Week 14: Crock-pot

Howdy Folks,

This week has been a very productive week, but very hectic one as well. This week, I wanted to start and finish texturing and practice using sub dermal maps to enhance my model.

Skin shaders are a great way to improve the realism and believability of a character and I wanted to practice this with my characters. Here are 2 great examples of the outcomes when using skin shaders:

Link: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/skin-shader

I was feeling really positive after my visit to EGX Rezzed last weekend. Speaking to Kevin had sparked an inner flame within, and all I wanted to do was my best to prove to Kevin that I am a capable character artist.

At the start of the week, I did a mass unwrap, working through this phase as quickly but efficiently as possible. Unwrapping this time round wasn’t too difficult and the results were a lot better especially as I had taken Del’s feedback on my Eagle Warrior on board. He wanted me to make sure that the lines on my unwrap were as straight as possible to achieve the best possible outcome for my textures.

However, packing my Unwraps onto texture sheets proved a much harder task. I split my texture sheets into 3 parts: The body, jewellery and ropes; the armour and then the hair. At first it was a matter of knowing which assets needed the most priority and then it became a matter of trying to fill the unnecessary gaps in the texture sheet.

Once complete, I send my results to Del and he was happy with the results. It was good to see that I was making improvements since the last unwrap- not too shabby.

I still needed to make a few minor tweaks to the low poly mesh, but for the most part, I was finished.

Once complete, it was time to bake my Ambient Occlusion, Normal and Cavity maps in X-normal. I noticed that when texturing there were a number of baking errors in the mesh. These would need to be removed, especially as they were in very clear places.

To make matters worse, throughout the process I was baking out each individual asset separately, this became a very tedious task which took time that I could be spending on something else more useful.

After telling Del this issue, he recommended that I use Substance Painter to bake my textures, simply because the texture quality was a lot better that n that of X-normal (which I could also adjust). Furthermore, I could bake all of my assets at once, which would be very helpful and less time consuming. By using the ‘Bake by mesh name’ I would be able to do this.

I realized however that to do so I would first need to go back and rename my meshes, both high and low poly and added the correct suffix. Once complete, I needed to re-export them and turn off ‘export by group’ in Zbrush. I must say this became a tedious task, especially having to rename all the assets again.

After this was complete I could then baking in substance. Baking was taking a lot of time too, in fact in some cases it even took 20 minutes to complete a bake of my character. By this point I was getting very frustrated that the bakes were taking this long and they had errors despite the length of time they took. Furthermore, I was even more frustrated that I was not meeting my goals for the week.

However, I was able to play around with the skin texture of my character and even the crocodile.

Following this I was able to show my progress to Kevin McDowell and also character artist Yogesh at Automaton games.

Whilst baking, I was also able to keep up with drawing my characters in my sketch book, and concepting the crocodile warrior which I am liking the look of so far. I even got the opportunity to design an Aztec Vessel and furthermore, continue experimenting in World Machine to create an Aztec environment.

I knew I had to re-bake my textures, however I decided to bake in a lower resolution than before in home of cutting the bake time in half, and it worked like a charm- Eureka!

With the baking complete, I spent Friday morning putting together a catalogue of crocodile reference images and a colour palette, to aid me when texturing. This was one of the things Angel Diaz said that I should do and I’m glad I did it, as it has been very helpful so far. Here is some of Angel's work:

With it I was able to see that a crocodile’s head has 4 major skin hues and from this I could make a colour palette from. I checked my findings with Del and he gave me the thumbs up.

So with the baking complete, I began blocking in the basic colours in substance painter, I started with the ‘Orc skin’ smart material and began working up. It was a fun task and I am glad with my progress. Nonetheless, there is still a lot of work to go and I would need to in improving its believability: including darkening the base skin colour and adding more micro pigmentation.

Afterwards, I moved onto texturing the body of the Shaman, this was a hard task at first, especially getting the right hue. However, after speaking to my peer Chris Lonsdale, I was able to get the correct skin hue and even go as far to add wet and matt areas to show where the reflective ness of skin.

However, I will need to make the albedo less plain as it currently is and furthermore some of the areas need more ref hues to remove the plastic element that the character has at the moment. Next week I will aim to finish texturing this character, however I understand that it might take a lot longer than planned.

I realized this week that I worked ridiculous hours to get the work done, at least 12 hours a day, once time even collapsing on my desk. I’m glad with the results of my work, but I’m concerned that I have to work to such lengths just to get the work done.

On happier notes however, I am glad that I pushed myself to work so much despite my fears of the project and that I’m maintaining exercise and a good diet.

So there you have it by hectic week, it has been a very busy one with its ups and downs however I am glad with my progress this week and glad that I did not give up.

Thanks for reading.