3D1 Assignment 3 better late-est than never

The only thing that we had to go through talking about to any extent was the eyes. There were some discussion on whether the eyes should be modeled or just painted on the textures. In the end we decided to go with just painting them on rather than modeled. This was partly because it would be easier and partly because the character felt so 2d on in the concept art.

I tried to keep as close to the concept as possible.

The hands were made as mittens with separate index fingers, something that was very important since the character had to be able to smoke.

Keeping the hair and face shape was a bit strange and at first I more or less forgot that the front of a face features anything except a nose and a mouth. For instance the cheeks did not protrude forward and I had not even thought about it until it was pointed out for me.

When I realized that I would have some triangles left I decided to add the pack of cigarettes taped to one arm from the action shot that Christoffer provided. It added so much personality to the character.

On to the UV.

I put the seams on the sides of the dress underneath the arms, I decided to not split it at the shoulders since parts of that area would be covered by the frills anyway I thought it would not matter as much if the texture space was smaller at that particular part.

Unwrapping the hair I left the part where the swirl goes round connected between the halves mainly because I did not want the seam visible there. The hair was  bit though because on matter where I put the seams it would probably show a bit and since I felt I could not get away with it I put the seam where I thought it would be least distorted on the UV map.

Splitting the hand and unwrapping it in a understandable was probably the hardest part and even though I went through several different iterations I think it could have been done better but at the time I was feeling that I’d better start making the textures or I was going to be late.

I drew most of the texures in Mudbox, since I had done the previous work in Photoshop I decided that trying 3d painting as well was a good idea.

Mudbox took some time getting used to and I had some early problems with the export/import of Photoshop channels but it soon worked out.

The problem in exporting from mudbox the first time is that it made all the chanels into seperate psd files which when just dropped into the same project sometimes became a bit off, but not enough to make me notice at a glance.

this led me to make some changes in the wrong place and then spend quite some time trying to figure out what the problem was before I re-imported the .psd channels and made sure that they all were in the right place.

I began the diffuse in Mudbox, putting on all the base colors starting with the dress and then moving on to the skin, the slippers, the glasses and lastly the hair.

Then I started building on with detail in separate layers. Making the texture and faces on the slippers, the texture on the hair and face came next.

I then exported it to Photoshop and filling all the base colors that were not quite covered in Mudbox. I also made all of the cigarette pack in Photoshop since I made the UV mostly square and all the sides of the package were easy to draw flat since they are in fact flat.

Once again I was quite lazy with the specular, I made the map using Insane Bump which is basically poor students Crazy Bump and then I made everything a slightly darker shade. Then I did the same again except not with the glasses this time since the held the look shiny red plastic quite well. Then I tried to make the eyes more shiny, this went through a few iterations before I got it right by account of me not thinking about the fact that the eye looking half closed would mean that the “top” of the eyeball would not be in the middle of the eye texture but rather a little higher.

I had some small issues with the specular map interacting with the alpha to create shiny invisible planes.

The Normal map though gave me a bit of a headache. I made that with Insane bump as well, generating it from the diffuse. There was some tweaking the balance to make parts of the map less  distinct. But the great problem was in the seam going across the hair that was very pronounced. When I found that I could not fix it by hand I decided to try and make a new one using the NVidia plugin for Photoshop to generate a new Normal map. When this gave no better results I decided to try out baking a normal map. So I made a new save of the model and subdivided and smoothed the model and after a few tries I managed to get all the settings right. But when this turned out with the same problems and the added mess of getting the normals on the glasses wrong I decided that the first attempt was after all the best one.

The difference between the render in 3dsMax and UDK was a bit annoying as the model looked quite good in 3dsMax with the seams and the early too bright specular map looking pretty good, and the fact that the re-import texture function did not work for me in UDK 3 lent some extra irritation since I needed to redo the whole import process every time. When we were given the UDK 4 keys at the end though the re-import worked as it should and I started saving a little time and a whole lot of irritation.

3DsMaxUDK

Well that was all I had time for and that is all I am afraid here is the finished product.