Unit 11: Major Project - Adult Barnabas Model Complete

Hello Everyone,

As I said over at the Polydoodle blog welcome to posting format Mark 2 which is code for a change of blog posting. This will mean that over on my personal blog I will now be doing my full length (fully boring) posts while over on the Polydoodle Blog I will be posting images with minimal text, this is likely due to my waffling ha-ha. Nah its just to make the studio blog more professional which I can relate too, I doubt anyone reads my random ranting on these blogs anyway. I only wish it had happened a couple of posts back so I could do my entire Major this way (people know that I am a total stickler about harmony DOH).

Anyway this post is about the Adult Barnabas as I have finally completed the model so we can get cracking on the rigging Phase. After this post I will probably be MIA for a week or so while I get these bad boys rigged. I don't want a multitude of posts distracting me I am just simply going to record a time lapse so you can see the entire journey (like the videos of me creating Barnabas, Benjamin, etc.) I am prioritizing the development of this project over the little bits for now but should there be time once I have everything rigged I will sit down and knock up the little extras that I love ha-ha.

Anyway lets get down to the post at hand here shall we...

The image above shows a couple of turntable render passes of the Barnabas model and I am pretty satisfied with the result. Apologies if they are not very clear I had to redact it in size a little so it wouldn't invade the page and break my safe 500 pixel width post layout. I know this post will probably be criticized for being wasteful but I cannot help it I love my text with images dammit. Anyway back to the work at hand, the render passes as you no doubt have guessed are shaded, UV and wire showing the texture placement, geometry alignment and overall look of the finished model.

The next image is yes you guessed it moving Barnabas into ZBrush for a post model play. I generally do this with all of my models as it gives me a chance to see how the model and UV maps are working. This is what leads me into doing a bit of test poly-painting one of which I have posted at the bottom of this post. Its just nice to see how the model looks with a bit of color, you have to bear in mind up until this point I only ever see the model in grey or grid textures which look funny. The key reason for doing this is to make sure there is no stretching on the UV maps, if its really bad you have to go back and fix it.


The video above is a subdivision and poly-count investigation into the workings of Barnabas and Benjamin on the same scene at different subdivision levels. This is handy for knowing the limitations of a scene for render and/or scene functionality. I tend to try not to push the sub divisions of a character too high as it makes Maya more sluggish and can take ages to rig, UV and render. Its usually best if you rig and UV and scale the sub divides by 1 if at all. In my opinion its best to keep it to the lowest until you are rendering, even then you can use Mental Ray to simulate the divide why keeping the view port low.

Last but not least a little poly-paint test within ZBrush to identify any stretching on the Barnabas model surface. From the tests I am pleased to say that everything seems to be evening out quite well. The UV's cover the model quite nicely and there is *drum roll* NO STRETCHING YIPPEE! There have been a couple of discussions about the texture style of the final model but that is entirely up to the texturing team of Sammy and Chrissie. Of course I will put in my two cents. Anyway all in all this model is looking pretty nice from all angles now the next step is RIGGING!

Well this is my first post returning my massive content to my main blog. Over the next few weeks I will be solely rigging so as I mentioned in the opener you will not be hearing much from me but I will update you when I am ready with a flurry of goodies. As much as it pains me to post primarily image content over on the Polydoodle Blog It does make sense that we keep the blog as professional as possible and hearing me rant over my personal feats across walls of text can get tiring. Anyway I think that is me, I will post our audio logs for the past 3 weeks on the Polydoodle blog a little later. Ill see you all in the funny pages!

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx