In fact I think i'll start the complaining right away. At the minute i'm feeling like i'm in a bit of a mess. My model is alright but not great. There's so much that I still don't know, e.g. practically everything to do with materials and texturing, and a whole lot of other stuff and it's kind of wearing me down. Apart from the textures that i've painted (a category in which you can probably only include the skin) I feel i've accomplished very little.
This would be down to a few things;
-Complete lack of knowledge in the area. I understand that this is the way that 3D, or as Derek said, everything, is as far as learning goes, but sometimes it's easier going than others.
-My nature. I seem to be unable to accomplish what I would like to - what I have in my head - due to my lack of knowledge, and it's leading me to continually tweaking and re-tweaking but making no headway. At least this is with the Maya materials. Mental Ray materials are a whole different matter, and bring up problems that so far I can't solve. For some reason the mental ray materials seem to require twice or three times the light strength as maya materials do, which must be something to do with a setting in my Maya, because it doesn't seem to be happening to others in tutorials i've watched. I digress.
-Lack of motivation. I think a combination of the above and other influences have depleted my motivation a little. I can't deny that I haven't been working as hard as I have been previously, and I find myself getting easily distracted by any old rubbish I find on the internet. Rendering things probably doubles the procrastination also, as when you're rendering there's potentially a few minutes where Maya is unusable, and unless I have a pencil and paper in front of me then I just end up getting sidetracked by facebook or some other timewaster.
Doom and gloom aside, I've learnt a hell of a lot throughout this whole process, and the year so far. More than I thought i'd have learned really. And (this should be my catch phrase the amount of times that i've said it recently) I really think that the next character I make will be twice as good or better than my current guy (or perhaps i'm forgetting the hardships of basemesh modeling a little?). I'd be happy to leave this guy as he is and just bank the knowledge that i've gathered, but I think that'd probably be poor form, so i'll press on and tbh I think the outcome will at least be decent.
But yeah, lighting is a bugger. Don't think I like lighting at all. Sucks that my rigs are failing for Andy, too, but I guess that's another thing to learn from. Onto the pics.
Here's an ugly little example of the woes I faced in the world of normal maps. This'll be the last time I dwell on them I promise :P (although Georg did suggest doing my innovation project on them... I do think that'd save a few people some stress if they actually read it, but I would quite like to make a monster hand.)
Anyway, the right is my hi-res sculpt, and the left is the disgusting translation that I was presented with in Maya using my very first normal maps. Crap right? Well after a hell of a lot of effort I figured it out, and here's a little rundown of what I was doing wrong.
1. UVs were bad. Make your UVs correlate as closely as possible to the polygons which they relate to. It's as simple as that, but tedious work.
2. The artifacts on the vest are due to the geometry of the basemesh and the way which Mudbox read the hi-res mesh when it was baking out the normal maps. Since the mesh is two-sided, I believe mudbox was bringing through the inner-layer of the vest when I only wanted it to sample the front. To remedy this, choose "Furthest outside" as an option when creating your normal maps. (This method will potentially throw up some new errors if the geo you're creating normals for has more geometry close to the outside. e.g. when I used this setting on the shorts, the inside leg of the shorts had the opposite leg imprinted on it.)
3. To a lesser extent, and at the risk of telling the obvious, different materials react differently to light. Duh. Obviously the shiny materials in Mudbox will look different to the lamberts I used in Maya. Next time I sculpt I plan to use approximations of materials and possibly colours from the get-go in Mudbox.
That's enough of that. Here are some screenshots of where i'm at currently.
Pretty? Hope so... don't think it'll be a whole lot different when all is said and done, but it'll have to do for now.
Next week, to give myself some purpose and direction, I'm going to start rigging him. I want him rigged and weighted by Friday. It's a challenge, but one which I intend to complete. If I don't get him done i'll be a goner. That's all for now. See you next week bloggers.
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