Iron Fist Prop - Industry Collaboration

This blog post involves my production process for the prop of my Soviet unit, the Eurasian Werewolf, from my Pre-Production assignment. The fist is a unique weapon in my character design that stands out the most, which is why I chose to model it. You can view this character design here. 



Iron Fist by April on Sketchfab



Drawing Orthographics - Preparing for 3D Modelling

I applied my anatomy knowledge to create a semi accurate sketch of an arm and hand. I felt that it was easier to create an open hand since I wouldn't have to worry about the position of the fingers later. I used basic shapes and mapped out where I wanted the palm to be flat or raised. 

Front
Top
Side




Modelling

To model this fist, I started with a cylinder polygon and rotated it 90 degrees on the X axis. I transformed the size of the polygon to align with the orthographic before extruding and started box modelling, manipulating the verts in a way that aligned with the orthograph. I used the same technique for the hand, thumb and fingers. With the fingers however, I just modelled one before duplicating it and aligning it more with the hand and changed the shape and size accordingly. 


I then raised the respective verts on the hand to give it dimension as well as adjusted the arm and wrist in a way that made them look less like cylinders. Lastly, I applied smooth to all aspects of the model except for the arm as I wanted to keep the more sharp appearance.


Lastly, I UV mapped all my planes to prepare it for texturing, then I combined everything together into one object.

Texturing in Substance Painter

This process was relatively quick. I exported my model from Maya as an FBX file and imported it into Substance 3D Painter before baking my maps. 

I drag and dropped the "Metal Brushed" material into my layers as a base and tweaked some properties, more specifically the metal colour and the degree of roughness to make it a little less shiny to give it the appearance of worn metal.

I set the roughness to 0.36 because 0 = reflective and 1 = matte, so I wanted it somewhere in between but still shiny enough to look metallic.

I also painted onto the crevices of the model, like around the finger gaps and the wrist to add a little shading and lowered the layer opacity so it wasn't intense.

Applying textures & Rendering

To export the textures from Substance Painter, I went to File > Export Textures and used the PBR Metal Roughness template.

I then went back into Maya and imported all of my maps in each slot respectively. This is a process that I have showcased in my Kitsune Mask blog post.

After applying the textures, I actually had to go into my Hypershade to fix my roughness map as it wasn't showing correctly using a remapValue and plugging it as shown in the image below.


After fixing my roughness map, I put a skydome light with a HDRI to properly showcase the reflectiveness in my render.

Now that my scene was set up according for rendering, I adjusted my render settings before rendering my model from the front, side and top views. 

Note: To make the background transparent, select the skydome light and go to attribute settings and Visibility > Camera = 0





Conclusion

That concludes the modelling and rendering process of my model. This experience has made me more comfortable with using Maya since this model has required me to look into fixing my roughness map, which was a learning curve for me as I haven't dabbled much with adjusting Hypershade nodes. 

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