Normal Mapping

Here is my current low poly mesh with the high poly detail normal mapped down. I haven't finished painting the texture yet so this texture is just 50% grey with the ambient occlusion pass on top to help the normal map pop out. Overall I am pleased with the look. the low poly mesh is a mere 2500 tri's (I limited myself to a quarter of a next gen character poly limit as its roughly a quarter of the character) and it is really showing a lot of the high poly details. There is one glaring problem area in the low poly and thats the mechanical chest piece, the valves in the centre are appearing nice and smooth which is impressive as they are just four quads. But the rest of the chest piece isnt working incredibly well. I am going to keep playing around with it to get the best results. The other problem area is actually an issue I think with the high poly mesh and that is the head plates which as I have mentioned in previous posts I dont have the tools yet in my copy of zbrush to get really clean edges. But I can forgive this in this mesh as its the back of the character and wont be scene much I will be fixing it as soon as I can. Everything else I am really impressed by how much of the detail comes across in the low res mesh.

Low Poly Bust

I've just finished modelling the low poly version of my bust, it still needs uv mapping and a bit of tweaking on topology. I could do with removing some of the polygon density in the mask as its quite high compared to the rest of the model. The next step is uv mapping the bust and then spending some time playing around with the normal maps generated from my high poly whilst I finish up the texturing. The reason I want to spend some time playing with the normal maps is to work out the best way of making the low poly mesh to capture as much of the high poly detail as possible. Obviously you dont want to spend time making the lovely detail if you cant see any of it on the low poly. But all in all I am very pleased with how this little side project has been going, I haven't had as much time this year to do litte projects outside of uni to improve, although luckily the uni work has been more in the areas that I enjoy and wanted to improve on. However I would have liked to have spent more of this year practising my zbrush work. The aim of this quick little project was to put together all the little bits I have learnt that I had in my head of how my workflow was going to be and finish an entire model in that workflow to cement it. Doing the project has emphasised this is definately how I like working, the ease in which I can work in zbrush feels far more artistic than the very technical maya and allows you to really brings ideas to a model much quicker.

PolyPainting

In keeping with the theme of the last few blog posts I will be posting the progress I am making on my character bust. I am happy with the look of the piece for what the project was designed to be, I now have a good idea for the full character and over the next couple of weeks will start working on that. Anyway I am digressing from the point of this post, seeing as I am happy with the sculpt (at least all the major forms of it anyway) I decided it was time to start texturing. I have been texturing in a different way to the way I normally do, instead of unwrapping the uvs of the character and opening them up in photoshop I have simply used polypaint to painting straight onto the polygons of the character. This is good for several reasons; first of all a 2k texture has roughly 4 million pixels in the document, although quite a lot is taken up by black space. My model when subdivided has something like 27 million polygons all of which can store colour information, second because I am painting in 3D I dont need to worry about texture seems, and can the model as it appears in 3D, I can go back into sculpting mode whenever I won't if I want to add or subtract surface detail. Finally I I am not missing out on any of photoshops fantastic features as I can just position the model and open it as a projection in photoshop, make changes and drop them back onto the zbrush canvas. Another advantage is not having to uv map the character before paiting. Instead I will paint on the polygons then when I have finished my low res block and uv mapped that, I will bake the normal, ambient occlusion and the colour information from the hi res down onto the uv's of the low res. So all in conclusion all characters with normal maps will be painted in zbrush, as it is so quick and easy to do. I've only really been working on the skin (an area I need to improve on) this morning, everything else has just been given block colours as place holder detail and will be dealt with next.

Turntable

I've posted a couple of still from this mini project over the last couple of nights when I've been working on it. I'm very pleased with how its been going along my aim for the next couple of weeks and from then is to make zbrush the main program being used in my workflow, especially for character work. The aim when I started this project was just to get practise in and hopefully make something portfolio worthy. I decided to start with just a character bust as I wasn't working from any concept art and I wanted this to not be a long drawn out process as I still have uni work to balance with. So really the aim was to concept as I sculpted and create a snapshot of the full character using my full next gen workflow. So I would start with high poly sculpt in zbrush, polypaint and ZappLink for texturing, then construct game res mesh in maya and create maps for the low res. This turntable movie represents a pretty close to finished high poly sculpt. I like the overall simplicity of the piece and the combination of hard surface mask, battered flesh and tubing. When I was adding the tubes I didn't want to over do it visually, hence why I started to using some zsphere tubing as a place holder and sculpted the skin over it to do the impression of tubing just underneath the skin. In terms of short comings and things I need to improve on I think the main thing is just spending the time to improve the organic sculpting and sculpting things like scar tissue. I'm currently using version 3.1 of zbrush so I'm missing a lot of features added in 3.5 and 4, particular things like the hard surface brushed that would really help with the mask. But a good workman doesn't blame his tools, I think the result is good here just could be slightly more polished if I had a few of the features I am looking forward to using. The back of the flesh has had less time spent on it than the front, mainly because the mesh has a rather striking look from the front and 3/4th and seeing as I'm making it game res I like to think about the characters context withing a game. The obvious conclusion I game to was he isn't like to be the protagonist and thus you are likely to only be seeing him from the front and trying to unload a couple of magazines of ammo into him before he rips your head off. So front needs the detail and the back not as much, although this hasn't stopped me making visually interesting detail such as the spine tube, its just meant I've spent a bit less time on the skin on the back. Apologies for the length of the post, I was going to go into the background ideas that have come to me while sculpting this character but I'm waffling as it is so I'll save it for next time.

Untitled from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.

Bust

Bust-a-Move

With my business deadline today and out of the way I decided, let the weeks of intense zbrush practise commence. To start of I decided I would do a bust of character using my new next gen character workflow. I started with a quick zsphere mock up, before making an adaptive skin and starting to sculpt. I'm coming up with the concept as I'm going and I like how its looking at the moment. I may take the time now to do some quick sketches on top of these images in photoshop to plan out a few ideas. I may also open the mesh up in maya to sculpt extra subtools around the mesh before importing and appending then in zbrush to detail them. Once I have my finished hi poly bust, I am going to paint the texture using a combination of polypaint and photoshop. Then I will open a mid level obj into maya (I reckon I can do up to about 134k faces as I'm not moving it) then I will sculpt the low res mesh around it. Then I will bake the normals, ambient occlusion, diffuse and a cavity map using xnormal.