Finished Character

So the day of submission comes and I'm sort of done with the practical. As always there's a lot of room for improvement but here's the over all of the project. 

I'm not entirely happy with the end result; some of the aspects that I would like to work more on is the textures (specially on the hair and eyes), good rig, blend shapes and some animation. 

I did manage to rig the character, but got stuck on the weight painting as I managed to lock the weights and I wouldn't modify it... probably did something wrong buy it was taking me a lot of time to fix it. Blend shapes seemed pointless if the character was in a still position. 

For the textures, it's harder to make them than it looks; on Maya they look one way, Unity3D another and UDK another. The hair look fine on Maya but the eyes didn't and the other way around on UDK. It becomes a bit of a try and error, quite time consuming. Next time I'll be trying the textures only on the final engine that it will be render at. 

Speaking of engines, quite disappointed at Unity at the moment and really looking forward of learning some UDK. The quality of the real time render is far superior on UDK and it pretty much makes everything look pretty. This is the final video for the turn table of Arnold. It was done real time, I just capture the screen video.

The baking of the normals are not perfect, this is the first time I've try Zbrush, topogun and xnormal, so there's a lot to learn, but I'm really happy that I finally got to try them and lose the fear of their interfaces. Next time, I'll work on separate parts of the body and bake separate normals. Also I'll avoid making a single mesh for the entire body, it would probably been easier to keep different polygon count on each part. 

I really like the process and it's fascinating to see how many changes can happen as you go along, depending what works best on paper and what works better on 3D. Looking forward to polish this and make new ones, but faster this time. 

Any feedback would be more than appreciated. 

Hand in time! 

Final renders - Vivus town house

So despite the fact that I didn't finish what I expected to do at the beginning, I'm pretty happy of how the final renders look:

 

It looks quite different after you render it up. This is just me playing with a beauty and occlussion pass so I'll definately finish the scene just as a practice. Details that I notice when wrong is the texture in the sign; I'm guessing is the flare deformation that could have altered because it look fine in previous rendering test. I could have also add some deformation to the roof to avoid making it look so asian-like. 

Final details

So at the end I managed to get a basic house together; I realised until I started doing some test renderings that probably I went in too much details with some of the textures while the ones that I left at the end are a bit sketchy. This is a final group of the house without any deformation. Not sure if being a bit less than 14000 Tris is good or bad for a game environment, but probably I could have done with less, specially on the windows (take in count that there are windows on all four sides of the house).

Also had some troubles with the roof: the main roof tilling is at different scale as the one for the sticking-out windows. I guess I should have done some testing before going through all the trouble of specular and normal maps.
There are some of the textures that were made:

Unfortunately there I ended up making more assets that I could even use like the square's fountain, road sign, chimneys, stairs and even grass. Some are textured but I couldn't put them in context for the render so I decided to let them out. Just for the sake of portfolio I'm planning to finish this scene during the summer.

Above are the unused props, the working texture for the tiles of the town square's floor and the fountain textures. This last one was the first texture I made as a test of the quality I wanted. Spent more time on it that I should have. Also I'm aware that I wasn't as efficient as I should have been; it was until the final crit that I was suggested to reduce the number of textures/shaders in the whole house, like having one or two for the whole thing. At that moment it was quite late as I was already half way through most of them. 

Next post I'll post some quick final renders. 

Stylised textures

So the "attractive" part of my responsive project was meant to be texturing; I had intended to have a simple and low poly environment that could potentially be used in a 2D camera as a sidescrolling with having an extra 3D/free camera angle when it came to exploring and item searching.

The hanging sign is the fist object that I completely finished:

This is just a screen capture, but I worked on the painted texture, a specular map to give it a shiny texture where needed and a normal map for the bumps.

The chains where quite tricky to get them look like actual geometry when they're just two plains, but I thing that by exagerating their normal map it worked out quite well.

For the normal maps I used Quixel's software called nDo2. It works as a plug in for photoshop and it's pretty easy to use. The idea is that once you have a texture you can convert it into normal maps by the click of a button, instead of going all the way of having a low and high poly mesh and bake it. Probably it's not as precise and it does have better results when you work with photographic textures rather than hand painted ones, but it sure makes life a lot easier, specially with features like live 3d preview, live sculpting, presets and a good panel control to adjust all levels of the normal map.

I'm aware that it can make specular , height, diffuse and other maps, but at least in specular maps I think I prefer to work on them on my own. I found this video on youtube that can show you an understanding and importance of a good specular map. It does come a lot harder when you are working with hand painted assets as you have to create everything from scratch. 

I've also been working on other assets like this fountain below. My main problem at the moment is the time put a dedicated amount of time on each asset as it drains a lot of time by doing so. I thought for my submission I could just focus on having as many assets as possible but with good finishing quality rather than having many unfinished. I'll aim to have a house finish, but I can't certainly assure this at this point.

Animating spaceship

Having the deadline upon me and having retarded issues with my health sure managed to get me quite behind on my schedule for the project.
As I mentioned before, the concept of my spaceship is an eye; the idea of a massive eye comming from the sky, looking at everyone and judging sure gets me the creeps, and this idea came from a while ago when I saw some pictures of the Helix Nebula also known as 'the eye of god'. Also my flatmate started watching a series called Fullmetal Alchemist and at some point towards the ending a creature summons god and he is represented as an eye behind a door of giant dimensions.

 

Now for the animation I wanted quick movements that will give a sign of desperation but also the idea of it scanning everything at an extreme speed.
I want sure of the textures when I thought of it; I had a concept of an abstract spaceship that would only resemble an eye, but at the same time hard to understand its purpose. I abandoned every spaceship concept I saw as inspiration as I wanted to make it something organic, so doors, windows and any ship-like feature was straight away ignored.

There is not shape more organic than a circle, so luckily most of the animation took place by rotating over a central pivot point, and by groping certain objects it became really easy to control individual spins and other movements.
Also to cause the effect of a pupil dilating I had to involve some scaling which gave the spaceship a bit of part on the silent narrative behind the shot; you can tell that it's looking around and also when it finds its target.

Hopefully the textures can be rebalanced in after effects to avoid looking so dump. Ill have to play a lot with transparencies and glow effects to achieve a decent effect.

Blend Shapes - Eye blinking

According to my idea and storyboard my alien doesn't have much expression on her face (thankfully) but I did had to work with blend shapes to achieve the blinking of the eyes. It was probably at this moment that I regretted making so many eyes...
After a while and with the help of mudbox I managed to finish all the eye blinks and a little creepy smile that will appear at the en of the animation.

I haven't actually made the blenshapes at the point of the screen cap so the number of polygons in the scene was a bit alarming. I also made the blendshape for the eye of the inside of the spaceship.
Something that scared me later on was the arrange of the inputs; I thought I did something grown when I was trying to animate any blendshape, after having the alien in a different pose it would go back to the original T-pose. Luckily it was something really simple to fix by just putting the inputs on the right order.

Eye can see you

Most of the model I made it following a tutorial part of Digital Tutorials that a friend lend me. It was basically to build a female human body which then I modified  on mudbox to achieve an alien-ish look.
Part of this tutorial was the building of the eyes which obviously I just duplicated, scaled them and used them for the other extra 3 eyes on her forehead.

Old eyes with simple geometry

I was happy with them but one thing I really wanted to make was the pupils to dilate as that would add some creepy effect to the scene; also I've always thought that extreme closeups of the human eye look rather amazing!. Just as if I asked for it, a video came on my dashboard on tumblr of how to make really really cool eye with Maya and mudbox and it was only 12 min long, so I gave it a go despite the fact that I made the model fitting the previous eyes.

It was pretty easy and despite the fact that maya wouldn't take the texture I made in mudbox for some reason I ended up keeping this new eyes and work later on on their texture. Now, they don't look really special on the screen cap, but at least the pupil is animatable now.

Also, if anyone wants to give it a try to this tutorial, it's pretty easy and it has a good outcome:

Change of hair style

Something that was keeping me quite worried about the project was the "hair" of my alien.
The tentacle like that I had planned where turning out to be a problem for the kind of movement that I wanted to achieve.

On the render tests it was more than clear that they needed a lot of work. so I went up and made a skeleton to animate it. 

The way it was bending didn't get the kind of look that I wanted plus to get a decent animation by hand was going to be way to much work with probably poor results. 

I decided to go on another direction as the movement that I wanted was like a slow organic tentable movement as if they where under water or without gravity. So I experimented a little bit with dynamics. Now I havent played a lot with them so it was quite difficult to figure the values for mostly everything and even when I followed some tutorials I wasnt getting the results that I wanted, plus it was nearly impossible to see it real time so I had to be back rendering all the time to see the results. 

By the time I was at this point I noticed that this had already taken me out of my schedule to finish things on time, and that it was being more problematic than it was relevant. 

Despite the concept that I already had, I went on and changed for something more easy to handle, so with the help of mudbox I made this as the new "hair-style". My idea was to put a bone-like aureola behind it, but because of time constrains I'll have to see if I have time to add it later on.

Warehouse work and development

The original idea for the environment was to make it an attic where loads of unused robots where stored and that's when she would fin him. While developing this we decided to modify it into more of a ware house. A place where the robots are being made at the moment and there are prototypes everywhere.

When I was working on it on Autocad I started to notice that the scales where too simplistic and slightly realistic for the style that we were doing, so I split the place into two, a small attic like studio where the the first scene takes place.

This is an office type with a desk, chair, lamp and a few blueprints of some work. The place has wooden floor and nice wallpapers. On one side there's a metal door half way open where surveillance bot leads the girl to have a peek.
This leads to the second part of the scenario; a massive workshop like building that is under level of the previous room but at the same time it has a quadruple height ceiling. It is all surrounded by copper walls that have got rusted over time giving a multicolour shade.there are 4 main beams connected at the top and holding a balcony like there are several smaller pillars as support. Right in front of it, there a massive circular window, from which the main light comes in.

The plan is to have Albus lying there motionless and having this really strong light coming to him; this was with the porpoise of creating a really intense scene where the connection between the Albus and Tabitha is made.

Part of the emphasis is the hight of the ceiling also try's to remark on the importance of the bound of the scene and all I did was to try to create an environment that looks messy like a workhouse would be but still keeping a central focus on the character without getting lost in details.

Hydraulics

One of the important parts for Albus movements were the hydraulic pistons included in both legs and arm.
The idea is that despite his movements, for cartoonish as they might be, they needed to be constrained to each other at all time to keep this feeling of being a mechanic character. Matt gave me a good idea to aim constrain them one another and, on its own, it was working just fine. The problem came when I had to constrain those constrains to parts of geometry that where already bond to the rig.

I found this very useful video online that basically takes you through a good way of not only make functional pistons, but also how to "cheat" by making an infinite constrain between the master and slave parts of the hydraulic part.

Skeleton of Albus

Rigging was not such a bit task as the robot had a simple structure, but the problem began when I had to bind it to the geometry.
I was told to try a rigid binding as it could work best for robot like movements, but no matter how much I tried I just couldn't get my head around it.
I ended up going for a soft binding and it turned out to be just fine, as I just had to do be very specific with the weight painting to avoid having organic movements.
Probably the part that made it a bit difficult was the fact that the character was not model in a T pose so the influence between the joint in the arm and right leg was creating a bit of confusion, but the character doesn't have a full arm extended so not putting him on a T pose from the beginning was part of the plan.

After weight painting, the joints were working smoothly but I discovered that there were some issues when the elbow would bend above one point. By the time I realised this issue the project was ready to start animation and going back to fix this small issue was probably going to delay the whole process. We opted to just make a note next to the model to let them know where to be careful in case someone else was to work with it in the animation process. Luckily, the movements of Albus did not require to bend his elbow to that extend.

Skeleton and skin of an alien

So this is the part of the process that was the most complicated for me in an over all view. From the beginning having to think where the joints go sounds easy as we can reflect the joints that we have, but it is pretty easy to over look at some other movements that normally I wouldn't even consider as important (for arm roll and the clavicles for example).
At some point here I got left behind from the rest of the class as I understood something completely different in one lecture. Luckily I was able to catch up thanks to the video guides we had made.

After making the skeleton, we had to constrain them one another, think of a hierarchy in which the react in relation to the whole structure and identify key joints for certain movements. All this at the same time as making sure that everything was properly named and organized as any mistake at this point would be pretty dramatic and complicated to come back later on to fix it. After the joints where orient and parent constrained, we then moved to create some controllers or handles to avoid having to move the skeleton itself. Master control, jaw and a large number of NURBs circles where created and placed on position, making sure the pivot points were set on the appropriate joint.

The whole process itself was pretty intimidating, specially for the amount of detail that you have to put on. Also knowing that the next step was skin weight painting and that if anything was wrong with the rig, the only way to come back and fix it is to delete all work done in the weight skin process; now that put a lot of pressure to make everything right on the first go.

So after soft binding the skin to the rig, the big job of weight paint the skin come into place. This is basically to determine  how much influence each joint has over each vertex of the character. So it is a case of try and test; paint a bit, bend, see how react and modify according to the elasticity of the skin in relation of the deformation desire when animating. Long story short, it is hard work, and from this depends a lot of the final look of the character. This is why, after doing a big work on the weight skin painting it's really painful to find a problem with the rig that will cause you to unbind the skin, fix the skeleton, then bind it again and repeat the long process.

Albus Model

Finally starting with the modelling. I finished the final art work of him that helped me out to use it as a reference for the modelling stage. The reason why is on a blueprint form is because it is intended to be around the environment as a blueprint of his creation.

Making the model was a lot of fun. I think this is one of the part that I enjoyed the most, as is just eh idea of making something in the most poly-efficient and and that will eventually work with the rigging. 

Albus is compose of many many small parts, as any robot I assume. So I didn't combined them as he needed a more mechanical way of move and even thought we wanted a cartoon style, him bending like an organic character would look just wrong. 

This is the final model and a break down of its pieces. I did my best to keep him low poly as possible. but being a main character to the animation I probably could have used a bit more without compromising the rest of the scene. 

Creation of an Alien

So getting back into Maya, our exercises now is to model, UV map, rig and animate an alien based on a reference t pose that we all got.
We also got some pictures that gave us an idea of how a good topology should look like for this model (mainly because there's not one definite solution).

I think the hardest part for me is to actually begin. After losing the fear of making mistakes I pretty much modelled the half of the character without too much trouble.
There where a few places where I had to go over and over. I was trying my best to get my head around the junctions like elbows and knees where animating could become a problem if it wasn't done properly.
I suppose this is what scares me the most: Having done a lot of work just to find out that I've done something wrong and having to go back and redo it. More than laziness I believe is something irrational about insecurities. I hope I can get over that in the future, but at on the bright side, I think I'm paying more attention to many details as I go along and learning to spot mistakes in earlier stages. (I have to the take out the positive of EVERYTHING) 

After that I just mirrored the geometry (fix some minor issues with the crotch) and Voilà! we got a decent looking alien. It looks much better on the smooth version, but as long as it works along with the rigging the I'm happy about it.

After that and creating the bit of the inside of the mouth, I then moved to UV map it. Because of the Russian dolls project I feel a bit more familiar with UV mapping and I didn't struggle much other than splitting the head while maintaining the ratio of the eyes (for as bad as that sounds). 
It isn't mandatory to give it a texture in specific, as all that matters is to have a rigged and fully animated character by the end of this exercise, but I might give it a go just for the sake of it.