Games Production - Taking the Gun into Quixel

For the gun to look good in Unity, I had to create an Ambient Occlusion map. It would find the location of the shadows and enhance them. It gives us an extremely detailed result. There are several ways to get the AO, I choose the mental ray Option.

I started off by selecting the object that I wanted to create an AO out of. I went into the hyper shader menu and selected the Surface Shader. The next step of the process was to create an Ambient Occlusion node which we will attach to the output of the Surface Shader. I had adjusted with the settings to give me the best possible result in generating an AO map. If you look below, you will see the final settings that we ended up with to achieve the result.
  

Adjusting the Shader's to create an Ambient Occlusion. 

Setting the Ray distance for full coverage.

All I had to now was to got onto the renderer tab in Maya. By clicking on "Lighting/Shading" you end up with a button which states "Batch Baking (mental ray)". I selected this tab and adjusted the setting accordingly (look above). By clicking on the bake option, the program would proceed to do so. This took some time to get the perfect AO map for our gun, but the end result was worth the trouble. This meant that it was now ready to take into Quixel.

The Maps

The Colour I.D Map.

The Ambient Occlusion Map.

The Specular Gloss Map.

The Normal Map.

The Albedo Map.

I am happy with the way that the maps had turned out. The use of the colour I.D map was extremely important when it came to texturing the gun. As you can see, there are a variety of textures to enhance the feel of the gun and make it seem more life like. This is the first thing that I have gotten to texture alone and the result was pleasing. 

Of course there are problems with some of the textures, such as the U.V's on some of the edges weren't done to the best of standards. But at least now I know, that when it comes to producing something else of this level, what to look out for.

The Gun with a Wood Grip.

Gun form another angle.

The Gun with a Metal Grip.

The Gun with a Metal Grip from another angle.

There were several different varieties of the gun that I came up with. In the end, I was stuck on these two different result. One with a wooden grip and one with a metal grip. As this asset was going to be in constant view of the player, it required a team meeting to decide what texture we were going to keep the grip. 

Overall I am happy with the result, as this is the first time, on my own, texturing an item. There are many aspects that I would like to change, if I had the time. One such problem is the weathering that the gun has on it. I would also next time like to use the DDO painter that is built into Quixel. It means that we could paint detail onto the model. Though again, I am happy with the result that I got in the end, especially with how much I learnt from the creation period all the way to texturing it and will definitely use this method of working the next time that I create an asset for a game.