March 28th - Normals baked and diffuse colour in progress

So last week I had been working on baking the normal maps and I also got to start on creating my diffuse colour map.

Early on I ran into some problems while baking the normal maps, my first attempt resulted in some extremely odd looking normals, areas from the high poly were projecting into the wrong places on the low poly, and some were even on the back of the model while they were meant to be on the front. I also got some painfully jagged edges from my first projection which just looked horrible on the model when rendered.

Here are a couple of renders of what the model and Normal map looked like:

As you can see from the images above, this was not good, I ran through different fixes for this problem and came up with this: moving the model pieces so that the projection cage of the model did not collide with other parts of the model.

Here is what the model and cage looked like after I moved about the separate pieces:

After doing this and re-projecting my normals it gave me a much better normal map as a result.

Here is the second normal map I rendered:

And this is the result I got when rendering my model in 3ds max:

Diffuse Map

I had some time last week to begin work on my Diffuse colour map, so far I have laid out the Uv's and started working on the belt and the gun holster, I have also placed a "skin colour" over the face and arms and will add more detail to these in the coming weeks.

Here is what my Diffuse map currently looks like rendered on the model and in Photoshop:

In the coming weeks I shall focus on completing my Diffuse colour map, I also plan to do a specular map and bake an ambient occlusion map for my model as well.

-J.W

March 20th update - UV unwrapping complete.

First of all I would like to apologise for not blogging last week, I had an assignment due in and I just didn't have the time spare to update here, however with that out the way I can safely say that I am well on my way with this project.

I have now finished UV unwrapping the retopologized model so all that's left is to bake the normals from the high poly to the retopologized one and start making the textures.

Here is how I have laid out my UV's:

I made sure to give the face the most space as I want that to have a high level of detail, followed by the shirt and trousers, then arms, belt, boots and finally gun holster.

During the unrwapping process I did run into one problem, the pelt mapping of the face, when I was pelt mapping the pelt connected itself to the outside of the face as well as the eye sockets, this caused the pelt to try and pull the rest of the uvs for the face through the eye sockets responding in some pretty horrifying looking UV's. 

After some brief research I found my solution, using the loop tool in max I could cap off the eye sockets making the pelt no longer target them when stretching out the UV's, this worked, and resulted in the nicely pelted and relaxed Uv's for the face you can see below.

When I start to create my textures I am going to use a 1024/1024 texture resolution, from my research in my initial blog posts that listed the poly count of several main characters of last generations consoles, 1024/1024 seems to be a good resolution to get the quality out of my textures, 2048/2048, to me, seems like it would be over-kill and not needed for this model. 

Through the remaining weeks of this final project I will be focusing on texture creation, each week I will give a brief update of how they are coming along and how they currently look on the model.

-J.W

Bibliography:

North Pixel. (2012). Pelt Unwraping a Face in 3Ds Max. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w-kEukP6wI. Last accessed 18th Mar 2016.

Jonathan Willetts. (2015). 3D Modelling & Poly Count. Available: http://jwillettsdissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/3d-modelling-poly-count.html. Last accessed 18th Mar 2016.

Re-meshing, retopology ready for animation.

So good news and bad news this week, bad news first, I have not completed everything that i planned to do, I wanted to have the retopology finished, the UV's unwrapped and the normals baked, however that has not happened, I ran into some trouble during the retopology phase which set me back a fair bit. my initial thought was that I could leave all the retopology up to Zbrushes own bit of software called Z-Remesher, however what I tried this on the entire model it did not work as planned, after setting out the guidelines for how I wanted the topology to flow and how many polys I wanted the software to get as close as possible to, Z-Remesher decided to ignore all this information and do what it wanted, resulting in a over budget poly count and terrible topology for animation.

Onwards to the good news however, my saving grace was in Scott Spencer's Zbrush Digital Sculpting, during Chapter 8 Scott Spencer defines why retopology is so important during the modelling pipeline and goes on to talk about Zbrushes retopology tools, the one he goes into most detail about and uses to retopologize his model, is the system that uses Zspheres to define faces one vertex at a time.

This method was the method that I decided to use when retopologizing the face, and I will continue to use it for the arms and hands as well, I found that using this method was a much more controlled and manual intensive way of retopologizing your model, however I found this to give the best results when it comes to defining your topology.

Here is a render of my model during the retopology phase:

As you can see with the above image I have even topology flow around the eyes and mouth to allow even distribution when animation occurs. 

Here is the model after I had finished the retopology process: 

Head Poly Count - 2410

Due to me setting out the topology guides using Zspheres, you can see that the model has a nice flow of even topology around the eyes and mouth allowing for high quality animation.

Here are the other objects that I currently have retopologized:

Poly Count - 336

Poly Count - 1956

Poly Count - 1085

The T-shirt and Trousers were both retopologized using Z-Remesher which is why the flow of topology is off, I plan to set out the faces in a more animation friendly flow when i export the model to 3DSMax in the coming week. 

My plan for next week is as follows - Finish the remaining retopologizing (Boots and arms), Unwrap the UV's and bake the normals. I will also redo my timeline for this project as I have now fallen behind by 2 weeks due to these unforeseen circumstances.  

-J.W

Bibliography:

Scott Spencer. (2010). Remeshing. In: Scott, S, Eric, K and Paul, G.Zbrush Digital Sculpting, Human Anatomy. Canada: Wiley Publishing Inc. p266-279.