Week 10: A seaming pile of...

Once again I had a problem with my seams after doing the baking, but luckily I managed to figure part of the problem out. Despite the title, my frustration this week doesn't come from UV seams but from, ironically, the dichotomous views of the different lecturers/teachers on the course.

The week started off with me continuing on with the model, I had finished with the Z-Brush sculpt and was really happy with the outcome, and was now baking it. The seam problem I had with the turret popped up again, all the preparation work I had done with the normals didn't appear to have fixed anything. After some googling and tinkering I had noticed that 3DS Max was importing the bump files in with an increase in gamma, linked with the already high standard gamma it was making my normals look way over the top. This didn't fix the seaming completely but it did make it less noticeable.

It was just as I was finishing the sculpt when my work was looked over and given 2 thumbs up. There were some tweaks that were suggested, like relaxing the hand and adding in the other lantern that I knew I had to do, this was all going to be done after the baking. There were also a few other pointers that I agreed with and took them on board too. Everything was going well so I baked it, tweaked the model and then dropped it into engine to get ready for texturing.

We had a final presentation to do and this is what I had to show, as I had not got around to texturing or rigging the character yet. It was during the presentation that a completely different view point came in, mentioning that my model hadn't captured the concept. Parts of the critique I agreed with, like for example the face on the model is quite menacing, while the guy's face on the concept it actually pretty caring and rounded. At the end it was suggested that I restart the model with a lower poly count. I just wish this was mentioned earlier and not with a week left.

After working hard over the last few days I am now back were I left off, except this time with 2 characters and a much, much smaller tri count. The original tri count was 8,000, now there's only 2,600 between the both characters.

I took inspiration from the low-poly TF2 models

I have yet to decide if restarting completely was a good idea, I think when both characters are textured I'll be able to make a better decision, but the more I look at the pair together the more I prefer it; I can always finish the higher poly version during my spare time. For now I need to focus on texturing them both for Wednesday.