Evening.

Hi there. Ain't posted for 2 weeks so hopefully i'll have quite a bit to show :)

What i've done:
-Finished hi-res sculpt :D
-Figured out normal mapping (huge achievement for me)
-Started textures and materials.

Hi-res Sculpting

First off - here he is :)

Hi-Res Lightning Mike Sculpt Turntable from Jacob Golding on Vimeo.

Slightly dodgy video as I was using a new plugin that I downloaded, but it should be alright. Also before I start talking about it, as a note only his right glove is sculpted, as I planned to mirror it for the right glove and also his socks have been modeled since then. Right.

Mudbox is pretty cool. I found it a little daunting getting used to it, but that's more because of the fact that I had all of the tools needed to create amazing art and it was just down to me now. Most of the tools work as you'd expect them to (not got the hang of flatten yet) and the interface is fairly simple and very intuitive compared to zbrush. Especially when you've just come from Maya, as it uses most of the same shortcuts and such too.

I had a few niggles here and there, mostly involving normals (not mapping, just the normals facing the wrong direction etc), had a little trouble with instanced objects also but that was pretty standard sorting out. Apart from those minor setbacks though, I feel i'm sort of settling into it, albeit slowly.

When modeling in Mudbox I get the same feeling as I do when painting in photoshop. There's so much scope for tweaking this and that and redoing bits that sometimes I get caught up in one tiny, potentially insignificant, area, and I start to waste time. Being a perfectionist can be a hinderance, and sometimes you just have to stop yourself. It can also be intimidating changing areas because you're scared that the changes you make won't be as good as what you already have. I think this is one of the reasons for the hi-poly being relatively... tame? I didn't really push the sculpt to any extreme, but I think this may also be because of the nature of the character and my lack of expertise with the software. Anyway i'm satisfied with what i've done and look forward to my next sculpt (which I reckon will be much better).

Normal Mapping: O

So after the stuff I was on about last week (which i'm too lazy to read back over, I talk too much :P) i've learnt a bit about normal mapping. After i'd sculpted the shorts and the shirt I started baking out the maps using mudbox. But annoyingly they didn't look how I wanted them to. I didn't take any screenshots, but the shorts were very pixelated and the vest was just looking ugly. The maps weren't working how I wanted them to at all. I couldn't find any good tutorials online so I was working purely by trial and error, and tried a million and one things to sort them out.

I tried making the maps bigger (4k square they're currently at. I still don't know if that's a bit extreme or not, but it's the highest mudbox will allow.) That didn't seem to sort it, so I tried using TIF instead of PNG which involves taking the new TIFs into Photoshop and resaving them without any sort of compression as mental ray doesn't support it, leaving them at like 200MB each which is seemingly a bit excessive. Very little difference there either. I tried using different basemeshes, I tried using a different program called xNormal to generate my normal maps, still nothing. So I went back to the UVs, a potential problem i'd thought of but put at the bottom of the list, tweaked a few bits and bobs your uncle :D The problem was that the UVs that contained the most important bits of detail on both the shorts and the vest (the two areas i was testing on -- bit of a coincidence) didn't have enough space. The UVs were squashed up and as a result the normals came out crappy as they were stretched over a bigger area than they were meant to be. Felt great when I finally got them working. Seems like UVs are a big deal! Here's a little run-through of how i've been doing my normals, and how they seem to work best, just in case you care or could find it helpful.

-Start with a tidy basemesh. This includes frozen transformation, normals facing the right way, no instances, deleted history, GOOD UVS! all that good stuff.
-Take into mudbox, sculpt your hi-res stuff. (Make sure smooth target UVs or whatever it's called is checked before you start subdividing the mesh, cause Cherie said so)
-Go to export your normal maps
--Here i've currently been using the level 0 model in mudbox as the target mesh and the highest level as the source, (think that's right) but I think in the future i'll take the highest level into Maya, pull the verts of the original basemesh a little to fit the hi-res, and use that as the target as long as the computer can handle it. This is because the level 0 can get a bit mooshy and lose some detail during hi-res sculpting.
-TIF for format, 4k for size, (use whatever you want/need.) and i've been using closest inside and out unless the model has two sided, like the vest which seemed to glitch out the normal maps. In that case I used furthest outside, and i've also been using best guess for the distance thing.

That's all I can think of now, I did do a little writeup on a piece of paper but i dunno where he is.

That's enough chat, here are some pictures of my normal mapping experience, with a few dodgy materials thrown on.


Looking at these now they don't actually show off the mapping too well, blinns are better for that, but the end material won't be a blinn so I went with a lambert. Also I turned up ambient colour as it made it pretty, but that wont be on neither. I think that's making it look a little more washed out.


Pretty good example here. Glove is very low poly but looks just as good as the hi-res!


Face for face's sake. I'm not sure why, not even sure if the normal map is on there lol.


Here's a weird glitch that happens in the viewport. You can see the seams really badly, and I tried fixing this in photoshop for a while until I realised that it doesn't actually show in the render. Duh.

Texturing/Mats

I'll keep this short as i'm getting tired, but that should be easy as i've only recently started with the texturing. Here's a few screenshots of the texture in progress! :D


I think it's going pretty well. You can see the reference i'm using comically plastered on his chest. This won't be in the final version :P The look i'm going for is sort of pristine I guess, but I really like a little bit of sort of real life skin texture here and there. I did try to find pictures I could use to project onto him but I didn't really know where to look. I've only really worked on his cheeks and his nose so far but yeah.

One thing that's bugging me is SSS. I'm still having problems with the skin shading, and looking at how little time we have left I don't think it makes much sense to spend any more time on it, all for a little glow in the ear. I might pick it up when I get to my next character or maybe I will do it. We'll see. I think i'm about 2 weeks behind as it is but i'm really hoping that I don't get any more tripups and can just power through the rigging etc and make up a little time. We all knew it wouldn't be as easy as it sounded right? To be honest there are a ton of things that I don't like about this guy, but I just don't have the time to fix them. The bottom line is that he looks alright -- passable, and that's alright for now. He is my first fully finished hi-res sculpted model after all. I'm really looking forward to going on to the next guys as like I say, they'll be waaaaaaay better. I've learnt a whole lot and look forward to mastering what i've learnt :) That'll do for now. Laters!

Normal... Moping (I am literally (not literally)) on fire with the puns today.

Alright. Quite an eventful, if not very interestingly so, week this week. I always forget exactly how it's gone but it's safe to assume that i've worked on both mine and andy's projects. Both are still running side-by-side meaning we've not cleared up the rigs on andy's project yet, but it's just how it goes. It never was going to be as easy as we though eh. I won't get into it this time, but it's just gonna be a case of seeing it through to the end. Andy deserves some good quality characters to go along with his cracking animatic he just finished.

So. I've nothing to show as far as the pirates are concerned, but i've a crap load to show for LIGHTNING MIKE rrrrrowerowjie.

This week i've been playing with the basemesh. Initially I changed the proportions of everything as it wasn't exactly to my taste. Here I am using photoshop to measure up the props' to figure out what was wrong. I used the Loomis figure drawing/anatomy book as a guide for what should go where.


After that I basically fiddled around til I was a little more happy. I'm not completely happy, a theme which will reoccur throughout this post, but what can you do...

So the proportions have changed, probably not very noticeably but whatever. After that, though, I got to do UVs!!


Here's an unnecessarily large snapshot, but couldn't be arsed to resize. My first proper set of uvs, they are. I didn't really mind the process. Sort of like a silly puzzle. That's just one set out of a forthcoming 21309821 though, so i'm sure i'll start to mind after a while.

After that I got to go to mudbawks. In mudbawks I spent forever and a day trying to tweak the model. Basically it's HARD to hi-poly model. The process reminded me of painting in photoshop. Tweak tweak tweak and you get nowhere. I don't think my personality helps me out here as i never seem to be happy. But I feel like I just need more experience with the program and it'll slowly get better. Of course this isn't the best position to be in facing what I am, but i'll sort something out.

I got tired of failing so I took what i'd made (a hi-res with very few changes, although the little that were there i was relatively (key word) happy with). Did a load of boring crap and took it into Maya to find that stuff wasn't working. To cut a looooong story short I basically had potentially 3 problems.

1. My UVs were linked up incorrently. Fixed by going Relationship Editors - UV Linking - Texture Centric and linking them right.
2. I forget two but there was definitely a two. EDIT: oh, it was normals. I had insane normals going on, so Georg helped me out, fixing it by exporting it as an OBJ without normals then importing it back in.
3. Cherie said that in Mudbox you have to have Smooth UVs checked (Mesh > Add Subdiv Level option box). Although i'm not sure if this did anything, i've ticked it now and it's going smootly. Here's an example of my problems anyway, Left is some bonkers stuff that may have been due to problem 3. Middle is problem 1. and right is a test i did to figure stuff out.


After that was sorted, I applied all my maps correctly and that stuff and this was the result.


Left is base mesh, middle is with normal map, right is my mudbox hi-res. As you can see there seems to be fuck all difference! there's very slightly more definition than the base mesh... So... i'm not entirely sure why this is - possibly because of shoddy normal maps or just because the hi-res really isn't that different... although to me it looks pretty different in the mudbox sculpt. Perhaps that's an optical illusion cause of the mud. Regardless, I figured i'd just continue on rather than get stuck in a rut. The next stage was textures, so I laid down a flat colour on my UVs and applied it. But then I thought 'what about lighting?'. So i found a tutorial online to create a basic light rig. Here's some snaps of that. (boring.)


So I played with the materials and crap and ended up with this:



As per usual, I am not happy. The whole thing just looks amateurish and mooshy and crap. I'm in half a mind to restart entirely, but that's probably not a good idea. I'll stop the moping, for now anyway, have a nice weekend (Los Campesinos! tonight! :D) and see what my brain thinks on monday.

Before I leave, here's one last thing that I did this week, and it's cool. Basically we're arranging a street fighter tournament in falmouth and I made the posters :D Won't indulge because andy's waiting for me to leave but here are some of the versions I made and subsequently plastered up around uni ^_^ can't wait for this. By for now !

Rush!

Finding it pretty hard to keep up with the posting. Recently I haven't even been able to go to life drawing because of all the things getting in my way (e.g. Dissertation, Channel 4 project (i know, extracurricular but whatever, real life, etc.). That's actually a bit of a shame cause i'd like to be doing more life drawing atm, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I rushed this post together for the benefit of the production meeting yesterday, but now I have time to actually write something, so I shall, although I have little to show due to the intense tedium of the work that i've been doing over the last two weeks.

Basically I spent the back end of one of the weeks redrafting my dissertation, and doing the inane bits and pieces like formatting, bibliography... fucking yawn. I cba talking about it but it's done, and I was reasonably happy with it. Gave it to my smart housemate to proof read one night and he said he enjoyed it, too, which I took as a good sign.

When that got finished I undertook the even more exciting task of painting weights! For those of you who don't know, creating characters goes like this. Design -> Model -> Rig -> Bind/Paint Weights. (UVs, Texturing and Blendshapes are also slotted in along the way.) The binding/weighting refers to the process of instructing certain parts of the model to be controlled by certain bones or joints of the rig. Probably superfluous mentioning this but whatever. It seems almost invisible - noone ever really pays any mind to the effort that has to be put in to such trivial parts of character creation to make it really successful. But basically this is what i've been up to for the past week.

Once you've roughed out the weights, your character roughly moves how he should, but every part of the model that bends in any way must be finely tweaked until it looks right. You'll get areas like these:


Notice the horrible areas of deformation like the shoulder etc, where the 'skin' doesn't move naturally. It overlaps as if it were cloth or something.. anything that's not skin. Anyway, these examples aren't even that extreme. Going back to Buckle it seems that for the most part he's actually weighted reasonably well, considering I didn't use any plugins like PoseDeformer (which i'll touch on later). So here's the stage he's at at the minute.


Not bad... not bad... I think the to do list atm is as follows:

Fix mouth (easy)
Fix peg-leg knee (hopefully easy with poseDeformer)
Potentially fix upper legs... (although i'm not sure aka I hope this isn't necessary)

Then Andy's left to do Swash and one day they'll be finished! I say one day because there's still a shit load left for him to do, the poor lad :( I sort of wish I could help out more but if I want to make anything that is really my own and do it well then I need to move on :/

Anyway, poseDeformer.

Michael Comet is a brilliant man who's spent who knows how long making reaallly handy scripts for Maya, and they're all for free! I came across the scripts through the Gnomon rigging videos that i've watched, and i've been using the CometTools for a while now, which includes handy things like easy shape creation and tools for playing with orients etc, but only in this past week have I started using poseDeformer which is just brilliant. What you do is move the character into a pose that deforms badly, run the script, follow the instructions, and you're allowed to move vertices, edges, basically model as you traditionally would until the pose looks nice and bob's your uncle! There's no point me going into any more depth but suffice to say it's insanely handy and i'll be using it on all future rigging projects :D

Link to his website here -----> http://www.comet-cartoons.com/

Do yourself a favour and check it out. You can also find poseDeformer compiles for all Maya versions with a quick google.

One last thing that i'll mention is that i've created a reverse rig on the main character :) Thanks to Georg for figuring it out, it's easier than it seems and just took me a little while creating a bunch of set driven keys to mess with constraints and bob is yet again your uncle. No example here but it'll allow the guy to swing from ropes and crap like Andy wished.

HHHHHHHOPPPEFULLY i'll have some pretty pictures up for next time! Some beautifully mudboxed boxer faces :D Actually sounds quite exciting. Anyway that'll do, ciao B)

Proost

Blog time! Bit of a weird time to be doing it but I missed last friday :x Surprisingly I feel really far behind on the blogging already :O I've got quite a bit to show, and there won't be much writing cause it's presentation time today. In brief, since my last blog i've kinda completed my basemesh for the Boxer ready for mudbox, I fixed some problems with Andy's rig, and accepted EVEN MORE work in the form of drawing a sketchbook for Pete's channel 4 show :D

So here are the pics. In chronological order.



Here's a little picture I made that looks at the topology of my model. On the right you see the original model that I made, and as you can see it's pretty dense. From the start I didn't want to limit myself to make a low-poly model, but I thought this was far too dense, particularly in the chest, so I decided to start it from scratch again from the collar bone area. You can see the reworked model in the center with a much tidier and less dense mesh. I think it's a great improvement, especially as it gives a similar shape to what I want with much less geometry than the original.

You can also see where I played around with the original in Mudbox (although this demonstrates nothing, really) and where I started playing around with a really great plugin called nex, which you can use to draw polygons directly onto other models. I think this would be really handy in retopologising hi-poly models, and i'll almost definitely use it again in the future, although I didn't think it was necessary in this case, really.

Just for a second I'll go back to show the reference that i've been working from for this guy.







Some of this you've seen before, but that doesn't matter. Basically the problem that I encountered was the way that the guy varies so much. Of course this is my fault but due to this I found it quite difficult on deciding on a final look for the guy, when it came to drawing a turnaround of him. I settled on this, with the thought that I can change whatever I want as I go along.




I wasn't 100% happy with how these turned out, but they were decent, mostly proportion-wise. And again, I can change whatever I want as i'm my own boss! >:O

So back to the modeling. As I said I've finished the basemesh... sorta. So here it is!




I'm kinda happy with this guy, but since the beginning there's something that's just been... off. I think it's gotta be the face, which will be the thing that takes the most tweaking. Also as i've said to some tutors I think when I get round to doing the blendshapes, the extreme expressions should really bring him to life as in every drawing I've done he's been grinning or scowling or something like that, whereas here he looks dead boring.

I also think the proportions could use more work - although i'm not sure in which area, or perhaps if it's just the pose.

Although I am happy with certain parts of the model. I'm quite chuffed with the topology of the body, I think it's a decent density mesh with all of the definitions that I wanted. I'll add bits and pieces in mudbox but I think it's a really solid basemesh. Fingers crossed it'll deform well, too.

I'm also pretty happy with the accessories that i've modeled, eg. the gloves and the shoes. Check out these babies :P



took me like a day to model lolz. But yeah, this is where i'm at. Next week is back to Andy's models for weighting (urk) and the week after it's back to my guy! I'm a bit behind, I won't lie, and that's a nightmare. But i'm sure it'll all sort itself out in the end.

As a bonus here are some of the drawings that i've done for Pete!









Thankyou and goodnight!

woooo update!

Back from christmas! Missed one blog post last week because I forgot that I've been keeping this thing lol. Didn't post over christmas either because I was working on the dissertation almost constantly... it was horrible. But i'm back now, dissertation is almost out of the way and i've started on my personal project finally :) Although as per usual it's harder work than I imagined. I'll go through what i've been up to for these two weeks that i've been back.

Initially I tried to get the weighting on Andy's pirates done, but as he wasn't finished finalising UVs yet I couldn't paint the weights. So i scrapped what i'd started and began concentrating on my project.

I thought it would be a good idea spending a day gathering reference images. In hindsight I do think it was a good thing, I've found a few images like these...






and these...





basically a mixture of really cool images and handy reference pictures for proportion/anatomy and style. So i've been using these in cojunction with the pictures that i've drawn of my character eg.



...to try and come up with a fully formed concept for my character. But this is harder than it seems.

With so much reference and so many differing levels of realism/stylisation etc etc it's hard to find a happy middle ground. I'm also realising that i'm probably my own toughest client. When modeling the pirates I only had what i'd been given to go with, and I specifically had in mind that I would put aside my own personal tastes and create characters for the client and not myself. When working for myself I just seem to constantly flipflop between stylistic choices. This is compounded by the technical aspects, also.

In maya you obviously work with polygon - vertices. The free-form sculpting tools available within Maya are not so great, to say the least, and so this has resulted in me getting stuck into detail far too early on, having too many vertices to work with and thus getting bogged down. Here's an image showing a few of the facial variations that i've come up with this week.





As you should be able to see from the images, forgiving the eerie look brought on by having missing eyes, the character just looked strange. The proportions were all out and there was just nothing going for him. The nose on the left face in particular looks rough, as well as the eye, which just looks unnatural. The face on the right is another prototype and the face in the center is what i've been left with (the level 0 mesh from mudbox after a few hours of tinkering.)

Here's the highest level mesh that I got to in Mudbox after a day of playing around and getting accustomed to the interface and it's quirks.



I sort of like this image, but it just doesn't have the zing that I want it to. But that's okay, i'm marking that down to experience. Of course I wouldn't just slip right into it, right? Nothing ever as easy as it seems in 3D land. As I didn't UV the guy before I mudboxed him I can't use this hi-poly sculpt for anything, anyway, which I think is probably a good thing. I took the lowest level mesh from this, though, which i've now taken back to Maya where I will create the entire base mesh for the guy. Here's the progress so far:



So i've not come out with a lot of visible progress this week. Hopefully this post will show you that i've actually been working some lol. It's been an interesting week, I think i'm getting somewhere though. I think really I want to make the guy a little more stylised. It's probably all in the eyes... who needs realism? Perhaps next week (or maybe the week after depending on what Andy's got me doing) i'll go crazy and make the guy super stylised. That could be fun. i'm babbling.

Next on the agenda is finishing the weights on Andy's pirates so that they're out of the way, then i'll get back to this dude and finish an entire base mesh. After that it's back to Mudbox for further modeling, (not before UVing) then back to Maya, tweaks, displacements, etc, and onto the rest of the crap. It'll be interesting to see where I end up. Oh well, i've run out of things to say that make sense, so until next week (Y).

nepoenpoepe

Back on blogging-track! This week i've managed to rig two characters :D (not including painting weights, sadly, but I couldn't get started on this until Andy had finished a few things.) Pretty good progress though, I think. And rigging has been surprisingy easy to get back to terms with :D (apart from one horrible day which I will describe shortly). Here's a pictures of the first rig I completed on Swash:


Nothing much to talk about, a very basic rig. The only new things i'll be attempting this time round are a jaw bone, and an extra bone in the arm for forearm twist (although I need to sort this out...) but basically nothing mindblowing. I managed to finish it in almost 1 day, which is great time, but painting weights will be fairly time-consuming I think.

So, I finished Swash all fine and dandy and was really chuffed, and quickly went on to rigging Dodger, the main character. This was all going fine, too, until I got to making the IK/FK arms when it took a turn for the worst. I'd set them all up just like I did with Swash but one thing kept on going wrong. I'd move the IK arm, switch to FK arm and move it and rather than sticking to the location of the IK like it should do, the IK handle kept snapping to the new position of the joint, when the FK controls moved it. Sorry if that's a little confusing, but bear with me.

So I tried a million different things, tried switching restraints on and off, remaking the entire arm from scratch, creating new, test arms along side this one and NOTHING was working. So I wasted pretty much an entire day on this one stupid problem and couldn't figure it out so I decided to leave it. Came back the next day and still no joy for about an hour, but after trying every different thing I could think of FINALLY I got it.


It was this bugger! This tiny, seemingly unimportant looking button, which I have no recollection of turning on either in the menu you see here or the button in the option box menu when you create IK handles. But remember this! It could save you some time. Enable IK Snapping is bad! Glad I figured it out in the end :D and now Dodger's rig is finished too.

Just one more week to go, one more rig to make and then three characters weights to paint... I can't remember how long weights take, but i'm foolishly optimistic that I might still be able to complete it lol. We will see. Here are some cool pictures to finish the blog :) I'm really happy with how the characters have turned out and what's even better is that they seem to come from the same world and all relate, while still remaining individual. Wooo




til next week!

Damn

I haven't posted in ages! And I ruined my one-a-week track record :( Oh well, it was going to happen some time. I won't dwell. Instead here's the stuff that i've actually managed to finish in the time that i've not been posting :D






There's swash. All done and nice and tidy in the outliner :) As far as i'm aware i've done everything that's necessary to have him move really nicely when he's finished rigging, but we'll only find out when it starts (which is hopefully very soon! possibly even today, but more than likely next week). I'm really quite happy with him, I think the face and body have a good amount of character in them, and the topology is pretty clean. Now it's up to Andy with the texturing and materials, which I hope he does a good job of. The only thing that i'm wondering about at the minute is Swash and the rest of the gangs eyes. I've always made the eyes quite er... stylised in the way that they have very hard edges on the rim of the eye, and pretty much all over the eyelid. I've not had to do any blendshapes or facial rigging in the past, so i'm unsure whether this is a good route to take. My instinct is telling me that they should (or maybe i'd just like them to be) a bit more natural looking, so i'm probably going to research this before I model my characters. (which i can't wait to do :D) Anyway, I can't really remember any of the problems that I had modeling Swash, but everything that I came across was solved with basic modeling techniques, so there's not much wisdom I can impart at this time :P So onto Buckle.






There we go, two haphazard turntables for Buckle. I'll probably have to present them nicely for the work submission before we leave, so maybe i'll get some pretty pictures up at some point. Something that i've learnt in this process is that it majorly speeds up your workflow if you can basically steal parts of other models and reuse them or reshape them to fit other characters. Every character i've made has the same ears, the same hands and the same feet. Just move around the topology until it suits you and bob's your uncle. I even reused swash's trousers for buckle, although it was quite tricky because of their difference in mass. Hands and ears were a godsend though, especially. I'm pretty happy with how this guy turned out, as well. I believe it's the first time that i've made an entire connected torso and head, and it wasn't so bad. It can be tricky in places like the arm/shoulder area where you have to choose between extruding the arm out or connecting a different piece of topology (of which i chose the latter) and then sorting out the topology, but i'm quite pleased with the results. I'm yet to see whether it will all work out in the end but i'm sure we'll manage it. Again, Andy will be texturing all of the models so now it's up to him! (Although i'm sure I won't be able to keep my nose out for long.)

Now all there's left for me to do is go ahead and rig. And I have two weeks left. And three characters <_<;;; That's a little worrying. Hopefully the vast (pleaaseee) majority of the rigging will somehow get done, though, and all with be well for us to leave for crimbo and get on with our dissertations (blarg).

Anyway i'm fairly happy with how all of this has gone. I'm happy with all of the models (Although i prefer the baddies to the good guy, but that was gonna happen due to the fact i modeled him first. And i'm sure texturing him will make him look pretty) and given that we've had a fair few lessons in between all of this stuff, along with the presentations, dissertation tutorials and all of that junk, i think i've done pretty well for time. I've definitely put the hours in anyway :) And i'm tired now but soon we'll have a lovely break, and then I can start on my guys :D :D

Seeya next week hopefully xx