FMP Changes and Problems I faced

Due to the global pandemic (Covid 19) and other circumstances beyond my control. I had to make changes to my original idea. Firstly I had to change the project over from being playable in VR over to a standard First Person view as I did not have the equipment or access to equipment to test on due to being in lockdown.

From this I decided to put my time into creating a high detailed enemy character. With the story behind my FMP involving a mix of Alien and Human Technology I wanted this character to showcase both sides of this with enhanced mechanical looking technology and weapons.

I started in ZBrush sculpting out the main shape of the character until I was happy. Over the course of around a month and a half I made improvements and added more detail in the background as I was completing my dissertation and other assignments that were due at an earlier date. Once I was happy with the sculpt, I imported the model into Maya to resize to a real world scale using my environment models and other drone enemys as I wanted to make sure the Alien was considerably larger than everything else. I then took the model into 3Wrap with a good topology model and setup the process of transferring the topology and wrapping it onto my model. Once this was complete I took it back into Maya to UV unwrap.

This is where I faced a serious problem. Having recently upgrading to a Ryzen 3900X CPU (Processor) and the GB 5700XT GPU (Graphics Card) I ran into a common incompatability issue with the newer AMD Parts and the Unfold3D features in Maya. The fix was only brought out with 2020 version of Maya however due to this being my last year of University I was unable to upgrade the license and was stuck with the broken version of Maya that was not compatible or optimised at all with my newer hardware.

I tried multiple hotfixes, BIOS changes and reset all my preferences and to no avail the problem still persisted. Once I had opened all of my previous work for this project including my full second stage the environment the UV's had been destroyed on them and I was unable to fix any of them. The droid enemies I done aswell when I opened them up to export the completed UV's, all the UV's had been reset and had almost every edge cut and would be completely unusable to texture from as there would be seam cuts everywhere in the texture.

With all the problems that icurred I had no choice but to just make it a environment that you could walk through and explore instead of my original idea with the enemy interactions.

This was incredibly frustrating for me as I'd put so much time and effort into the modelling process and alot of my environment and assets were UV'd before this error happened. If this compatibility error didnt occur I would of simply been able to UV my character perfectly fine I would of then taken it back into ZBrush so that I could project the highpoly detail onto the lower poly exported all the maps ready to of been textured in Substance Painter.