Triceratops progress
I’ve worked with the texturing of the triceratops. This is how it looks in the unreal engine at the moment. I’m going to tweak some things later, but for now it’s done. Have to start with the environment platform.
Some different angles of the dino.
I’ve thought of how I am going to record the finished scene in the engine later on. I read that there is some camera function, or matinee option, that lets you set up a ‘movie’ with a camera going through the scene. I don’t know how complicated that is, but it sounds like it will look best if I use that. I could go in and ‘play’ the scene and fraps the whole thing but it will be hard to make nice camera movements. If it’s possible to be a ’spectator’ in the scene, and fly around, that would help a lot. I’ll have to look into it more further ahead.
Next: Environment modeling…
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.
This week I’ve been hard at work baking out normal, occlusion and cavity maps. I started out in Maya, but soon decided to give xNormal a try. It worked out very good and I had no problems. Well I have one slight problem to solve still and that’s the characters lips which I still haven’t managed to bake good normals from.
Some map examples.
After that I rigged and skinned the character in Maya, and started posing her. Skinning was a pain but I managed to sort it out in the end. Some joints were problematic and bent ugly but all in all I’m quite happy with the result. To get the clothes in place I made them nCloth and run a quick simulation to let them “fall” into place, I then tweaked some vertices if needed.
Front and back shot, she’s currently at 7214 tris together with the staff/mace. But I’m going to add jewelry and other small stuff to her so I will probably end up at 8000 tris at max, which sounds just about right.
Here’s a turnaround with normal and occlusion map.
Next: Texturing…
