Pack it in

I think I'll stop writing about how stressful weeks on Game-Art can be, especially when they're near deadlines, because it's like writing about the sun rising in the Morning. Painfully obvious.

So anyway, the good news, I got more done than I thought I could (especially as I had another tragedy happen in my personal life recently that threw me a bit). The bad news, it's still going to be a horribly tight deadline.

So I spent the first part of this week re-topologising, which for some things was fairly easy, and for others, was tedious and slow. But I didn't expect anything else. You have to suffer sometimes to get good results right?

I re-topologised my kimono using 3D coat which was incredibly tricky but it gave me a relatively low poly result. On reflection however I should have spent more time thinking about flow lines and how a) the topology would aid my unwrap, and b) how the topology would affect normals and deformation.

Here is the low poly kimono:

Something I am glad I picked up on early was the size difference between my high and low poly models. I had to re-size my model for Marvellous so the clothes would come in quite large, so I had to be aware of that and making sure my low poly models would still overlay nicely with my high poly models for clean bakes. I also needed to make sure that I brought my high and low poly models in from Z-brush at the same time, so that when I re-sized them to match the clothes they too were still over-layed nicely.

The skirt was also tricky in that I needed some of the folds to have a bit of depth, but they didn't need it too much as they were relatively small. It was hard deciding what to model and what would just be baked when re-topologising, It's the same problem I have when trying to stylise something, I always end up copying over too much unnecessary information.

The hardest part with the skirt was connecting the lower poly base part of it to the higher poly top part where all the folds were. Some feedback I received was that my topology should have been a bit more evenly distributed, so perhaps I should have put more tri's into the base which would have also made connecting the parts easier. Although to be fair, making the tri limit was tough enough as it was (I'll talk about that in a bit).

I used z-brush to re-topo the face. After playing around with lots of different colour densities in poly paint and using z-re-mesh guides to mark out the loops I wanted I ended up with a decent result. As the rest of the body won’t be seen I split the body from the head before re-meshing so that the target polygon count was entirely focused on the head, as I wanted the head to be around 3000. It was a bit higher in Z-brush initially but I deleted the top and sides and part of the ear to reduce the tri count.

I also re-meshed the hands and feet in Z-brush.

Here are some close ups of the feet and hands (before I deleted the feet):

All in all re-topologising didn't go too badly, or take up as much time as I thought it might.

What slowed me down was optimising the low poly model to be within the tri limit. I had to cut it down by 10,000 tri's, which was painful. It's the main reason behind my decision to hide the feet, so that I could get rid of a huge chunk of tri's that way. Stripping the kimono of loops also meant that I ended up with some even dodgier topology. That was particularly difficult to leave alone, but I simply didn't have time to worry about it. Some feedback I recieved on my model was to make everything too sided and put more tri's into the belt. I did put more tri's into the belt in the end, but unfortunately I couldn't make a lot of stuff two sided, as it was hard enough to be within budget as it was.

For now I'll just have to use a two-sided shader and make everything two sided for my portfolio. I also want to fix the Kimono topology, so that's a definite to do for the future-Re-topologise the kimono again. Oh gosh.

I did manage to unwrap everything this week, however I didn't get baking done as I'd planned, which hopefully won't set me back too much next week.

I am proud of my unwrap though as I adopted a new methodology this time round that I think will really help my texturing later on.

I made sure to check each unwrap as I went, something I haven’t previously done before, to make sure the patterns I wanted to texture went on correctly without warping or distortion. It also helped me to check things like resolution once I'd done a temporary pack. Just to get a rough idea of how big different Islands needed to be in the pack. I feel like I could have packed it even tighter, but as always, time was looming over me this week. So I stopped here, this is my unwrap:

Something I also did that I think will help my texturing is work out where my seams were in marvellous designer and put my unwrap seams along those as closely as possible (this is where better topology would have aided me quite a bit). All in all I'm feeling good about my unwrap and low poly model.

The final low poly model:

I also managed to sculpt the head-dress this week. Or rather the parts that required sculpting, which were the hair, head-dress base and horns. I'm quite pleased with how these sculpts came out, and hopefully they'll bake onto the model nicely.

The horns:

The head-dress base:

The hair:

This site really helped me out both with re-topologising and with working out how to do the hair:http://www.tiflos.com/2011/04/05/the-creative-assembly-works/

It looks like I'll be finishing my Hades concepts next week along with my final concept. Hopefully I'll get my bakes and textures done relatively early on in the week so that I won't have to rush them too much. Although even if I don't get them done to the standard I want them to be for the final hand in, I'm planning on working into them after the project in preparation for the character pitch later on.

I do however have an idea for my final concept and I've taken photo reference in preparation for drawing it out next week. I also have a good idea of the kind of style I want to do it in, but I'll talk more about that next week once I have something to show to illustrate my idea properly.

Finally I did also manage to get most of my work organised and tidied up in preparation for the hand in, which took up more time than you'd think.

But I'll post up all my polished work in the blog hand in post, to keep things clear and simple.

In Game Production we covered unwrapping and texturing your character in Z-brush. It is something I tried out but I much prefer unwrapping in Max, and texturing in Photoshop and Substance, so I think I'll stick to that work flow. Although texturing in Z-brush is something I would like to come back to in the future when I have more time to experiment with it.

We went over presenting our characters in Critical Studies again, which as always will be useful for the Character pitch in week 22. It's something I'll come back to after next week, as right now my focus is more on finishing my character than presenting it.

So time for the final action plan of the project: