Introduction

Now that I have the high-poly and low poly made I can do the UV work, which if you don’t know basically is the painting of the model and using the high poly as a texture on the low poly to make it look better while keeping game processing needed low

Maya UV Editor

First I had to make a UV for both the low polys, which I did for both as you can see below:

Skull

Firstly I opened the UV editor in Maya, this lets you check the UV of your model and change it around so UV later on is alot easier. Basically you see all those small alone pieces? We need to make them more connected so that the UV wrapping works better later on. Oh and I started with a generated UV which gave this

Then the tools I used were the unfold after making edits to show what I had done and the layout tool to neatly organize it after this fact

Then after connecting most the stray polys (mostly the teeth) I got this

Spear

This was the automatic UV for the spear, very neat weirdly but it still has stragglers and so I worked to connect those to other, getting this:

I know it looks less organized but now it is more connected and therefore ready for the next step

After getting this both I just saved the selected as a FBX files, if your wondering where the high poly is this is because apparently I just needed to make an automatic for them, so I did

Which I then imported into Substance Painter

Using these stats for both low polys

Once you have the low Poly set you go down to texture setting and bake mesh maps, select your high poly to get this:

Then you want to get rid of all the red and untick all the bakers but normal (I was just testing stuff out as only did normal for now). Once it was free of red you then bake

And now you get to paint you model which will go with the now added high poly bake

Painting

Now that I can add the textures I want I went to the community store and got some textures that made sense since the default would not fit what I wanted to do, then doing such with them:

Skull

First I just made a fill layer with the crystal texture I chose to get this

Obviously, it is blue, not purple, and so I added value and tint fill layer after it like so:

Why did I do this instead of color? This is so it keeps those lines of energy you can see, leading to this instead of just a straight purple skull:

Now we export the textures like so:

Make sure you do Arnold and a normal one as arnold can only be shown in renders when normal can be seen otherwise, making working with it alot easier with both

Then I went to a new texture for the skull, clicked bump mapping to bring up this:

Then out of this massive list you pick file

And add the exported substance file, which gives you this:

So yeah since it is only the normal it just gives the texture, not the colors and such, however for the rest you just have to do the same for the other options like so:

You can see they are yellow because they are getting their values from one of our files, making sure they are set to what will make it into what we painted before hand, letting us finally get this:

Yes it is abit dark but given it will be glowing in the environment which I cannot do by itself that will be fixed, then of course you do the same with an arnold texture like so:

Spear

Okay so this one was alot harder due to it being made of multiple materials, which is why we painted it, substance painter sees these colors and puts it into different sections, letting us put a different texture on each, so first lets do the metal

For this I am using an obsidian texture, why? Because logically a strong glass would be better for an enchanted weapon, letting the magic go through it easier as glass and crystal and one in the same. Plus it just looks better than metal I could find and makes it stand out more, so I used it, however I tweaked the settings to get this:

Which not only looks more realistic but gets that corrupted feel I wanted in the spear

Then again for the crystal, got the texture, put it on, then edited it to fit more like so:

This way it just looks more realistic and again has the purple color we want

Then added a wood material but this is way too bright and again is scales all wrong

This is better, more dark color to go with the rest of the spear and makes sense for the dark energy going through it

Then finally added a leather texture which again is scaled too big

This is better, and made the color abit brighter so it stands out more from the wood

Putting that all together we get this which we then export like we did for the skull, making files for each color which are then made into their own textures in maya to be applied