Revenge of the crates and barrels!

Making more crates and barrels? Say is isn't so!

I've just started texturing my campsite. Some of the first targets - the supplies crates, and the flags. Since this is meant to be used in a snowy environment, I've used 3DS Max's Viewport Canvas to paint layers of snow onto some of the static objects, like the flag: but for repeatable objects, like the crates, I've had to avoid that. They need to be able to be placed anywhere!

I've just finished the first pass of the body textures for the brothers. It's not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination - there are specular issues and the occlusion is rather heavy-handed and needs to be taken down a notch (or several!) The front of the younger's jacket seems rather flat and "blocky" to me in the mesh, too, and needs a bit of relaxing. The next step with this is to get feedback from the director - this is the first time the clothes have been textures (and coloured in something more effective than quick block colours)! Before I go any further and make changes, I need to make sure the general direction I'm heading is approved by the director - these are his characters, after all!

Maybe she's born with it?

One thing that's really been relearned from today: it's worth paying attention to real-life makeup tips when modelling! The old adage about mascara making your eyes look bigger turns out to be true. I created the headsculpt of my knight and finished it to my own satisfaction a while ago. But upon blocking in eyelashes this afternoon? Suddenly her eyes looked ridiculously large! Luckily it was something I could fix with some use of the scale tool and some soft-selection of verts on the head and not something I had to dive back into Zbrush to fix, but it's another thing to bear in mind the next time I sculpt a head, particularly a female one.

Just another lesson I've learned this year when it comes to poly modelling heads, I suppose!

The Grid

Have been doing more texture work on the Japanese garden. I've got some problems with mismatching resolutions at the moment; I need to fix that. I'm pretty happy with the revision of the grid texture, though, which you can see in the second picture. It's beginning to come together!

The illusion of life

I'm working on some of the strange, peripheral parts of my knight model at the moment. This chain of screenshots shows the progression: after my last post, I resized my character's eyes slightly before creating an alpha map for her eyelashes.

Then, I did some experimenting over how to give her some eyes that had life in them. I'm aware that some game engines have very clever tricks with shaders to create an illusion of depth using a simple sphere for the eye, but after a search I could find an easy way to replicate such an effect with the simple scanline rendering I'm using for this. In the second screenshot, you can see me weighing up the advantages of making the mesh for the eyes more complex: the eyes at the bottom are simple spheres with a material and texture, but the eyes at the top are two spheres. The "eye" sphere uses the same map as the bottom eyes but has had the iris area flattened out, while the "gloss/lens" sphere is still perfectly spherical. It's got a simple thin-wall refraction material on it to simulate some level of depth. Looking at these tests (particularly when looking at an angle), I decided that adding the extra polys was worth it. There is something about the upper eyes that just look more lifelike.

The third screenshot shows my progress on creating a simple normal map for the inner mouth (it will eventually be added to th face map, where there is dead space I'm not using). I'm still in the process of creating this.

I've been building cliffs over the last few days!

I think there are only about 4 tris in that whole mesh. The rest is quads. I feel like this might be unnessecarily finicky of me.

Knight update!

I'm busy creating the alpha planes for the hair at the moment. This is my second attempt, and it's looking much more promising this time. There is still, of course, a lot of texture work still to do!

The first screenshot is is a nice opportunity to show how my edgeloops are placed, but really, I rather loved the co-incidental rainbow the wireframe colours were forming when combined with the normal map I had sitting on display. Sometimes even the most accidental, incidental things can be visually pleasing - at least to me!

Campsite

I've started my final project - building a campsite! It's mainly a project centred around small props - a project based around creating small environmental assets that may be the kind of thing I'd hope to be doing in emplyment should I get a job as a junior artist. Here's hoping!

This is the result of a few day's work: there are a few things (a sword, a basket, and the shields) which need further modelling, everything else is unwrapped and ready to be textured.

I think I might want to put more detail into the tent, though!