figureheads to go.

I have also made more props in 3DS Max, and textured them in Painter. I used simple box modelling for most of them, and I used the FFD modifier to get the curves correct. I made a high poly version of the torc (necklace) by using the twist and bend modifiers, which was then baked onto a simple cylindrical copy. I used a lofted spline to create the tankard handle, and attached it manually using target weld and bridge. 

It took me a few tries to get the torc right, as the pivot point of the three cylinders kept changing. It also took many more subdivisions than I expected to form the correct shape when twisted.

Pictured above are the nodes I used for the fibers in the horn tankard. I struggled a bit with this, as I could not get them to look correct, nor balance them with the background noise. I used the crease node and stretched it to create the base I ended up using, and blended it with various noises and some smaller fibers thereafter. This took me longer than I expected, but I am satisfied with the result.

I added a metal band to the tankard in Painter, and used a rough wood texture I had made for the main table on the wooden parts of the objects. I will explain this texture in the next blog post, when I have textured the table. I used the levels filter on several of the height maps, as the edges did not have the correct sharpness. I also added runes to the stones to show that the captain is superstitious, and I will lower the roughness on part of the tankard to imply a recently spilled drink.