Character Project : Part 2

So its been a while since my last update – ive just been super busy making everything I didn’t get round to doing an update. But its all finished and handed in now so I can carry on where I left off.

So after I was happy with my base anatomical sculpt I moved onto dressing her up in her cloths and armour. The best way I found to do this was import my anatomical into Max where I would build a basemesh of an item of clothing say a boot around the anatomical model.

Modelling the basemesh for the boot

I imported this base mesh into zbrush wear I would sculpt in all the detail. This is the same process I went through with all pieces of armour and clothing for the model.

Finished sculpting the boot

When it came to the stiched on the leather armour I had 2 ways to approach this. I could either sculpt them in zbrush which would be the quickest option, or I could model the stitches and place them one by one in max, this method is longer but would give me better bakes. I opted for the later.

Placing the stitches on the armour

Below shows the final highpoly:

Highpoly

Next step was the low poly. To do this I imported lower subdivisions of all my highpoly sub tools to model around, I call this my ‘Trace models’.

90% of the lowpoly was made with standard box modelling or plane edge extrusion techniques.

Modelling the hand using plane edge ectrusion

For the head I looked into one of zbrush 4r6’s new feature called ‘Zremesher’. Which basically produces a low poly mesh from your high poly with a click of a button, you can also paint in guide lines to effect the edgeflow, which produces a better quality mesh.

I was very impressed with the results and how quick and easy it was. But I felt some of the edge loops weren’t as good as they could be in some parts, plus the silhouette wasn’t as strong as I wanted. So I decided to model it from scratch using the same method as the hand. I felt by doing this method instead of letting zbrush do it I had greater control over everything.

The results from Zremesher on the head

To make this character as realistic and feminine as possible I created alpha planes to use as eyelashes

Modelling the eyelashes

Below shows the final low poly model. Which has a triangle count of 11,513. The budget was 15,000 but I felt I nailed everything and adding more polygons to it would be adding it for the sake of it.

Lowpoly

Unwrapping was a quick and easy process because of the brilliant and free unwrapping tool called Roadkill. After unwrapping I baked out all my maps using XNormal.

Next up was texturing. After my bakes were finished it was time to move onto texturing. I overlayed my AO and cavity maps to get a good base to work from.

Texturing was a straight forward process of looking at references of real materials and trying my best to emulate them within photoshop. 80% of my textures are hand painted as I feel I have much greater control in the feel and look of the texture than just pure photo sourcing. Brushes such as scratch and grime brushes help quicken the texturing process. I only use photos to get that nice surface variation and micro details which is very difficult to achieve with hand painting.

Below you can see me adding slight wear and tear around the armour plates on the body armour to give the texture more character as well as making it realistic.

Early stages of texturing

After all the main texturing was done it was time to focus on the alphas for the fur.

One of the techniques I read about over summer I wanted to attempt was the ‘shells and fins’ technique which was used heavily in “Shadows of the Colossus”. This method creates realistic and volumetric looking hair and fur.

This is done by creating an alpha texture full of dots which represent a strand or clump of hair. The polygons the texture is applied to (aka shell) is then duplicated, moved forward and scaled up a tiny bit. This is done a number of times. The more shells you have the more realistic the hair, but this become very intensive for the engine, I settled with 10 ‘shells’.

Below shows this effect in action better. As you can see as the camera rotates round the head the fur will follow it. Giving off the impression of nice volumetric fur.