week 14 : friday
Character tweaks
Since tuesday I’ve been tweaking the character and staff textures. A specular map has been created and a alpha map for the hair, I’m still having issues with getting the alpha to work. In the unreal material editor there’s two kind of opacity slots, regular opacity and opacity mask. The opacity mask seems to force the alpha map to a pure black/white image, which results in a coarser but faster map. That works but I want it to be smoother and I’m having trouble figuring out what to do. Simple connecting the alpha map to the opacity slot doesn’t work, there is some settings I’ve missed.
Here’s some in-game shots.
I also continued tweaking the diffuse and normal maps. Adjust the levels, sharpen them and add fine details in the normal map, all in Photoshop. I could go on tweaking forever, but I need to stop if I want to finish the rest in time.
Besides the alpha hair problem I also ran into problems with my mesh, seen below. It turned out that I had to invert the green channel in the normal map. Thanks to Polycount and Dimitris for the help with that one.
This is how it looked when wrong, it only really worked when the light came from below.
And after inverting the green channel.
Triceratops mount
I haven’t progressed as far as I would have liked with the triceratops, but I’ve started to block out the volumes (yes I know the legs look like sausages right now). Aiming to be done with all sculpting this week so I can start baking and texturing next week.
Front, side and perspective view.
