Well I am a man of my word, I am here to post up the textured low poly version of my "Driver" for this project. I still have yet to do the Stage 3 concept but that is a mere fly in the ointment as I now have the version that will be the game asset. Most of my time was spent making sure the normal maps were tight in the key places. I have also been trying to come to grips with folds and wrinkles in clothing as I wanted my texture maps to be as accurate as possible. This meant I spent a lot of time texturing and then re-texturing just to make sure the folds made sense...
I am pleased to say that I am at a place where I am happy with the model to show it to the masses (whoever they may be). Please just be delicate with your opinions I put a lot of hours in on this guy as I knew he would be the key thing about this project. I kept the painterly style recommended by Phil and Alan in our Crit taking the cue from my Night Car also. I did this by starting with a projection map of the Jacket, from there I managed to fill the entire Jacket. I moved onto the trousers and beyond there after... I got a few videos but again I didn't record everything... sometimes the videos don't save properly so you have to be careful...
Anyway I will now do the big unveil of my 3952 poly Driver.
I am doing the same kind of thing that I did for the Night car textured post. The image above (Driver 37) shows my 3952 poly Driver with ray traced shadows. A white spotlight with a drop off rate and slightly higher intensity is what illuminates the scene. The render is from Mental Ray (as are they all - Maya Software makes normals look horrible) with a production 720p quality. The mesh as a slight ambient glow on it but the diffuse is at 100% for a full range of colour. Believe it or not that mesh is under 4000 poly... I'm still having a hard time believing it... It looks higher!!!
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The videos above show some of the development steps for the Driver in ZBrush. Particularly me projecting an image I drew onto his Jacket. Then the blending of the Jacket which eventually went all over the mesh (with the exception of the face). Just for good measure there are the final touches I knocked up on his individual hair strands. For those of you that do not know the point of the separate strands I will briefly explain... Hair stands can be given alphas and made partially invisible... If you have ever seen a game characters hair move in game its actually planes with paint and alphas on strips of geometry placed on the head of the character.
Next are of course my UV tiles now filled with Beautiful textures exported from ZBrush straight out into texture maps. The normal map is exported separately requiring me to clone the texture before exporting it out. My Driver model was actually in pieces so I had to export each individual tool and place the UVs together to make one big map. For those of you that do not know what these panels mean... The UV is just the polygonal grid to map texture coordinates. The 50/50 is a screen of the UV on top of my final textures. The DIF is my poly-paint on its own and the NRM are my normal maps that trick everyone into believing the mesh is higher poly... when it isn't.
Last but not least you have the final turnaround of my Driver he is lit a little differently then the night car mainly because ambient lights washed out his texture. I wound up using 2 spot lights one in front and one behind. I tried using one but it didn't show the poly paint on his back so well. I didn't project that detail onto his back for it not to be appreciated here. I am personally amazed at the result here, there has been a lot of soul searching for this guy to look good at a lower level. As you can see though the painterly style has been adopted on all of his geometry!! He even has stubble bumps on his face :)
The main problem areas of the mesh were of course on the trousers, I had to learn quite a bit about drapery for his clothes folds to feel right. This mesh was not an easy feat and took ages mainly because of the clothing. His face was the first thing I painted along with the hair. The gloves were a last minute thing just before the Hair was sculpted. Its just a different paint mixture but damn do they look good. There's no surprises that I would take careful consideration to my Driver, everyone knows by now how much I love characters ha-ha... Anyway I think that's it for this post.
Over & Out,
xXStItChXx
Very Nice :)
ReplyDeleteVery nice indeed, Stitch!
ReplyDelete