Unit 9: Adaptation - Night Car Low Model Complete

Hello All,

I am back to report the completion of my low model as I have done so for the Driver and will be doing for the Day Car. I have been slaving away to get the night car as good as possible and of course got a piece of Stage 3 concept from my initial texture exchange. The model is still to be painted again (with UV maps in place) and I have to replace some of my normal detail. These will also be done over the course of the weekend and hopefully complete by the Monday with any luck. Next week I want to be putting it all together with a rough background...

In other news I have been texturing up my Driver which is actually going quite well considering he was a worry last week. Suffice to say I will have a higher map for him and hopefully a successful result once I get the hang of occlusion baking. We are literally counting down the days now till we get a sigh of relief and the chance to take it easy. It will be nice to get cracking on with a few other things that I have planned over summer including work experience in a small games company really cannot wait for that... I could be working in games sooner then I thought!

Anyway enough waffle lets get down to the "Night" model.

I basically provided the same passes that I executed for the Driver mainly because I thought they were quite cool to see on the blog. We have the standard Shaded model, a version with a UV tiled grid to show seams and of course the wire done using contour rendering. These 3 image sequences run endlessly from a single 180 frame render from Maya. Of course you have to render it 3 times using the built in turntable function from Mayas Animation Tab. I'm sure everyone knows how to do this but I recommend it if not it is pretty easy...

I do also believe that I mentioned poly-grouping in another post and here are some visuals to help (image above). Basically there is a perspective and Orthographic view in ZBrush same as Maya just in-case people were wondering the difference. The poly-groups are essentially the same as the combine/separate tools in Maya they allow you to mask and separate parts of the model. You can then split them into sub tools and thus they can be coloured individually or altered individually. This is handy because you will not accidentally hit other parts of the mesh.

Next came my standard test on the model directly, although this shows my reject version as it was yet to have a UV on every tool of the car. The body of the car however is high subdivide (6) paint on a low poly model. This helps create the illusion that the model is of a higher poly count, of course normal maps go a ways to achieving this as well. Sadly you cannot see normal maps in ZBrush as they are just mostly a models subdivide 5-6 model. Either way this model has been completely mapped now I just have to get the paint onto everything followed by my normals.


The video above shows the low and high versions of the model, in this case you will notice extra detail as this is the model I had to scrap. The scrapping of this model was mainly because I thought the UVs were due to mess up when I ported it into ZBrush to separate it. However I have learned that it makes no difference to the UV maps I just have to export the maps and project them onto a Maya Model. This essentially means I am using ZBrush as a texturing tool and not as a modelling or rendering tool. Thankfully I know how to port out the maps its really easy...

Last but not least I thought I would demonstrate what I intend to do with some visual aid (image above). Basically in ZBrush you divide the quality of your mesh and add detail to the higher as it allows more range. You then bake the normal & texture maps from the higher model into your UV map and then port it to a program like Maya, this is where I intend to get my ambient occlusion map and bake that over my texture map in photo-shop using the multiply blending mode. This gives the illusion of depth of a model and the illusion of deformation. The camera then uses these maps to create the illusion of a high model onto a low.

I am not quite out of the woods as far as post its go but I think this has put a further dent in my work load and hopefully will allow me the confidence to push on. I am a little worried about the Maya exercises primarily because I want to prioritise my project. I will probably ask what the crack is with those... last year if I recall we got a week extra to create the Maya stuff at the end. I'm kind of hoping we are afforded the same deal this year because I am way behind on Maya. Anyway I think this post is pretty much complete. Hope everyone is having fun and not missing me too much :)

Take it easy!!
xXStItChXx