Protagonist - Posing

The protagonist will only be viewed in the menu screen of the game, when the player clicks Enter the camera will zoom in to her head to suggest the player is playing as the protagonist. So what I want to do with the model is pose it lying down with a slight breathing animation which will loop. It was a bit tricky trying to pose her within a animation layer as all the constraints interfered as I tried to pose her lying down. Had to rotate the model onto it's side out of the animation and then pose her limbs with it turn on.

This is how it turned out, now that the model is rigged I may animate it walking for use in future versions of Rove where the protagonist will be a visible character controller.

Protagonist - Texturing

As I had to texture skin with the lost once before, I tried to produce a better skin texture for this model again to show my prowess at texturing. Using a few different photos off human skin, I made a few skin stencils in photoshop before stencilling them on in Mudbox, I then exported that texture back into photoshop to adjust the colours and add a bit of shading as well as the lips and eyebrows. I also produced a really nicely detailed opacity map for the gown which doesn't show up well in 3DS max viewport but works really well in unity which you will get to see later. For now heres the viewport screen:

Protagonist - Problem with Baking

After I re-topologised both models in Topogun I baked them separately and imported both low poly's with normal maps applied. I lined up the verts of the feet objects to the vert positions of the botton of the leg from the body object and attached the two meshes together. My plan at this point was to bake the two normal maps to new uv coordinates and smooth the normals between the feet and the bottom of the leg but I had a lot of difficulty with the way max rendered out the bumps in the end I was left with terrible seams on every part of the model so after a while I decided to take that new mesh into mudbox to sculpt over again so that it would have feet and it all would blend in nicely.

Here's the new sculpt, along with the feet I made some changes to a few things I didn't like about the first sculpt such as the width of the shoulders being to masculine and softening the face and chin to make her look more like a woman.


The uv maps for the last model were pretty bad as well so this time around a paid a lot of attention to unwrapping and tried my best to utilize as much uv space as possible. Here is the new UV map:

Protagonist - Sculpt

For the protagonist I used the base human mesh to sculpt from in Mudbox. I wanted this model to be the evidence of the amount I've learnt during this project, so I spent longer than I usually do on the sculpt. The only thing wrong with the sculpt is the feet as the base mesh didn't have toes so it was pretty difficult to add them on, what I planned on doing was making another sculpt of a foot from my own base mesh and then adding it onto the body in 3DS max.

And below is the new foot sculpt I made from a base mesh I created in 3Ds max.

Protagonist - Concept

The protagonist is the woman who looses her son in the house fire, she has suffered from schizophrenia for years and dealt well but the incident sends her into a relapse. The game is set inside her hallucination and the characters and environments are based on her emotions. The concept is to have her in a gown with no shoes to give the feel of vulnerability you feel with no protective layers on outside (such as barefooted).

This character only appears for a short time in the first draft of the game so I left her till last as she was the lowest priority for the games first draft but since she is the third character I will be making I want the model to show everything I've learnt making the first two characters.

Portfolio Website

I set up my account with GBBO today to get a free web domain, the actual site itself I run through google sites which isn't too hard to work with. I've spent a little time making it look better and bit more creative looking. The banner is a png image with no background so that the background of the site can be seen through it, also containing a wireframe render of one of my models. Here is my site thus far:


Now I just have to update it with my show-reel and shots of my character models once they're ready. Googles sites has a set amount of data which can be hosted on the site so keeping in mind my videos and images may be over the data allowance i've set upa klickr account so that I can host images on there and then post them on my site without any problem. I have also set up an account for vimeo so that I can host HD video files on there and link them to my site. I decided to buy a month of vimeo pro as well so that I can have multiple HD videos hosted and embedded on my site as the free account doesn't allow HD videos to be embedded.
http://vimeo.com/user7157112

Lost - Difficulties with animation

I didn't want to make another post just going over pretty much the exact same process as my last post so I'm going to talk about some problems I had working on the animations for the lost character. We wanted the lost character to appear in a stair case level walking up the reverse side of the stairs. The first thing I need to work on was the walk cycle for the lost which in itself isn't too much of a problem. The problems I had were to do with the weighting around the crotch of the model where the skirt laid over the top of the body. In the end I completely re-topologised the skirt and added in more verts so that It could deform a little bit better as each leg moved forwards and backwards. In the end it was far from perfect but I had to give up as a few hours went by without any progress, at this point in time I don't understand enough about weighting to get this polished.

You can see that the skirt mesh is being pushed into the body mesh by the bones around it, I've tried for a good while but I can get it to balance out between it not being pushed too far and not being deformed to the right shape.

The second batch of issues I had was when I came to walk on the full animation of the Lost travelling up the stairs in order to achieve this I had to import the stair models into max and create a path for the character to travel along after a couple of tries I had a perfect path laid out and a dummy which travelled along it the right way. The first thing that went wrong was when I applied the path node to the character walk animation the foot prints that it placed automatically went wrong in a few areas and I had to manually place them back in order. Then the second problem was that I had the wrong idea of how to extend an animation relying on the length set in the motion editor, I thought exporting the same number of frames would work, but really it was much simpler and all you have to do is extend the time line at the bottom using the time configuration in the bottom right.
Lastly we were faced with some issues with the scaling, Even though the path I laid out was in exact proportion to the stairs when we imported it into unity and scaled it up, it no longer fit to the same grid. After a lot of tinkering about we couldn't track down the problem and I can only think it is to do with my scale set up in 3DS Max not being the same as unity. We managed to tweak it a bit to fit the stairs and looks pretty good, here is the path with footprints laid out: