Quixel won't work, Using Substance Painter Instead.

I recently bought an academic copy of Quixel Suite 2 however I cannot seem to get it to work.

Because I only need small details on the normal map I don't need a high poly mesh however what I do need is a program that will let me paint on normal information onto the mesh in 3D. Because the normal I have is too flat it is almost impossible to tell where the details are. Quixel also doesn't seem to let me do this, even though the initial tutorial for the suite displays the exact thing I want. As soon as I load up the mesh 3DO makes it exceptionally blurry and refuses to bring up the 3D painting mode which the suite definitely has.

Instead I got the Substance painter 30 day free trial and surprisingly it worked immediately. The program is excellent and let me easily draw normals straight onto the mesh. All I wanted in the normal was welding marks, scratches, some height texture and a few indentations. Once I got to grips with the controls it was fairly easy. The only thing I didn't work out how to do was place normal shapes on the mesh, I had to draw out and polygon-like shapes or tap using a shaped alpha.

Then I could go straight into painting. Substance has bunch of pre-made materials to use, most of them metal based, many with normal, height and roughness maps already set to them. I used fill layers with masks to create the textures. In Substance all the maps are combined and then exported separately so you can see how it would look finished while you are working on it.

Low Poly Finished- High Poly Unnecessary?

I feel the low poly is high detailed enough while being under 10000 tris to not require a high poly, or at least a high poly in zbrush. Programs like Quixel and Substance Painter should allow me to draw any additional normal information onto the normal map. If I use the cage method but use the low poly for both definitions in xnormal, this should give me a functional normal map and AO map

I have also started to UV the mesh. I am currently doing it in segments as I am still unsure which approach is best; having three separate meshes or to have a singular mesh.

Sewing the Mesh

The biggest problem I had with my pillar mesh was that I did not combine all the separate objects I used to make it in order to create one unifying mesh. This became a problem while re-topologising, as there were many faces, edges and verts underneath the surface which made it incredibly difficult. And the file corrupted.

This time round I have made a conscious effort to make sure there are no internal verts or artifacts that could affect me at later stages. This is more difficult but should eliminate a lot of problems before they can even happen.

Here you can see I have separated the different elements of the mesh, detailed them and then started reshaping them so I can target weld them all together with not internal verts.

Time Machine

The final project for this unit is to create a time machine using all the skills that I have learned. It has to have a normal map, AO map, roughness, metallic and an albedo map. The brief is fairly broad as a time machine could be anything which gives me lots of options.
I'm basing my concept on the radio series 'The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy' and means of time travel that is cheap, random and possibly dangerous. Like actual hitchhiking.
It's basically a portaloo sized cubicle which is cramped, uncomfortable and filthy that has no co-ordinates or time zone. When activated it will transport the user to a random place in time and space.
I have already settled on a design after some quick silhouetting and concept art.

Finished Pillar

Despite my set back I managed to get my normal maps baked along with ambient occlusion in xnormals.

I used Unreal Editor to make sure that the normal looked good over the mesh. I added some metallic and roughness values as well to give it a more suitable material.

Maya corrupted file- Fixed

Before I started prepping my meshes for baking, the Maya file containing the low poly mesh and the in-progress topologised mesh became corrupted. This has set me back a bit becuase of the difficulty I previously had with topologising the mesh so a lot of work has been lost. As the I am overlapping this with the next project, I tried to fix it quickly by decimating the high poly mesh to under 10000 tris. This bad for actual 3D modelling as decimated meshes are still far to complex for use. However I do not appear to have an alternative. UV mapping a decimated mesh will become very problematic as it has so many verts and edges and would take a huge amount of time to map it properly. Just only automatically unwrapping the mesh works but is still not optimized and is unhelpful for any future texture-work.

Finished High Poly, Re-Topology

I have now finished the high poly model of my pillar. From the last iteration I have added cracks from bullet holes, more general distortion to the surface and a deep energy sword cut to the side

I have also started re-topologising the low poly by sewing silhouette changing details from the decimated mesh of the high poly to the low poly.This is becoming fairly difficult as I appear to have many internal vertices and edges in the low poly, causing a lot of deformity when I try and insert the bits from the high poly.