Character modeling and texturing

Character modeling and texturing Making of

Basemesh • Boxmodeling • Imageplane to get right proportions • Quads • ~7000 tris • Trying not to get to much into topology at this stage

Zbrush basesculpt • Blocking out propotions using claytubes • Looking at reference matrial of bodybuilders and anatomy books

Re-topologizing • Before re-topologizing i did a quick rig with the setup machine to see where i would have problems, but the only real problem was that i needed to add some loops around the knees and elbows. • I used Nex , other alternatives would be maya live, zbrush or topogun.

Re-topologizing • In zbrush i imported the new mesh and subdivided it to the same level as the basesculpt, then added it as a subtool and projected the detail on to the new mesh

Rigging • I´ve rigged using the setup machine because its so fast and gives me good control and ability to change proportions if needed. I painted quick skin weights just to be able to figure out a pose for the charachter • I´ve also used transpose in zbrush to make minor changes, but unless you have already decided a pose it´s faster to test with a rigged character

Trying out different poses on the rigged charachter

Sculpting • Looking at reference material, pictures, video and anatomy books • I mostly use clay tubes brush, and the standard with small alpha

Sculpting • I often use alphas to create finer details • Custom tileable alphas are easy to make just create a square sized document and paint.To offset use the tilde key (but in swedish keybords you use ö, that took me a while to figure out).then use grab doc in the alpha palette. • If you use other alphas created from photos you might want to tweak midvalue, radial falloff and play around with the alpha adjustment curve, all in the alpha palette • The standard brush with dragrect is a good way to apply the aplha details to the mesh, and also for texturing

Decimation master • I used decimation master(zbrush) a lot in the beginning, it does a great job of keeping detail att lower polycounts and this alowed me to start lighting and shading in maya without extracting displacement and setting all that up. I could also start texturing with polypainting and a temporary automatic uvset(auv tiles) and the renders where fast.

Lightning/shading tests

Lightning/shading/texturing • I used a couple of area lights with decay • I also changed the gamma to 0.455 in render globals>quality>framebuffer to work linear. This gave me problems with normal map generated in zbrush so I did them as open exr:s in Xnormal instead. • The displacement was generated in zbrush as 32bit tif floating and converted to metal rays .map format (set up in maya with alpha gain 2.2 and alpha offset -1.1). I also used the mental ray subdivision aproximation editor (and turned feature displacement off for the mesh.I used a script by Scott Spencers(can be downloaded from zbrushcentral.com) to convert the subdivision approximations from CCMesh to subdivision surface to get correct displacement. • Skin shading was done with misss_fast_skin • Textures where created in zbrush and photoshop via zapplink

Hair • For the hair i used shave and a haircut for maya • I had to render it out with separate lightning with spotlights and with the shavebuffer, but if you have a proper workstation i would try the mentalray hair prims. • The cast shadows from the hair i faked in fusion by blurring a copy of the hair, make it black and multiply it under the real hair.

Hardsurface models • Everything started from primitives • To get nice edges, I mostly use the smooth preview(3) and if i want harder edges i add loops, use the crease tool or bevel • If it´s more simple shapes or you need to keep your polycount down in the scene, i use mia_roundcorners

Character modeling and texturing