Earlier today I uploaded my Post Mortem and movie and now I’ve finally delivered my PowerPoint Presentation.
Low Poly, 9328 Tris.
Using Nex’s Quad Draw helped me finish the low poly fairly quick and Unfold3d made life easier when unwrapping.
Normalmapped asset inside Unreal Engine 3, with a AO-baked Diffuse.
I had some problems but finally I got the model to show in the Engine.
Body Texture, 2048×2048.
Head Texture, 2048×2048.
The texturing phase was the one with the least problems and was a breath of fresh air after playing puzzle with UV’s, skinning and trying to get the exporter to do as you want.
Final Model.
So, here it is. I’ve learnt a lot during these few months and I think I was able to maintain the vision I had, from concept to final asset.
Thanks for reading!
/Dimitris Themelios
For the organic surfaces I made simple base meshes in Maya and imported into ZBrush where I sculpted the forms. I also did some scratches on the armour in ZBrush as well.
For some of the larger objects I used Meshlab to reduce the polycount for the bake object and for most objects I also made a light version(also with Meshlab) to use as a reference mesh when making the low poly with Nex’s Quad Draw.
Here’s the finished High Poly:
/Dimitris Themelios
When making the hard surfaces I try to think about how the low poly will encompass the high poly and take that into consideration when making the model. It’s important to make sure that edges on the high poly aren’t perpendicular to edges on the low poly but instead get as much coverage as possible, otherwise the edge won’t show up in the normal map. For example I scale down the top of bolts, so that the edges show if you look at it from above, which is where the plane of the low poly will look from when you’re baking the normal map.
Here is a preview of the high poly of the armor that I’ve made, where everything has been done in Maya except the bags which were done in ZBrush. I feel that the time I put into making the Block In has really paid off when making the High Poly since it has been a real life-saver, as it allowed me to concentrate on each object separately, therefore saving me a lot of time. Overall I feel that I’ve been able to stay true to the concept.
Next: Organic Surfaces…
Before starting on the highpoly I make a rough block in to make sure the concept doesn’t look awkward in 3d. It also lets me identify any possible problems I might get when the mesh is deformed during animation.
It helps to get the larger shapes looking good before starting on the highpoly since it can sometimes be a hassle to make larger changes on a highly detailed mesh later on. I used a head from the base male skeleton that Epic provides on the Unreal Developer Network as a placeholder to better get a sense of the whole picture when working on the armor. I also have the rig visible so that I always have it in mind when placing the joints of the model.
So what I did after the thumbnail pass was to test the versions that I liked the most with some quick sketches. I then settled on one sketch and worked on it some more to get something a bit more defined. As it stands now it’s a bit bland and generic, but hopefully I’ll be able to sort that out somewhat during the later stages. For example, I haven’t decided what to do with the head yet, so maybe I can come up with something a little more interesting than a bald dude… Maybe…
Next: More frequent updates…