The Tesseract project was an eye opener to how models and assets in games especially look so high quality and run smoothly.

After experiencing many times having an un-openable file because its 800k+ KB, this method has proved to be very useful.

A look at the stages of the tesseract:

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First Thing was to create a box in Maya, put some edge loops into it, extrude those shapes out of the box and then add more edge loops into that before finally smoothing it out. Pretty simple thing to do.

Before the next step, I had to save the object as an obj file, allowing me to transfer it between cross platforms, in this case, Mudbox.

After opening up the obj file in Mudbox, I could then make easy edits. To make the proper edits needed at the quality desired, I had to add more subdivision layers, up to 8. From the 8th SD Layer, I masked over an image onto the faces of the tesseract, creating a bump structure into those faces. Mine turned out noticeably spiky which I found difficult to edit between layers probably because I masked on the wrong layer, but in the end it didn’t matter too much as long as the designs could still be seen.

Once the edits had been made and saved, it is noticeable from here that the file size drastically increases. This is the case because we added several sub division layers which, in other words, increases the topology of the shape.

Unless you have the greatest computer in the world, opening this file will more times than not result in a crash.

There are many ways to size-down the file but the way I did this is by creating an ambient occlusion and a normal map out of the faces.

Once that was completed, I simply assigned the maps to the original tesseract before the edit in Maya.

In my opinion I think it looks like an asset from old time games like golden eye.

This is how the wireframe looks on the low poly mesh with the normal map applied to it (bottom right image). You’ll also be able to tell when your model is low poly due to the size of the file, the fact that the file will open, and/or will not crash whenever you try to move it. If it happens to do all of those as high poly, the biggest noticeable factor is that almost your entire model will look green when you have the wireframe on show. I’m unfortunately unable to show what that looks like for myself as I didn’t require the high poly version in maya.

To explain why the normal map looks the way it does, the normal map will change the hues all over the image to suite the depth the image had when it was the actual bumpy faces it was in mudbox. In turn, when that’s applied to the low poly model, it will give it the look of a 3d bumpy model when it hasn’t actually changed the bumpiness of the faces at all, in a way, making the normal map on the shape look 2.5D.

Overall thoughts. I could have and had the capability to turn out a better piece for this task, its just that at one particular point of this task being the masking, didn’t turn out how it was supposed to. I say that mainly because it looked too spiky for just minor bumps. On top of that, I didn’t quite master baking, so in the end I was only able to create a normal map for the tesseract to have on it. I think this is only the case because I either misunderstood an instruction on the instruction pdf file we were given to do this task or maybe I just didn’t quite understand baking too well, something I should definitely tone up on in the future. The tesseract wasn’t the only model to suffer this problem as you can see in another post being my Alien body model.

I do think this is a doable task for other modelers. So long as they follow instructions given to them on how to do a task or at least know what they are doing when it comes to these tasks, they shouldn’t have a problem.