Viking Table 1

 I began the first of my 3rd year projects this week; an environment brief set by Ubisoft involving the creation of a captain's table. I went down the sea captain route, and chose to create a viking sea captain's desk with a mainly realistic style and some slightly stylised shapes. Because of the current covid restrictions, I decided to work on the main table in class and the props at home. I began by blocking out the table and a shield (after gathering reference) so I could sculpt the details in ZBrush more efficiently.

The table sculpt mainly just required edge wear and slight surface and shape variation, which I completed this week using mainly trim brushes and pinch. The figureheads at the ends of the table will require more work, however. The shield is almost complete, with just the back needing more texturing. 

I used the base mesh as the low poly, as the overall shape had not changed during the sculpt, and conformed it to the high poly in 3DS Max. I had some baking issues, which were luckily solved by moving the low poly mesh slightly and fixing some smoothing groups. 

I textured the shield in Substance Painter, using a wood material that I made in Designer and base materials with various filters and masks. The wood grains were difficult to create, as I could not find a way to turn sections back on themselves to add variation to the straight lines, but with some help from a tutorial I realised I could apply alternating colours to a gradient, specifically the gradient created by a twice tiled bell shape. This creative technique will be useful to me in the future, as it would have taken me a while to come up with it myself. 

I had some trouble with the mask for the red paint, as the paint was visible in the deeper parts of the cracks. I eventually solved this with an ambient occlusion mask generator, which I tweaked the settings for until the mask looked correct.