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Advanced & Experimental Group

Week 9: Hologram Base Textures in Substance Painter & Final Model Animation in Maya

This week I focused on finishing the textures of the hologram and refine its animation.

Hologram UVs correction and base texture

When I started to add the textures to the base of the hologram in Substance Painter, I noticed that my UVs were wrong as I sliced them in sections. Therefore, any time I tried to add a rust effect on edges, the programme was not detecting them and placed the textured in the middle. I then went back to Maya and redo the UV maps, but this time only cutting off the edge that was less visible, and unfolded the UV from that cut. Then, I updated the UVs in Substance Painter and added the rust effect in the edges.

Hologram UV maps corrected in Maya

Originally, I wanted to do the texture in bronze colour to follow the style of most of the objects in the master render. However, I then realised that this texture will not work as hit is too flat and yellowish so it does not really match with the blue hologram effect on top of it.

Initial bronze texture test in Substance Painter with some dirt and rust effect added on top
Rings with bronze texture and dirt effect
Overall look with bronze texture

After testing the bronze texture, I decided to swap to a more reflective and metallic texture such as the copper texture, and then add the dirt and scratches masks I made for the previous bronze texture on top of the new texture.

Base with copper texture for the overall surface and cobalt texture for the small rivets and the central star
Base texture made of copper preset mixed with some previous features from the bronze texture (dirt and damaged edges effects)
Outer ring texture is the same as the base but changed the position and the quantity of dirt effect shown
Outer ring rivets textured with cobalt preset and some surface scratches mask
Both inner rings have damaged cobalt as texture – I didn’t add many effects to these rings as they are inside the hologram so they are not too visible
After I finished with the textures, I baked them all and exported them in Arnold aiStandard (as bmp)

After exporting the textures from Substance Painter, I created the shaders in Maya using the Substance plug-in, and linked each shader the the correspondent part of the hologram. After relinking textures in Maya, I noticed that the metallic textures looked too flat and they did not shine as a metallic surface would do in reality. Therefore, I checked the roughness map of the copper texture and reduced the ‘alpha gain’ till 0.5 (it was 1 before) and then changed the ‘color gain’ to a darker gray so the shadows had some contrast from black to gray (before they were white so they were not visible, hence the flat look). Then, I went to the ‘Lens Effect’ I added for the hologram and reduced the ‘threshold’ from 1 to 0.65 so it did not look that white/burnt shine on the surface of the metallic base.

‘Lens Effect’ added in render settings for hologram effect
‘Threshold’ reduced from 1 to 0.65
In copper shader – ‘Roughness map’ – reduced ‘Alpha Gain’ and ‘Color Gain’ changed to darker gray

After the textures were finally completed, I redid the animation of the spinning of the rings and the little satellites rotation on them with manual key framing.

Final hologram model with textures and animation

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