Alpha Presentation

This Tuesday we gave our Alpha presentation, If I am honest I felt it could have gone a lot better, but did not go terribly. I made a quite substantial mistake by using a version of UDK that was newer than the Uni build, meaning we had to rely on screen grabs, a lot of which we of an older version of the set-up. However, one thing I notice was that we actually seem to be a bit further alone our production plan than other people, this however may be due to being one of the only groups, and that the scene lacks the complexity of other students.

For the presentation I actually managed to get my characters posed, and had a lighting and post processing set up done. This was a lot of work, but I think it was definitely worth it, as it gave a lot more depth to the scene than It would have had if I had just placed "A" posed characters in a scene without any decent lighting set up.

The next milestone is mid January now, this is the milestone for the final complete version of the scene. I am going to carry on at a steady pace until that date, but will probably slow down from the pace I have been going at, as to dedicate time to other modules that need some love.

Heres a few shots of the scene as it was for the presentation:

Head unwrapping and retopology

Work is continuing at a steady pace, this week I have focused on the retopology of the head mesh, and getting basic textures on it for the alpha presentation.  I have come across a few small problems, which have been rectified in a somewhat makeshift way. The main one is to do with unwrapping heads, this process can be done very easily by simply drawing a seam in Roadkill and letting it works it magic. However, I find the resulting unwrap is useable, but the texture space is not actually used to its fullest, and the distribution of UV's although pretty even, is not ideal. The way I see it, the best way to layout a head would be to have the face taking up a proportionately larger space than the normally do, and the face should have as little stretching on it as possible. I am going to talk to my tutors about this and see if they can offer any tips on how to best layout a head unwrap.

Here is a screenshot of the heads UV sheet at the moment, this will be changed after alpha, but at the moment it will do.

The next thing was the texturing, as this is a model of Steve Buscemi's head, It needs landmark parts of his face in the texture. This is very hard to do without being able to magically travel back in time to the set of the film and take reference images of him. The way I plan to tackle this is to work with a few different techniques. Firstly, I am going to put together a poly painted version of the texture, this will be a good starting point for colours and shading, I will then overlay some real skin and hair textures, and finally put AO passes onto the texture, hopefully these techniques together will give me something that resembles Steve Buscemi, without actually having any pictures to take textures from.

For the Alpha, I have thrown together a relatively quick poly paint, and projected some skin detail, this will not be the final texture. The normal maps and AO passes still have some artifacts, but I don't think its worth fixing this as they will be reprojected when I re-unwrap this at a later date anyway.

This Tuesday we have our Alpha presentation, for that date, I will hopefully have 2 posed characters, and have sorted a good lighting setup in UDK.

Baking?... Is this a 3D model, or a Pie!?

The time has come to start baking. Unfortunately I am not baking delicious cakes, but instead normal maps. This is a process that I still feel that I need more practice at. At first glance normal baking seems simple - Insert High Poly, Insert low poly, press button, hey presto.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be that simple. There are more factors involved when baking out normal maps for a character model. I use a bit of software called xnormal, this software takes a high poly model that would be practically impossible to import into maya, and then projects its details onto a low poly models UV sheet. However I have found out that this isnt as simple as loading in the whole model of each and hitting go. I have had to split the models into sections, and then bake the map for that section, for example the Shirt is one object. This gives much better normal maps, but also takes a lot of time.

So, I got the first pass of the normal maps for the whole body model done, here is the sheet:

I then started to lay down a first pass on the textures. This is a rather un-detailed pass, just an ambient occlusion and a few material patterns overlayed. I also discovered that using the green layer of the normal map can help add detail to a texture.

Here is the texture so far:

This is what they look like in action on the model:

There are a few re-bakes of the normal maps that need to be done, but I think that this level of detail on the texture will do for the alpha presentation on the 16th. By then I need to have Buscemi's head retopologised, UV'd and a first texture pass done, the poses done and have it placed in udk. I am on track for getting this done, and might have even got the sculpt of Harvey Keitel's head started.