Game Production

Sculpting

WEEK 1

Use ZModeler > Scale EdgeLoop to easily scale the trousers all the way around instead of having to use the move gizmo tool. I used this on the trousers and the boots.

The masking brush: MeshProject is super cool and speeds up the process for blocking out. Really handy for clothes, straps etc.

I don't like how using masks in my process yields messy results. When I saw another 3d artist creating these extreamly clean polygroups in their speedpaints I needed to find out how they were achieving the results I wanted. This video above went over it breifly and these are the notes I made. 

Sculpting

WEEK 2

Looked at these character models of from South Of Midnight and Torin from Love Death And Robots Ep: "Bad Travelling"

It was a challenge to get his face right. It was extra challenging when I had to transfer his face shape when including his beard.

The lessons I was having on human anatomy in traditional art classes where helping a lot to understand muscle anatomy. It was difficult trying to get his arms to be stylistically large but not look inncorect and strange. I find that I always make legs far skinnier than they should be - which has been corrected in the later stages of the process pictures. I also often make the torso shorter than what is anatomically correct.

I moved into 3Ds Max to model the hard surface items such as buckles, belts, hooks, clasps etc. I used a lot of Symmetry, Bend, and Boolean modifiers.

Apron loop strap Buckle

Optimising the low poly

For these irregular shaped hooks I decided to work from the Turbo Smooth Variations rather than using the geometry that came before the turbo smooth because not only was it messy, but it also didn't capture the silhouette well. By working on top of the turbo smooth geometry, the silhouette is far more effective and clean.

When moving into the unwrapping stage, I couldn't select one of the assets. As usual, I went back and reset that asset's XForm. Unfortunately, This broke it further, squishing and flipping it over so that it was completely out of it's space - what's worse is that the back space wasn't helping restore this error either.  Thankfully this was one of the assets who's high poly was really similar to it's low poly, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to re-optimise.

I was thinking of using the low poly and modifying it to fit the silhouette but when I compared it to the high poly I realised that it would be aa lot more difficult to get it looking clean. I decided to therefore use the highpoly and optimise it from there.

The topology for the high poly was decent, the only horrific area was where the Boolean modifier interacted with the mesh. This is the only area I fully reconstructed. The rest of the mesh was just optimised using Collapse and Target Weld.

Isn't it soo much fun... when you realise the thing you spent time on isn't even visible.

Onto the belt, I had thankfuly had a low poly saved during the process and so the only thing I had to edit was the hole which the clasp sits into. I could just bake over the hole but since the belt is fairly large on the character, I have the budget for it, and I don't want to set myself up for baking errors, I decided that the low poly could definitely do with some interest.

I packed the assets in their groups whilst unwrapping to keep my workfow manageable. This is useful because if I ever encounter any errors whilst unwrapping, I can narrow the focus down to just the singular asset. I want to pack this map with alphas so it would save me time to pack the map once I have everything I need. In the past I would have started packing it now and would have moved things around when I needed to add more things. Although yes that approach does cut up the work when done that way, it wastes unnecessary time in the long term.

Mask edge, polish the edge, close holes, now the hole has a different polygroup to the arm so you can push that out to close the gap between arm and torso. dynamesh

ZProject Brush is super useful for belts and trying to get things to lie tightly on a surface.

MOVING ONTO SUFFERING WITH THE HAT...

First two attempts I tried to bend the hat by using the move brush and the Infinite Move Brush but it is a poor approach because it produces messy and muddy results. It's impossible to move the hat in ways that look natural and believable. I then tried again by using a cone and cutting off the top. This gave me a shape that was closer than what I wanted but I had no idea how to make it look like it was made of fabric and curving it's 

Brush > Auto Masking > Topological

Retopology

The ears where super fiddly and tricky to work with when manually retopping so I worked from a ZRemesh version of the ear instead. Usually the loops given by Zbrush are horrific but because I sculpted the ear in two parts , which where then welded together,  it seems Zbrush had a far better time with it's topology. I spent the time going in and removing a lot of loops - whilst avoiding the ones which held the shape of the ear together. This was a far better method for creating the topology of the ear, and it sped up the process quite significantly

When I moved onto the hands, only then had I realised how tightly I had sculpted the fingers together. This would have been manageable if it weren't for the thick finger-less wraps that obscured the first third of the fingers! I didn't have time to go back into ZBrush and change them so I am just going to make do with what I have. But now I know to start sculpting hands with fingers far wider than usual to make SURE the retop phase is a breeze.

The palm area where it wraps by the thumb was so difficult to get it to make sense. The thumb always seems to give me problems. This is because, if you aren't careful, the edge flow can get directed to the wrong places which lead to excess loops in some areas and then scarcity in others.

After the hand was finally completed, I had to move onto the arm and it's wrappings. I thought it was going to be far more challenging then it actually was. If you start by having the usual loops as if it where a bare arm, and then work on bringing the silhouette in, its quite simple.  Move the vertices that are already there, one by one, so that it follows the corners of the wraps that it's closes to. Then cut in manually or add a swift loop and move it into place.

I tried to edit a ZRemesh version of the beard to use as it's low poly - not only speed up the process but also to capture the silhouette effectively. unfortunately, the topology was far too wasteful and the loops where unmanageably disgusting so I started from scratch to save my sanity. When retoppinng I usually focus on the loops because they are important for hands and faces, and then I work into them after to capture the silhouette better. For the beard I decided to focus on capturing the silhouette whilst having the attention to loops be second. Since the beard won't really be animated - he isn't a character that would move around or talk much - loops aren't a problem since it only sits on top of his chin.

For the laces I used a low poly version of it from ZBrush as my base. I couldn't go any lower than this (left picture) without having it's form be drastically effected so I decided to manually remove edges. For the majority of the lace pieces, loops where easily removed. For others.... not so much due to the messy corners (the images above show examples of these corners). My advice is to remove the corners BEFORE removing edge loops.  The picture on the far right is an example of how the corners look after attempting to optimise the polys. I tried to work around the edges to minimise the work I had to do but it actually took longer. When working with poor topology, remove the hassle areas BEFORE you try to optimise.

The boots are made using only 1,300 polys. The laces are far more expensive in comparison, sitting at 3,100. Looking back at this, I think using alphas for the laces would have been a far better and more efficient method for displaying the laces.

We have been given an entire map designated for hair but my character has more metallic items than hair so I have decided to put them in the same map so that I have enough space for the clothes. Alphas are also very minimal on my character.

I was constantly having issue with setting IDs to my assets. It refused to let me change them. I tried deleting all of the materials I had created and retrying but that didn't work.

Straightening the unwrap saves a lot of space. If I use and tileable textures, it will also follow the curvature of the hat rather than having the texture laid flatly. This adds realism to the hat's texturing if I use tilable textures.

Learnt my lesson from last project to use the topology of the skin to extrude the eyelash alphas rather than suffering with placing strands individually. This only works because it is a stylised character.

The heels are inverted. I had modeled them in 3ds max and it had been a plain which it's edge loop was used to create the height of the heel. This was probably caused because the mesh was inverted but surely there is a way to change it in ZBrush because I had already modified the asset too much to use the 3ds Max version.

I then had issues with editing the topology of the low poly boots. It refused to show me the vertex ticks or allow me to edit them even though it was definitely an 'editable poly'. Display properties also had 'vertex ticks' turned on so there wasn't really a reason for them to not be working. The issue still persisted when I closed and reopened the file...  I needed to edit them because the heel wasn't following the silhouette correctly as you can see on the top right image.

3ds Max was such a pain because it refused to let me use a certain material and change it's material ID.. Material IDs worked fine for most assets but some decided to become completely broken..

in 3ds Max I prioritised the Material ID because that is what effected an asset's unwrap to appear in the correct unwrap map - even if the colours weren't matching. But then in Substance painter the maps where sorted in their colours and completely disregarded the material IDs which makes no sense at all especially since I couldn't choose the displayed Material AND material ID without Max changing the other.

Yes you need to have a version of the alpha in your High Poly fbx if you are using high polys. I thought I could get away with it because of the button 'use low poly mesh as high poly mesh' but this only applies if you want to do that for your WHOLE character.

Even though I had the issue with the layers, I decided to do a test bake so that I can catch any further errors I need to fix...  I found one in the eye..

TEXTURING

Hands reference with a style guide reminder from South Of Midnight on the far right.

I really liked the stylisation of these illustrations and decided to keep these in mind for colours when texturing. I particularly like the one on the far left.

POSTMORTEM

Interesting project.. I focused on sculpting the face but this did leave textures on the clothes to not be .... I was relying on substance painter to bring in the textures. 

I would have liked to have learnt new processes such as Hair cards and realistic clothing in marvelous designer during this project. Despite this desire, I decided against it to keep the project simple and so that I would have enough time to complete it. I had only given myself 6 weeks for this project so instead of learning new methods and workflows, I decided to simply focus on increasing my sculpting millage. I spent a lot of my focus on sculpting the face. This might have resulted in an imbalanced quality level decided to focus on the sculpting phase because