No.4 - dragonfly

The fourth, and last, project (inventively refered to as No. 4) is made up 2 mini projects.

The ain of the is to build and texture a wind up/mechanical toy dragonfly and composite it into a live action plate. The minimum outcome is to have a still model on a still plate, the maximum outcome would be to have a fully animated model interacting with a human – the actual outcome will probably be somewhere between the two.

Some of the research sheets from the project planning -

The model sheet:

The current low poly model (which currently comes in at  a little over 60k) is pretty much modelled - it does need some cleaning up and maybe some more detailing, but I'll deal with this as I'm unwrapping it

One of the issues arising during modelling was how much mechanical detail to model and how much can be done in texture. After creating the seams I needed to add a fastener so I used this one as a reference.

Punch head

Punch head painted in zbrush, not quite as finished as I’d like. The process started with using spotlight to project a basic skin texture across the model, but that produced virtually a completely even skin tone. Alphas and free hand painting were then used in layers and differing intensities to mottle and unevenize (basically the opposite of concealer) the skin tone. The face was also slightly changed using the move topology tool to relax the face a little bit and to reduce the symmetry.

The back and sides of the head (skull section) do have some odd colouration, since they will be under a hat they served as a testing section (I'll even that out in photoshop)

One of the major problems I had was the lips, the character isn’t meant to have much lip colour, but none looks odd and much more than there is now looks really off too; so I’m leaving like this for now.

Kiwi update

The director hasn’t modified the scenes I gave him, and is referencing them as they currently are into animation files then altering the references. I am not sure of the changes that may have to be made to the files at a later date…not sure if that’s going to be a problem.

chinese garden

update on the texture maps sizes, apparently now it has changed again so that separate sheets are okay, instead of two 2k maps – but the 2k maps are okay if there isn’t time to change them to smaller maps.

Punch - test

Had a bit of an experiment based of Eat 3D’s Portrait Production tutorials. Exporting displacement and normal maps from zbrush and getting them working in Maya.

Just the head for now. When everything was first set up in maya the head looked like it had exploded. This although needs to be tweaked down again is starting to look ok.

top maps out of zbrush, bottom maya screen grabs

Punch - hat

seams by slash3

Kiwi - muppetry

...because I am a muppet and didn’t think of this earlier, and I am sure that this has been thought of many, many times before.  

In Photoshop when cutting out alphas for foliage and it is already a transparency, and you want to have a black/white cutout for it, instead of trying to fill with black or white, or using the selection choices – use the black and white adjustment to make a copy of the cutout black and then invert and fill sections – it gives much nicer edges than other methods I’ve tried.