Week 17: More Meshing About

Next week will be the final week of this Container City project and at the moment I feel like it is the calm before the storm. The main texturing is now done and I am creating extra assets to help populate the level; I also tried some Z-Brush this week but the results haven't really blown me away, I'll go over the outcome a little later.

Now that the texturing is finished on some of the assets, I can at last show off some of the work I've been doing over the last 2 weeks. I also feel a little more comfortable with the PBR system now, as I think I have captured some good likeness in the materials I am trying to simulate.

Below are a wooden beam and a generic stone block, which we'll be using to help break up some of the repetitive walls and also hide any unwanted seams or holes in the level. My aim for the wood was to have it look extremely weathered and worn, which I think I have done quite well thanks to an old park bench I found. The Altar I decided to create out of modular pieces, this way we can expand the design or size of the thing if needed and can also use some of the pieces elsewhere in the level.

I used Z-Brush on the altar and while some parts came out quite nice, such as the stone disk, other parts came out poorly, like the main building block is either missing the detail or looks oddly burnt, as you can see from the picture above. I however do think I've nailed the stone texture across the altar.

The logs had a problem with the texture looking repeated, as I can not stand easily noticeable, repeating textures so I had to readjust some of the unwrapping; without the use of Z-Brush I think I managed to capture the gnarled look of an old log.

I also had fun trying to imply a damper surface on the bottom of these stone pillars, where maybe dirt and water have been splashed about more. This isn't everything I have modeled, as there are a few smaller things that use the same texture space but there isn't much point in showing them. I am now making a few more assets to help fill some of the spaces, like altar seats, bones and a wall ornament, with some other ideas up my sleeves too. I just hope I can get this all done by the end of next week.

Week 11: Character Duo Post-Mortem

Just before we break up for Christmas our dichotomous character duos are finished and handed in. Just like with the turret project, this blog post will cover the entire process, what worked  and what didn't work.

Concepting

The entire project started with me just thinking of existing duos, and then making a pinterest board out of it. While I was doing this I was also using my notebook to think of ideas of my own duo; this was a mistake but I didn't realize it at the time. By picking a theme and style this slowly began to pigeon-hole my thought process which eventually led me to a potentially stale design.

I had eventually made a choice on the theme and began to design the first character, which was my second mistake. I should have designed both characters together. I struggled with the initial shape generation of this character which is why I jumped straight into sketching heads.

With one character done, I began to think about the second character. I knew I wanted this character to be a larger, protector of the child, yet not combat focused. I was confused on how to go about generating ideas for this character, so I tried what worked with the turret, a bash kit. I grabbed shapes that I liked from the moodboard to get my bash kit going.

It was at this point that I had to present my concepts. I had only one character complete with a small selection of silhouettes for the other character. The end result of the presentation was that the silhouettes are far more interesting than the final character, and while I liked the child soldier, was the idea really pushing myself out of my comfort zone? I decided to scrap the child and restart with the silhouettes.

Post-Presentation #1

I pulled more shapes from the moodboard and just began piecing them together to make interesting shapes. I didn't think about the duo or the theme at this point, I just wanted interesting silhouettes and eventually I had a good selection to chose from; then I paired them up into interesting duos to try and get some good dichotomy going. The silhouette I picked had elements that reminded me of feudal Japan, with a headdress and lanterns so I began researching the theme on pinterest while trying to push the idea within the silhouette.

I picked the duo I liked the most, which was an older, larger guardian figure and a younger girl, who clearly travel together. With a couple picked I pushed forward with the design process until I had orthographics.

Modelling

As we only had to model one character I chose the big guy as he seemed a lot more interesting with his huge backpack. I decided to go for a 8,000 tri-limit, which was larger than we're used to but not completely insane. It felt like a comfortable size. I modeled it with Z-Brush in mind, learning from my mistakes on the turret but this also tripped me up, as I found out later, I didn't focus on the overall model enough, my mind was to focused on the sculpting.

Base model complete I took it into Z-Brush and began sculpting. This time I actually had fun with Z-Brush, as I wasn't learning it for the first time. There's still plenty to learn but I got stuff done! I then baked it all out, added the extra arm and the other lanterns and then dropped it into UE4. I still needed to the pose character but I was getting ready to begin texturing.

I had to do another presentation for critique at this stage, and unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan, which is something you don't want to happen with only a week left. The overall critique was that my model didn't capture the likeness of my concept. While my concept Big Guy had a caring look, the model looked quite creepy and his overall igloo shape was lost. I agreed mostly but I just wish I could have been told earlier.

Post-Presentation #2

I decided to remake the model low-poly. I am still unsure if this was a good idea but I did manage to model and texture both characters and hopefully their quality is still to standard. Both characters come to only 2,600 tris which is a significant drop from 8,000 for one model. It was a challenge to try and capture the characters in a low-poly limit.

About 1,300 each

 As I was now very short on time I decided to skip Z-Brush, but i did try and go for a painterly texture sheet which was a bit different than I am used to. When I started the guy I had to find my feet for the style but I think by the time I had reached the girl I had found my footing. I do however need a lot more practice with skin as I think my faces have come off a little flat, and certain other elements such as the hair could also use some more practice.

The metalness, roughness and AO are all in 1 RBG texture sheet

Final Outcome

I am happy with the final characters but I am always wondering if the higher poly version would have been better. Due to the characters low-poly count I made the textures quite small too, which means that these characters probably wouldn't be viewed up close. I had also made some mistakes with the unwrapping, I should have had the facial features take up a lot more space over other parts of the meshes, like the legs or bags for example, then these characters might have been usable up close.

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.

Week 7: Turret Post-Mortem

The turret project is almost complete, with the hand-in tomorrow and I am beginning to notice a common theme between projects now; things just are not going to plan. This week has left me once again feeling like I have taken a swift kick between the legs. I was also going to use this post to display all my awesome knowledge I gained in blueprint, sadly blueprint is harder than it looks and I struggled heavily with it but I will show some of the things I managed to figure out.

The Turret Design Process

The early stages of this project was fantastic for me, for once I had a great way to generate ideas and it was actually producing good results. I spent the time iterating on the design while also trying to incorporate my chosen splicing objects. Keeping the entire theme and style random was also a good way for me to explore areas of design that I would have never thought of.

Initial idea generation

I maybe could have spliced the objects into my design much earlier to get even better results but this just meant I had another iteration chance. I became stuck when I reached the final 3, I needed to start imagining these flat silhouettes as 3D objects but I couldn't do it, so I had to take a design into a 3D format so I could make a solid final decision. 

Final concept into orthographics

To keep on track I decided to start the model earlier than normal. I wanted to try and create a nice final 2D piece, showing what the turret would have looked like in its environment but I thought I would set that as an end goal incase anything went wrong. It's a good job I did. I also skipped the entire colouring process in a bid to get ahead with the modelling side, I got away with doing it this once I think; I won't be doing it again though.

3DS Max & Z-Brush

This is where things began to go wrong. I made the base model with a few hundred tris to spare and then I got into Z-Brush, all the earlier time saving was because I knew I wanted to use Z-Brush. I spent a few days in tutorials trying to figure everything out and I eventually left Z-Brush with some okay results for baking. The entire process is still a bit confusing though so I am going to note it down for future reference below.

Z-Brush sculpts

My Z-Brush Process

1. Create base model in Max, making sure the normals and smoothing groups are all okay.
2. Unwrap it.
3. Divide the base model into separate attachments, these will become sub-tools in Z-Brush which will make things easier.
4. Make a copy of the base model and make it high poly! Use edge-loops and turbosmooth (with the smoothing groups option).
5. Check the normals again (This could have been one of my big problems).
6. Export the model as an .obj and import it in Z-Brush.
7. Split the tool to create subtools, which makes things so much easier.
8. Before starting sculpting on a subtool Dynamesh it then divide, the number of divides depend on the object size (eg. a belt buckle won't need that many divides)
9. Once done, export the tool. Use the Decimation Master Zplugin if the tool has an insane amount of tris.
10. Import back into Max and bake!

Baking everything down is when it all broke. The bakes for whatever reason had huge, noticeable seams. I spent days trying to fix the problem, I must have baked each thing at least 15 times over trying little tweaks. Part of the problem I now realize was due to some poor unwrapping. I had the great idea to mirror as much as I could to increase texture space which lead to some very clear bump seams, so I redid the parts I could and hid a few others with geometry, like I should have from the beginning. The final model still has seams but the most noticeable ones are now hidden.

Texturing

My original schedule was now out the window, but I gave myself enough time to texture the model properly. Not doing a colour scheme earlier had slowed me down in places but overall things went smoothly until it came to dropping everything in engine.

Final 1024 texture sheets

The large grey empty gap was meant to be for the glass bottle, used with an alpha to get the bottle label to show up. When in engine however, the translucent option broke my model by making all polygons to appear flipped or something similar. I made the decision to use a multi-sub, with a glass material being used for the second slot, this meant that my label and the bottle holder wouldn't be visible but I thought it looked much better than an ugly grey block.

I also placed the metalness and emissive textures in the RGB space to save resources, but looking at it now I could have thrown the roughness in there too.

UE4 Screengrabs

UE4 Material Help

Glass

Quick bump map increase

Simple Glow

Finishing Off

Originally I wanted a couple of days to mess around with Blueprint but in the end I just had one, where I manged to get both barrels to emit the firing particle and eject a cartridge. I couldn't figure out how to get the second barrel to actually fire or how to make the small crank rotate. Spending days staring at blueprint and trying to find tutorials has left me quite exhausted. Maybe just before hand-in I can quickly grab some help.

We had also been tasked with creating a promotional poster for our turret. I was a little nervous in creating this as I didn't know how much of my graphic design knowledge has actually stuck around in my head but I am really happy with the final result. I tried to keep with the theme of late 19th Century Russian by injecting a small amount of constructivism into the filigree.

Once again I am feeling a little underwhelmed with the end results after 3 weeks. Maybe I need an ambition check once and a while to scale myself back, I am pleased with how the turret looks but when parts of it don't work how I want it has left me dissatisfied. I also had to heavily cut back on the 2D side which is something I am not pleased about, I still might try and paint the turret in an environment, even if it doesn't get marked it will still be great practice. As for the next project, bring it on! What else could go wrong?!

Week 6: Z-Brush

I mentioned last week that I wanted to get into Z-Brush, well, the last few days that is exactly what I have done and after a few stressful hours I have finally managed to create something that I am happy with.

The week had me start with finishing my base model from the week before and testing it in engine. I wanted to make sure it worked before I moved any further and thankfully it works fine with the skeleton. I will need to make adjustments though, like making it fire from both barrels. I have then spent the rest of the week fighting inside Z-Brush as I tried to get use to the unique way the program handles itself.

Final turret design

Turret base mesh - 5,000 tris

I found that many of the tutorials for Z-Brush like to focus on sculpting a super-awesome rock dinosaur robot and the process behind that, which is great for when I'm ready to tackle something like that but at the moment is pretty useless. Simpler, beginner tutorials appear to be pretty difficult to find. This just slowed me down, as I began smashing buttons and trying things out myself and eventually after a number of failed attempts I began to have positive results.

This might actually look like I know what I am doing in Z-Brush

There were plenty of tutorials videos on  the actual baking down process though, which was great. Below is the bump map of my various bakes. The massive gaps are because I didn't do high poly bakes for every part of my turret, these will be filled in with bumps from textures. Being new to Z-Brush I wanted to keep things a little simple.

Next week is when I plan on getting the turret working in engine properly and I will be making a bigger blog post about it, where I'll be noting down everything I pick up on to make it work. This will hopefully serve as a good resource for me if I ever need to reuse something from this project. Below I have linked the final look of the Viking room we created, as a group, during the first week back. I have been meaning to post it up but every time I have forgotten about it! I concepted the bench, modeled the hog's head, unwrapped the shield and textured the barrel! I also made the rug as an extra. For now that is me done, I need a break from this turret and more importantly Z-Brush!

Reef Character.

The next character project was to create a character based off the word Reef, the character also had to be a humanoid but apart from them 2 criteria we had free reign.

Reef

1. a ridge of rocks or sand, often of coral debris, at or near the surface of the water.
2. Mining. a lode or vein.

I had no idea that the word Reef was also the name for a lode or vein, so already I should have researched the word at the start of the project, because my mind went straight to the coral reefs. Luckily I learnt a lot during the previous character project so I made fewer mistakes overall and had a much more enjoyable experience this time around.

Research

We started by looking at existing work and also by doing our own research into the subject. After an hour or 2 I had gathered a good selection of inspiration, a whole range of sea characters and interesting marine life. The main thing I think about when I think of a reef is colour, with all the vibrant coral and fish, so I really wanted to try and get some of that in my mood boards.

Silhouettes

I had a good starting point with all the reference but I needed to turn this into some actual ideas, the way to do this is with silhouettes but before I started my own I looked for some examples online and I found a Feng Zhu video which really helped me.

Once I had done a few the ideas really started to flow, not all of them are great but at this point it doesn't matter, they only take a few minutes each. I'm not sure why but I gave most of them weapons, when I could have imagined them in any situation possible, which is something I should consider for any future open briefs.

Still following the Feng Zhu video I selected a few of my favourites and worked into them more, looking back I could have selected a few more, like number 4 or 11 as they both stand out from the others.

Design Iterations

Working into the silhouettes was again quite a quick process, as half the work was done. I do think I made these images a little dark, they could have used a levels adjustment but they definitely flesh out the original silhouettes effectively. Off these I chose what character to push forward with, I really liked the idea of the semi-opaque, jellyfish oracle. I didn't move forward with the oracle because of the difficulties of painting the transparent material, and her having to be underwater. I was not confident with painting this so I went with the middle-left, a sea serpent warrior.

Using some quick reference to make sure my anatomy was correct (I hope!) I sketched out variations for this sea serpent warrior. My idea was that these creatures wouldn't be able to craft metal due to being underwater, therefore the majority of their weapons and armor would be scavenged from us or from the environment.

I merged my favourite parts into a final design and added values so I could get ready to play with some colour choices. Colour theory is a huge weakness of mine but I think I have just enough of an understanding to have a go at making a good selection of colours, without making them seem ridiculous. With the final design done I could also complete the orthographics for this character.

The only thing left for me to do now was to create the final piece, I am still not comfortable with my digital painting abilities but I've done as much as I can to make the process easier. I made sure to do some quick thumbs before I started the final and gather reference if I needed, below is a quick WIP of my Photoshop file, showing some of the reference I used.

I started my image with values and added the colour later as I am not confident enough with painting straight in colour. Overall I think this is my best digital painting I've done but I think it lacks some of the expressiveness and mystery of a more professional painting, at the moment I think I am painting far too clinically. To finish off this painting I adjusted the saturation, levels and added a subtle texture in hopes of binding it all together.

Sculpture

Like the 2D side of this project, I learnt from my mistakes during the last character creation task for the sculpting too. This time I made sure to make a sturdier frame so my model could stand up, unfortunately it was still slightly unbalanced but I didn't need to man-handle the model as much.

This time I had to attempt to sculpt some anatomy, and I couldn't hide the facial features behind a beard. I found this a real challenge and it really put my anatomy knowledge to the test.

Compared to the "Interesting Character" project I had a lot more fun with this task, I think this is because I made sure to not repeat the mistakes I made and I also done research to help me improve in the areas that I needed. I found the final 2D piece a little annoying but this is because of a lack of practice I think, something no amount research can improve. I must do more paintings!

Interesting Character Design.

The course has now shifted into looking for at the creative processes involved in making good designs, the first project was to create an interesting character using the people of Leicester as inspiration. The end results would be an orthographic and a clay sculpture.

To begin with I went out into Leicester again and sketched the different people, I'm use to this now after doing so many for one of the previous assignments. I was on the look out for anyone who looked a bit different, and I know for certain Leicester has a few characters who like to roam about.

After spending a few hours drawing across a couple of different days I definitely found a good selection of people, the wet weather didn't help though, most people were in coats.

During one of the nights I also gathered reference from the internet of characters. To me an interesting character doesn't need an over the top outfit or suit of armor, instead they could be plain clothed. Look at Brad Pitt & Edward Norton in Fight Club, both have every day cloths on yet their characters are fantastic, or there's the main character from Memento, again a normal looking guy yet his various tattoos tell a completely different story.

The next thing I did was take a small selection of my quick sketches and reproduced them to a higher quality. Maybe this was a bad idea because this could have cornered my mind into thinking about these characters too safely which will be apparent soon, but I had fun doing these nonetheless.

Out of these sketches I then tried to shape them into an interesting character but I feel I didn't push them far enough. I thought about turning a homeless looking guy into an almost The Last of Us survivor [1] but looking back this was way to easy. I really should have played around more to see if anything more unique could have been done, obviously I did not want to throw tentacles on him but I could have pushed it a lot further. 

I tried another character, this time a Big Issue seller and the idea of a Rorschach like person came to mind, hiding in plain sight with his costume in his bag but I quickly ditched this idea as I felt I was really bringing anything new to the design. Towards the end of the project I saw something in one of the sketches I done, the large coat collar around one of the women reminded me of some of the crazy neck ornaments some the African tribes wear and this sparked the design below of a Village Priestess or something, turning the handbag into a basket of shrunken heads. I only wish I had thought of this early.

In the interest of time I pushed forward with the Apocalypse survivor guy, thinking of various outfits. I again don't think I explored this enough, with my characters looking more like he's gained a new piece of equipment rather than a different design entirely. I tried to think of what it would be like to survive during an apocalypse, clothes would be torn or broken, things would be missing and as for weapons, they'd probably be rare, especially guns and ammo. I also should have used reference for base figure!

I dived straight into doing the orthographic without trying any colour variations and again I should have used reference for the figure.

The entire process of designing a character is a new thing for me and I without a doubt made a number of mistakes through out this project. The next character project that I've already done (I'm slow at posting this stuff!) has benefited from these mistakes and I'm much happier with the whole work flow and I think this has without a doubt improved the quality of my work. Next up though is the sculpture for this character!

My experience with sculpting is very limited so being asked to make an entire character was a bit scary. The only thing I knew was that I needed Sculpey and some modelling wire for the frame. I looked for videos on creating a frame because I have never actually created one.

As you can see my frame wasn't the best as it couldn't stand up by itself, this was a huge problem later on when it came to doing finer details. I now understand the importance of a good solid frame and won't be making the same mistake again!

Once I got to use how the Sculpey handled i really enjoyed modelling, if my model could stand up I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Adding nice details then to only flatten them out a few minutes later was a real pain. I am about to make another sculpture and again the mistakes I made with this character will help improve it, I will be making a good solid frame so I don't have to man-handle my model every 10 seconds.

This entire project was a huge learning process for me, learning about designing characters in the 2D space and 3D. I am pleased with the final outcome of both but I feel the design could have had more thought put into it but I think this is to do with my process more than anything. The best thing I have taken from this project are the mistakes that I made, because for the next character project I didn't make them again, leading to a much better end result, I'll post up the other character soon (hopefully)!

References & Notes
[1] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/screenshots/TheLastofUs/TLOU_Gamescom_ConceptArt_1.jpg