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.

Kiwi - trees

This is the process I follow for the trees using the hollow tree from scene 1 as an example. Starting with the rough forms made for the initial sets (1), they are taken into zbrush for some rough modelling to make them less blocky (2) they are taken out of zbrush and unwrapped before being reimported and a more detailed sculpt done (3 – 5) then spotlight is used to map a bark texture so it is seamless (6).

 Maps are extracted either using the usual method or the plugin multimap exporter. The texture maps are then due for an edit in photoshop.

chinese garden update

I have been overdue for a post on Fox and Turtle. The project specs have changed to 25k total polys, and the textures need to be on two 2k maps – which left me scrambling to sort out the mesh to get that to work.

These are the current meshes for the walls section and the props themselves. The pagoda is modular and will make up a small square pagoda as well as a rectangular one.

 

The unwraps, normal maps and ambient occlusion mapped where available.

 

The maps applied (the pagoda currently in bits)

Punch

quick update on the Punch project

this is the state of the sculpt at the moment – the seams at the back of the coat are working, but the shoes are not looking so good.

Chinese garden block layout

Basic block out of level - the project leader says it looks ok to go and the character can get through the doors. Although it does look more Noddy in Toyland than anything else yet.

And there's a 30,000 poly per view limit which is more more than expected...

Chinese garden flatwork

For a game project, the concept for the game involves a board at the centre of the garden but beyond that I can't tak about the game play. the design is based around a chinese garden.

These are some of the design sheets for the project as the individual assets are made the sheets will be posted with them.

Punch - WIP

current zbrush models WIP update

Punch - testing testing 123

The zbrush sculpt is kind of extreme on the face wrinkles so I've done a quick deformer test to see what happens when the mouth is openned really really wide the wrinkles are normal mapped back into maya from zbrush.

Admittedly the way the mouth deforms is deeply odd but the wrinkles on the side of the mouth seem to be working

Punch - low poly model

Low poly punch model finally done for now - ready to try out zbrush on it. The bottom of the coat will be rigged, as will the hat's pointy bits, and the sleeves have so many loops since they will be blendshaped to be able to fall up the arm.

details of arm and head.

(no ears are modelled because the hats not coming off)

For face modelling this was useful for getting the edge loops especially on such an extreme character, and this video was good for explaining the shoulder topology

Kiwi Forest - Intro

This project revolves around the creation of 2 forests (4 scenes) for a short film. The characters in the film are a kiwi, a boar and a genet. The description given was realistic, but not too realistic (but more real than up) and there need to be game trails through the forest.

I was given a breakdown of the initial script for it and did some drawings of locations for the short film.

 

 From these and the initial script; plans like below were developed, these examples are for the first and third scenes.

 

From these I built some set files, these are being given to the director to be modified as required for the animation.

set 1

set 2

set 3

set 4

top to bottom Set 1 through 4 (and I will refer to them interchangeably with scenes 1 to 4) with camera angles. Set 2 is designed for multiple camera angles.