Workflow progress
This week, after making the triceratops concept, I began testing out my workflow for this project. First off I took my earlier triceratops skull and imported it into Zbrush. Since the skull contains two parts I added the jaw as a subtool. It was pretty straightforward and completed it pretty fast. After completion I exported the highest and second lowest subdivided meshes as .OBJ files.
I then imported the second lowest subdivisioned mesh into Maya and begun deleting unnecessary geometry, focusing on keeping the silhouette. I got it down to 1004 tris all in all. I could probably go a bit lower though. When done with that I smoothed the normals on the meshes, here’s where I encountered my first problem. As you can see in the example below, figure 1 has some black areas, this I found out don’t work too well when you are going to bake normals later on. It looks ugly and really breaks the illusion of the normal map (in my opinion). The solution is simply to add more geometry, like in figure 2. A simple bevel and it looks much better. Of course since I was doing a low polygon mesh I had to be conservative, use it where it matters. I might have been too generous though, I added some more geometry along the neck shield which will probably never be seen anyway.
After the problems with the black areas I ended up with this below. 1004 tris.
Time for baking. Here’s when I ran into some more problems. After I was done with the lowpoly (above) I UV-mapped it, which is necessary for baking and texturing. I imported the highpoly model, skull was around 6.6 million triangles and the jaw around 2 million triangles. I read in the d’Artiste Character Modelling 2 book that they took their highpoly meshes into Polycruncher which reduces the polycount but keeps the overall shape, they did this so the mesh would be more manageable in Maya. I skipped that part and took my chances with the huge polycount. Maya is not very good at handling large meshes, so it took some time baking, especially the skull.
Before moving on, I took a peek at the normal maps in Fchecker, but they were all wrong. For some reason the colours were all brownish when they are supposed to be bluish/purple. I had no idea why so I tried inverting the red, green and blue channels, and by inverting all three channels it seemed to do the trick. The colours were now correct and I moved on by adding the normal maps to the lowpoly mesh. The mesh turned all black, again no idea why. I made a Phong material to see if the specular on the normal mapped mesh would reveal if the shape was there, and it was.
I enabled the normal symbols of the mesh and found out that they were pointing inwards, by reversing these normals the mesh went back to it’s standard material grey. But, there’s always a but, now the UVs were flipped since I had reversed the normals so I had to flip the entire UV set and then rebake the normal maps. This was a lot of hassle, but in the end this was what I got, I think it turned out nicely.
Then it was time for texturing, I began with baking occlusion maps, just like with the normal maps. I could then use the occlusion map and multiply above in Photoshop to help show where every part is, it also makes the texture look more realistic by adding some shadows. The texture here is still work in progress. (diffuse, specular and normal map, maya viewport)
I will use this skull in the Unreal 3 Editor later, to try things out with the meshes and materials.
Conclusion for this week
I ran into quite a few problems during this workflow test. Lots of them could have been avoided if I was more cautious, but I think it was good still, I learned a lot from this and I think things will go more quickly now that I know what to look for before I jump ahead.
Project plan changes
I’ve changed 4.1, 4.2 and 5.2.4 in my project plan, I felt I needed to be more specific although I passed MS1. The document is added in the MS2 directory.
Mount concept
Here’s a concept for the mount. I didn’t spend as much time on the saddle as on the triceratops itself, I’m not sure yet if that’s what I’m going for.
I’ve also come up with a little backstory behind it all; the character and his/her mount travel deep into a jungle. They are on their way to an especially dangerous part, where they are suppose to spread some meat. A sacrifice of sorts, to keep the beast that lives here at bay. If they do not do this the beast will go on a hunt and might risk stumble upon the small human village residing not far away. This task is often handed to young villagers, on their way to adulthood, to prove themselves. They often bring triceratops with them, both because of their strength but also because they can protect the humans and themselves well.
MS1
This Tuesday we presented our progress so far, milestone 1. It was a long day but it was interesting to see everyone’s progress. I think it went pretty well, I presented what I’ve done, what I plan to do next and what might change. As said earlier in my blog I think I might slim down the environment part in some way. Either make it simpler or just a jungle-themed platform for my character and mount to stand on. Håkan thought I should try and make a real environment and I agree, it would be much more interesting. I’m mainly worried about all vegetation that is needed. I might change the theme to something more rockier, or more temple ruins and less vegetation. I was also told that Unreal 3 Engine already comes with loads of assets, that I could perhaps use. I would prefer to make all myself but I will certainly take a peek and see what’s at hand.
Magnus had an idea that I could paint a nice background, that would be pretty cool. I’ll have to see if my environment will be open enough to allow it.
Got a mail today saying that I passed the MS1, which was nice to hear. It also seems my documents are in order, at least no one complained about them.
Concept and reference gathering
This week I will do concept art and reference gathering. As seen earlier I’ve already done some environment concepts, I might do more but right now I’m going to focus on the character and mount. I’ve begun on the mount, but it’s not finished just yet. I put together some references for it in the meantime. I’m going to use a Triceratops as a mount, a young one. As you can see in my references I try to not use too much pictures of a Triceratops, mostly because we can’t know for sure how they looked, so besides from the skeleton I would only be influenced by other fictional pictures. I’m especially going to avoid copying the Jurassic Park version.
My references contain mostly creatures living today, crocodiles, alligators, turtles and lizards. Mainly because of the skin textures. From that I’m going to try make my “own” Triceratops with the help of skeleton pictures. It’s going to be interesting.
I’m also going to add the gear for it, try out different stuff and so on.
I’ve begun modeling a triceratops skull. Reasoning behind this was that since I’m still not sure how my character etc. will look, it’s much easier to just make something that I don’t have to design. My first concept contained a scarred triceratops skull, I liked the idea so I plan to try out my pipeline with it and in the end take the skull into Unreal 3 (make pretty) engine.
The skull itself will then likely end up as a prop somewhere in the background.
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The mesh presented here is the base for the high poly sculpt I intend to make. That’s why it has many edgeloops, to make sure all polygons are square.
It’s not so accurate so I hope no paleonthologists will kill me. :]
When I begun modeling, I decided to try out ‘Create Polygon Tool’ in Maya. Since I’ve never used it before. With it I drew along the outline of my reference image to get the base outline of the skull. It then becomes a big polygon shape which I have to cut up into quads and start shape into a proper skull. It worked pretty well and was intuitive to use.
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Besides the skull I plan to try out some simple modular modeling for the environment, to try in the Unreal 3 Engine and later use as set pieces (probably).
Here are the files for MileStone 1. Project plan, Research document and the MS1 powerpoint presentation for december 9th.
In the research document I’ve written about the pipeline I tend to use from concept to finished model with texture, I will add the game engine research during the MS2 period.
- Project Plan
- Research Document
- MS1 Presentation