Baking the Star Wars Turret on Maya and Xnormal

In this lesson we had with Robin, we were going to add detail to the turret on Maya and then take it over to Xnormal. This will give it the detailed effect that we desire. We will also add some effects of our own once the turret has been fully detailed.

The Xnormal set up.

One of the first things that we did was select the model that we had in the original posts. Once we had got it, we imported it into Xnormal, Robin had told us the settings that we needed to have set in Xnormal in order for it to make it detailed. The settings that worked for this turret are shown above.

A finished rendered version.

This is what we end up with once we have rendered the image. It takes all sides of the turret and makes them extremely detailed. This is quite a long process to go through, so while it rendered we had a ten minute break and came back and it still didn't load. On average it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to completely finish.

The new "Skin".

Once we come away from Xnormal, we are left with two files, one being the Photoshop image of the skin taken apart, the other being the finished Maya turret that we had previously. We can already see, compared to previous models, that this has greatly improved the detail on the turret, making it more realistic and believable.

We have to apply the Photoshop skin over the top like you would do with any other object on Maya, which if you look at the fish tutorial, you can see me doing this.

Looking up images.

As we apply this over the top of the turret, we can alter this to make it look different on the turret. For my turret, I wanted it to look old and scratched, so I went to Google and typed in "scratched metal".

The Photoshop file.

Once I had the image that I wanted, I set about placing it over the puzzle pieces of the turret. There were several ways that you can go about doing this, for example, you can place the image of the metal over the top and turn the opacity down. From here you can delicately cut around the different edges.

I feel I'm quite experienced when it came to Photoshop, so I knew a quicker route around doing this and which would also make this more realistic.

I created a new layer, placing the image of the scratched metal over the top. You have to make sure that it is the top layer and drag the scratched metal to cover this new layer. I then changed its layer type in the corner box located on top of the layers, it says "normal". I experimented with the different types of layers until I settled with one I liked. 

This meant that all the areas that I wanted covered on the layer below had scratched metal on them, whereas everything else was blank.

The turret with Scratched skin.

As you can see from the image above we have our turret looking even more realistic, like it had seen a lot of combat, but I felt we hadn't finished here, I wanted mine to look more individual, more original.

I'm extremely interested in history and of that, especially World War 2, I think maybe as I have so many relatives that fought for the allies, such as grandparents and others, I wanted to incorporate it into my turret. I remember, while searching through old images in a book, I came across the image below.

It is off an American pilot, who displayed a Nazi flag for every single enemy plane that he had shot down. This was seen as an insult, displaying how many of them that he had killed, making sure that they saw it when he continued to battle them in the air.

I thought that this was a great piece of inspiration and I really wanted to include some form of kill count in my piece.

"Kill Count" inspiration.

I went back to the skin that I had before in Photoshop and got an image of a tally. With this tally, I had altered it and moved it around, then duplicating it and doing the same thing until most of the skin was covered.

I made the tally fairly small so I could fit a lot onto the turret, making it look menacing.

My finished piece in Photoshop.

 Once I had put the Photoshop file onto the turret it came out looking like this, with scratched metal and a tally, you can tell that this turret has taken out some menacing foes.

The final product.

In the end I'm quite proud with what I ended up with. I think that the small tally idea was great because it looks well with the scratched paint, again, like it had taken on quite a few enemies.

Today, I think that I had learnt a lot, like how to use Xnormal and make a realistic looking model. If I can create something like this by myself within the next few months, then I would be very happy.

If I were to do this again, I would add my own tallies, instead of repeating the same one and changing it up in scale and leaving it. I would go onto Photoshop and do several hundreds lines to make it look that much more realistic.