Nikki's 3D Spot

- I had barely 2 hours left and I needed to add some background sound, it took a while to find some free source music that was appropriate, I downloaded it and tried to place it in the scene but needed to convert it from .MP3 to .WAV apart from that I dropped it into the scene with no trouble. - I with one hour left I recorded the matinee, compressed it, added sound and uploaded it to Vimeo

- While that was up-loading all I needed to do was to package the build, I set the options and ran it and 5 mins in it encountered a fatal error! I tried again and still the same error, so I tried a few more times and I fixed the problem, I migrated all the files into a new project, so that all the files where in one place and I found out that I was packaging it as a shipping/stand-alone build, so I changed it to a development build and it packaged file. All done!

Personal Judgement

I decided to go over my asset list and look through my estimates to see how I went, I estimated my project to take 41.5 hours to complete this level of the project and it was able to spend 45 hours in total between all my other assessments. 

Only 3 items on the list had the correct time estimates, everything else took 2-4 times as long as i expected and I had to drop a lot of the objects I wanted to do. What really threw out my times schedule is that I didn’t factor in the time it takes to place the objects into the scene itself and the time it took to set up the matinee camera and the landscape setup took 8.5 hours longer than I had allowed because of all the problems.

28/45 = 62.22% complete (judged on completeness vs. priority)

by this we can estimate that it would have taken approximately 64 hours to complete my goal project and 180 hours to complete the entire concept that I envisioned at the start of the semester, and It would have taken a team of 4 to bring the project into full realization.

Its not perfect but I completed almost the entire house asset to a stage I am happy with, this was the most important object in the scene and the landscape is also almost perfect, I got the look that I desired in the end even if it was arrived at somewhat haphazardly.

- Final thoughts There is so much I would have liked to add but this semester was a really good introduction to project planning and I learnt a lot about my own capabilities. Every time I touch unreal, even though there are so many troubles that arise, I like 3d modelling more, I like problem solving and I like the visual flow charts as a way of programming, Unreal is a really exciting development tool and this makes me want to do more with it.

Instead of describing how each object was made, I’ll just describe the production pipeline and problems that arose and what changed over the course of the production.

- Blocking Stage Block out volumes of all major objects and place in scene, walk through with a first person character and adjust the scale.

I started out with blocking each of the main objects in Maya (from the floor plan), and placing them into the scene. I started with scaling up each object to x100, Running around in the scene, everything felt was too spaced out compared to the character and would have been really difficult to fill, so I played with the objects and scale and had it down to x40 before it felt right.

- Rough Modelling Stage Using the blocking shapes as guides for the scale, create each individual model, just focusing on the main shape and form of the item.

Starting with making a 2.4x2.4 meter wall segment I started to build the house, It was really difficult to line up the walls to be flush with each-other, for a previous assignment we were using Unity, and they have the ability grab a corner and snap it to another object to quickly line things up. I think a lot of time that I did not plan for, was used setting up the scene trying to line things up right. With the floor space sorted I modeled the lower roof and the pointy roof and set it up in the scene, I wanted it to feel more looming and imposing so I increased the height of the walls to 3 meters tall.

- Unwrap Unwrap each object, ensuring each material has separate UV shells, At first I was doing this by hand and getting ok results, I would cut all the edges, sew the straightest edge ring first, rotate it straight then sew all other faces connected to this ring, use the unwrap tool to straighten everything out then sew more faces to it, unwrap again and repeat until everything is together.

The problem was, some faces have really large scales on their own and when I used the unwrap tool, they would be larger than everything else connected to it and it would distort the texture, meaning every-time I unwrapped I would have to shrink and rotate faces to get it even.

A friend saw me getting frustrated at this and recommended using “Roadkill’ to unwrap things and this made a huge improvement in my pipeline’s speed. 

So now all I had to do was, model the object - export as an .OBJ file - import this into Roadkill - sew all the edges together - then cut seams into the object. Roadkill would unwrap it with a uniform scale across all the faces. - I then re-import into \Maya and rotate and place the objects on the UV grid being wary of which way any object’s texture grain is expected to run. (I like having all wood grain run vertical in the texture with stone and tiles running horizontal)

- Build Basic Lighting

Create lights for any objects that emit light (Lantern and windows)

- Test Texture Scales

Import rebuild the scene with the updated models, then going back and forth between Maya and Unreal I make little tweaks each object, checking for a number of things

-Make sure the models fit correctly in the scene

-Make sure UV’s are react to lighting correctly The way I have the windows set up is that they are a glowing plane of glass with a light behind it so that the plane will emit light, the problem is the light would go through the walls of the house because one way planes only block light in one direction. To fix this I had to make an extra box for each window that would keep the light from spilling out into the insides of the walls and roof.  - I also had trouble with the roof somehow having overlapping UV/vertices making errors when building the scene’s lighting. This was one of the objects I made before I moved to using Roadkill so I re-unwrapped it and that fixed the problem

-Make sure scales of UV are consistent Because I had 3 different objects using the same roof texture, i needed to go back and adjust the UV’s so that the roofing would not look out of place.

- With objects that run flush, (like brick walls) ensure textures line up and don't distort too much 

- Refine Shapes

Adding details to each model to complete the scene Edging for the roof, Hinges on the door, window sills and the hourglass details  -assign more textures and re-Unwrap the UV’s

- Finalize Textures Set up each texture properly in Unreal, with specular and normal maps I was running low on time so I didn't get to set up the textures as well as I could have, the cast iron edging on the roof didn't get to have more than a flat color with an even specularity, I would have liked to have a hand made texture and set up a normal map for it as well.

- Finalize Lighting 

To record a fly-through of the scene, I decided to use unreal’s matinee tool to create and record the movement.

Like everything in unreal, there is a very specific way to set things up, but once I found a good tutorial, It was fairly easy to the camera movements up because it uses a key-frame system similar to Maya. The only problem that got me stuck for a while was that you can’t (or there was some specific way that no one knows) change the total duration of the camera after you have a director referencing it and have already added keys.

I also spent way too much time trying to find out how to record the matinee and where to find the file, last time I tried to find out, I couldn't find anything and just used Bandi-cam (screen recording software) to do it, but it lagged the system and made the video quite choppy. So I went looking for information again, digging though Unreal documentation and 5 different you tube videos, I found out after my computer crashed and it corrupted my level file, (unreal auto creates backups /few) that inside the project folder is a ‘VideoCaptures’ folder. I guess it was kind of obvious but no-one, anywhere, said this, the closest was someone said it was in my documents, grr!

The next part is the worst and it took hours so I’ll just dot point it for both our sanity’s sake. Trying to use matinee to fly-though the level whist still being able to move your head so that when using a VR system, you can look around while you are flying.

- create matinee fly-through camera, look online for a way to program your head being turned (cant find) try to do myself, camera blueprint needs a controller to accept inputs (similar to how a player controller is set up) decide to just use a player controller for the fly-through - have a lot of difficulty trying to turn off gravity for the player - find a blueprint fix online - create matinee fly-through, with the player’s position and rotation being effected - this overwrites input from the player so you still can’t move your head - create an object parent for the player so that it is not being directly effected by the matinee - should work, still cant move head - create another object that is attached to the matinee, and link this to the parent of the player, through the level blueprint (position and rotation) - adds another layer of separation, still cant move head - look online again for advice, find roller-coaster plugin - they have a player sitting on an object that is moving - create an invisible platform for the player to stand on that is controlled by the matinee(turn back on gravity) - still doesn't work - find out that linking the matinee to a director created a temporary camera (because the object that I am using is not a camera) - so i deleted the director - It starts working, but for some reason the player cannot look up and down, also player collides with the environment and falls off the moving platform - Made the collision capsule for the player smaller so they wont run into things, player immediately falls off at the start. - after a lot of playing around trying to get the player to sit on the platform, find out that for some reason when I press play, it doesn't recognize my player controller and creates a new player wherever my view-port is - going back and forward, I cant find a way to fix this, so I make the player spawn point on top of the platform. - the player look-up/down is still broken, i don’t know how to fix so I link the player’s rotation up/down to the platform, at-least you can control side to side.

To allow me to change the shape of the bone easily, I decided to use unreal’s landscaping tools to create a cap on top of the bone island that would be used as the landscape.

I created the landscape during the blocking stage, shaping it so that the edges of the landscape would be inside the bone object so you wouldn’t see it while in the level. 

The forming of the landscape was a finicky process and took much longer than I expected and was difficult to get it right, every time you changed the size of the tool, you need to change the strength of it and raising up the landscape left it all lumpy because it rarely rose evenly and the smoothing tool was much too strong and would flatten out everything too much, leaving you to need to raise it again (unevenly) and back to square one.

Ok, the shape of the bone cap is perfect now to move on to the next stage, painting different textures onto the cap to show where the dirt/paths are. I tried to start painting textures and my first problem arose, nothing was happening, I turned to the internet and found out I needed to create a special texture that has all the different texture layers inside it, I followed a tutorial and created 4 texture layers, one for smooth bone (the path) one for rough bone (the edges of the path and exposed bone landscape) dirt and grass.

So texture is set up now onto painting, I apply the material to the landscape and the whole scene crashed, RESTART - recreate the texture node, save the file properly,  apply the texture and it works this time, I paint everything ‘smooth bone’ and try to add the next layer ‘dirt’ everything crashes again... RESTART, try starting with the dirt this time an it looks really speckled and hi resolution, strange because it is the same file size as the others 1024x1024. I paint everything ‘dirt’ and the scene cant handle it again and it crashes. I think the problem was from a number of things, I imported a Photoshop file instead of a jpeg accidentally this may have been confusing Unreal, also I looked at the texture files that came with the starter pack and these have LOD (level of detail) set up so that they have less resolution the further away you are from it. After tweaking things and dropping my dirt texture, I had everything painted but it just looked really bad, the textures wouldn't blend well and when you painted it you could only paint small squares, leaving the edges of textures jagged.

I decided to create a second landscape and rose this one through the bone cap to create the raised dirt patches, I am really happy with how it looks now, the crisp changes of texture are more in line with the style of the buildings.

This blog will now follow the development of Creating a Virtual environment from scratch to (hopefully) a high standard.

I have had a crazy semester while focusing on my final games project, I have let my other projects slip, so this project will be an exercise in efficient use of time and completing the minimum viable product before moving on to expanding the environment.

This assignment was a combination of the while semester’s project work, making a environment from an image while exploring the Unreal4 real-time engine. This semester really steered me in refining my asset creation pipeline and confidence with Maya, Photoshop and introduced Unreal as an interesting and useful game engine. The first thing I wanted to do when I finished this level was to create a sledding game and I’m confident that, even though I don’t know all the processes required to create this, I can find it out through looking at online resources and at Unreal documentation entries.

This semester has been a struggle, to manage time between my animation subjects and the final game project, this has impacted on the amount of work I could get finished within the time frame. There is so much more I would have liked to implement and refine but hope this is a good showing of my work and I feel that this satisfies the assignment requirements. Thank you for reading and all the best till next time!

With time running low, I needed to round out my scene and bring it closer to original concept art. So I created some more large scale unique props for the scene.

Sled - This object is I little bit sloppy, I would have preferred to have all the wooden elements, one solid mesh but this worked out fine I used the wood texture of the table and tinted it dark, then I painted the red strip on the lower fifth of the image, to cover the metal sled base.

Bookshelf - Having learnt my lesson from the footlocker mesh, this time I lined up the edges the extruded the center faces inwards. The UV mesh looks messy because I wanted to reuse the floor plank texture for this, so I needed to have everything overlapping so the boards would be a a good scale in the final image.

Now that the lighting and the character is looking good, I can move onto creating more props for the scene. The most important item, first on the list was the lantern.  I’m really happy with how the lantern turned out, the mesh was easily spit up into 3 cylinders, I counted out the edges needed and soon had the shape done, from here I extruded 6 faces and turned them into the support frame, using similar method, created the wire handle, then deleted half the faces and mirrored it over sewed it together and was done. Next was the UV unwraping, I’ve found the quickest way is to select the vertical edge-loops on the model (except the loop where the seam is going to be) and move-sew them together in the editor with one click, then sew the strips together from the straightest edge (while unfolding the mesh whenever it gets messy). The whole process took 2 and a half hours, I can tell I have definitely improved from the start of the term, where it took more than 8 hours to model and unwrap a barrel.

Anyway back to the task, all the processes I learnt from creating the opacity and emissive nodes on the light shaft, came in handy making the lantern, but it was a bit more finicky this time, as i had to have a opacity mask, an emissive mask and I wanted to have the ‘flame’ of the lantern glow orange.

With the lantern finished, I could bring it into the scene and attach the lantern light to it. I tried to find information on how to make an object only not cast shadows from one light, but I couldn’t find anything. (I wanted to have a second lantern light that would cast shadows on everything but the lantern so that the shadows on the walls/floor wouldn't be as dark)

With the lights attached to the lamp, I added collision physics to the lamp so that if the player bumps it, it will swing on the beam, or get knocked down. At the moment the slightest nudge sends the lantern flying, if i have time, I’ll look into making the physics not as harsh.

I looked into the emissive panels and found out its 5 point lights arranged in a grid and its good at creating really diffused lighting but for this project just a spotlight with a hot-spot is enough lighting spread. With the spot lights lined up, I turned to the trusty internet on how to make a light have a visible beam, I found that Unreal’s directional light has a light shaft option but you can only see it when you are facing the light source, not quite what I was looking for.

Also I found a great tutorial on making light shafts with transparent objects that really expanded my knowledge of the material editor.

Here’s the rundown of the process of making the light shafts

- I made a pyramid, made it transparent, positioned one for each side of the window for both the spotlight and the ambient light outside. 

-Created an opacity mask that fades to black with noise so that it looks like dust particles, increased its pixel depth (so when walking though, it doesn’t show just single planes of light)

- Blended in a depth fade so that if the beam touches an object it doesn't pierce through it, it fades away as it approaches then fades back in after passing it.

- Made the object emit a low level of light, so it looks like the particles are dispersing the light.

The other thing I wanted to try with the lights is to have the lantern’s light change intensity to make the scene more lively, after a little research I found out about the timeline function in the level blueprint. This allows you to change values over time, just what I was looking for!

As shown in the red graph, the intensity of the light goes up and down over a period of 4 seconds.

The assignment requires us to set up character and movement mechanics with animations for each, we were given a link to ‘Mixamo’ website as an option for the character animations. They advertise a lot of free rigging tools and even a character creator, great! even if its a bit generic looking its better than a bright blue mannequin (from the animation-starter-pack in the Unreal store for free). I logged in, confirmed my email address and everything but for some reason it wouldn't let me download the character creator program, not wanting it to degenerate into another multiple hour long saga, like last time, I guess the starter kit would have to do. (The first thing I did when I had the chance was to change to color to something less eye-wrenching)

I am extremely intimidated by the process of setting up character animations so I immediately turned to the Unreal documentation for the step by step process (awfully nice of them for making this). At first it was very difficult to understand the blueprint scripting and find all the parts of the graph.

Setting up the Movement blueprint script.

I needed to stop and step through each part of the graph and slowly I was able to get the Lingo. The real test on if I understand is when I try to create my slide mechanic, I understand the basics of calling up variables, comparing and assigning new values, but at this stage I will need to completely map out any new mechanics I want to implement before touching the blueprint graph.

Setting up blend spaces.

I had seen images of this before and had no idea what it meant, but having it explained step by step, its fairly simple - set the max speed of blend space, then place the animations on the grid so that opposite directions don’t touch. From here you create the animation state machine, which is just a flow chart of the animations with rules that allow moving from one state to the next. (rules are usually - when button press = true - when speed = ( or not =) zero)

Creating Slide Mechanic The first thing I did was to add animations to the state machine flow, because I don’t have the original file, I cant create new animations, so I’m just reusing the prone idle and prone-to-stand. Unfortunately there is no prone-to-crouch set, I thought that you could just play the first half of the animation (stopping at a crouched position to easily blend to a crouch) like you can do in unity, but it seems you cant split animations, you need to re-export them at a different length.

Next was blueprint scripting the mechanic onto the character. The plan was to have the slide behave like this: - hold space to slide, releasing space stops sliding and stands up fairly simple, created a release option for the space bar the resets everything - cant change directions while sliding at start of slide, disable movement, also created a variable to disable turning - speed boost at start, slowly comes to a stop This was a bit difficult, at first I tried having the slide behave like a jump, goes up into the air then falls on the ground with the prone animation but this didn’t work, the character would barely hop. Then i tried just increasing the movement speed to have it slow to a stop, I could get the first part but had to turn to the internet to find out how to make the character decelerate. I could only find some convoluted way of increasing the friction over a timeline or something, but this gave me an idea, why not have an initial force push the character and lower the friction temporarily so the character slides to a slow stop. I would show the graph but its fairly long and you wouldn't be able to read it when it’s shrunk that small but here is the run down in words. event-on-jump -> if crouched = true -> set character-max-speed to zero -> make ground friction 1/40 strength -> Launch character at current direction at current speed times 7 ->  disable turning event-on-release -> set character-max-speed to (crouch speed) -> make ground friction 40 times strength -> disable character movement for half a second (while standing up) -> re-enable movement -> re-enable turning So by the end we have - Idle (no input) - Walk (wasd) - Run (hold left shift) - Crouch (toggle left ctrl) - Turn (mouse movement) - Jump (space-bar) - Slide/dive (ctrl toggle on + space bar)

The second assignment requires us to continue developing our scene and set-up a character to move, collide properly and light the scene. I plan to approach the task in stages, divided by their role and importance.

1st Stage - Setting up the Character Need to set up the avatar with animations for its movement, have 6 different mechanics, walk - run - jump - crouch - idle and 1 extra (I want to make a dive/slide mechanic) also set up collisions. I thought i would be cool to have a few collision events, the lantern rocking when you bump it and a door to the room that you open to get in. I don’t now how to do any of these so I’ll be heavily relying on tutorials and online advice. 2nd Stage - Lighting the scene I want to get the lights as close to the concept as possible, I remember from one of the first lectures, they showed a really realistically rendered building and they had emission panels or something for the lights outside the windows, so I’ll look into that, otherwise the Lighting is very similar to how it works in Maya. A point light for the lantern and spotlights for the windows worked well for when I made my quick scene mock up with the last assignment.

Assignment 1 - Asset Showcase

This assignment as been interesting to say the least, when I started my modelling skills were basic and my Photoshop skills even less, I’ve never been comfortable drawing using digital medium and I was really struggling at the start trying to produce something that is wasn't a complete mess. Even though the materials were not photo-realistic in any way, when combined with the bump and specular maps, they come out looking believable within the scene. I particularly happy with how the log cabin walls turned out, the walls were the last thing I created and you could tell by how much more appealing they are.

I was low on time and I wasn't sure how to create transparent parts of an item, so the windows are just blacked out for the moment. Some of my times are not very complicated, but I hope the complexity and the amount of time I spent on the barrel, walls and crate will be enough for this assignment. To get a feel on how the modular wall pieces fit together I mocked up the scene and threw a few items in, as show in the picture below. I was worried by how many clashing wood colors there were in the scene, but the yellow lighting helps bring it all together. I made the scene from my level sketches a few weeks ago, but when you are actually inside the room, it feels really small. For the next assignment I’ll try to find a good size that you can move around in and doesn't feel like a tiny shed

The final sprint - placing objects into scene

The priority parts that I need to complete the scene are

Modular Floor    - Model - Diffuse - Normal Modular Wall      - Model - Diffuse - Normal Roof Beams       - Model - Diffuse - Normal Barrel                 - Model - Diffuse - Normal (all done) Foot Locker        - Model - Diffuse - Normal Table                  - Model - Diffuse - Normal (done) Logs                   - Model - Diffuse - Normal

I need to make sure all the objects have their origin points in the right place, the maps are working and their history and transformers are at zero. Also that everything has meaningful, consistent naming.

After the great barrel fiasco and the discovery of crazy bump my production pipeline is fairly smooth and It was fairly straight forward to churn out new items.

Floor - created by combining my 2 wood textures and dirtying it up a bit to dull the color and increase the contrast. my main difficulty was making this tile-able, you need to remove features so that your eye doesn't notice the repetition as much but i wanted to keep the cracks for more character, so this was trying to balance the two.

Beam - Simple rectangle and reusing the wood texture from the table

Foot-Locker - Modelling this was a little bit of a hassle, trying to use as little edges as possible and struggling with dividing the faces with edges to get it right. In the future I’ll plan my workflow better so when creating the object I can just count the number of edges required and split the cube primitive’s width/hight/depth with the correct number of edges (its easy enough to delete extra edges so I usually over estimate deliberately). The material is just the same wood texture that I darkened in Photoshop and made it more polished by changing the spec map and smoothing the bump map a little.

Log - Editing free textures to cartoon them up, the main hard part with this was making the wood growth rings, the only image i had was of a half of a log end so I had to flip it and distort it so the rings mostly line up. Its a little bit wonky but it will pass anything but close inspection.

Crate - Made by re-using the floor texture and the wood texture. The main trouble here was creating depth-like shadows on the cross beams so that crazybump can pick it up for the normals. I ended up copying the cracks between the planks (stretching them) and used this as shadows with a lot of blending.

In class this week, I showed the tutor my barrel object from a few weeks ago to get some advise with generating normal maps in maya and maybe combining two normals (wood texture and the bump for the planks). It seems that what I’d done with the barrel was unnecessarily complicated and the tutor recommended a free bump map generator ‘crazy bump,’ you just use this on you texture and it makes the map for you. 

So In class I created a good texture map for the barrel, basic planks and metal rings. The metal rings were my first try at creating a texture from scratch.

I wanted something that would be able to be picked up by crazybump as being raised so I used the garage door picture a a color guide and made the color strips in photoshop, I then layered the stone texture over it to make it look scratchy (added watermark filter) and finally I painted some rust patches in brown and layered that in too. The last stage was to make sure it properly looped, so following the tute I mirror split the screen and mended the seams before mirroring it back.

Here is the finished color map, I ended up rusting the rings further so they wouldn't stand out as much.

And the normal map for the image, defiantly much easier to use crazybump than creating a high poly object for each item in the scene and you can make the specualrity map too.

After finishing a few basic objects (table and planks), I decided to finally try to some objects into unreal. I had already signed up to Epic games so I could use the program in class but I had yet to install it on my computer.

Well, it seems everything I try to do with regards to assignments fails horribly at least once and the simple task of installing the program was not exception, I’ll compress the saga of many frustrating hours to a few points for you. - Tried installing from website, failed - need windows service pack update - Sure, Install all important updates for windows, only the one I needed fails... - Restarted computer, tried updates again (30mins later) fails again, grr... - scoured forums for my specific error code - tried 3 different convoluted fixes from microsoft, GRR! - needed to download a direct exe patch and it finally works - installed Unreal from website successfully, overall only 12 hours of frustration and waiting

Unfortunately I was completely bogged down with an animation assignment and I couldn't find time to work on the 3d project, I also missed the lectures as I was pulling all-nighters at the time and couldn't get to classes in the morning.

I have a lot of work to do to catch up and I hope I can get everything finished to a degree I’m happy with.

Here Is a list of the catch-up I need to do - Go through the Unreal 4 basic tutorial - Listen to the 2 missed lecture recordings - Listen to the 2 missed tutorial recordings - Catch up with the tutorial exercises and Blog entries

This week’s classes focused on texturing and various programs to do it in, from free (mudbox and blender) to thousands of dollars (Quixel and Substance (crazy impressive but so expensive >.<’)) I really want to learn how to use blender for 3d texturing and I had a quick look at the program in class, but I became lost almost immediately, I think for this class I’m going to have to stick with Photoshop because it will take too long to learn a new piece of software. I have very little idea how Normal maps work or how to make them, I cant even get displacement maps in Maya to work properly, so I looked into it a bit this week. I tried an online converter (apparently generates a normal map from an image) It didn't look right, so I when right down to basics of how to make it properly. I watched a tutorial on how they work (about the angles that light reflect off an object being transferred to color information and how to transfer The normals from a high-poly objects to a low-poly one) so I created one of my assets - the barrel and spent more than a few hours getting a high poly version made that shows the metal rings and ridges of the boards.

I spent way too long trying to do this, I started with a cylinder with 100rads, 100height and 100end segments (I was originally intending use the sculpt tool in maya, but it works best with organic shapes and not the sharp angles i was dealing with and I wanted it to be symmetrical. So I did it by hand instead - I soft scaled down the top and bottom edge-loops, selected the loops that make up the 4 metal rings and scaled them out, tucked in the outer loops to make a proper ridge, I selected the vertical edge loops that would be pulled inwards and deselected the 4 ridges before scaling them down, moved the loops again to make to ridges more steep. Then I deleted the caps and created new ones from scratch. I deleted half and mirrored the bottom then laboriously sewed the seam together. It took so long to just select the edges I was working with and I developed a huge headache just keeping track of it all. Next time I'm just going to work from the low poly and upgrade it to as high as i can by adding edge-loops and slicing faces.

(my low-poly barrel ready for new normals)

With the high poly finally finished I followed a tutorial to transfer the normals to this one and I ended up with this normal map.

now already this looked wrong, it was missing half the barrel and it was squished into the corner, so i stretched it out and copied the missing parts over, before applying it to the object in Maya.

The caps were all wrong and it was very obvious where i tried to fix the missing bottom half. I scrapped it and tried again, I had the wrong options selected for the destination object so I changed from Object space to world space and it worked fine.