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:

Lure - Animations Continued

After we got the Lure placed in with the walk cycles I wanted to go a bit further with the animations for the lure, especially since I had it rigged out anyway. The first thing that I had a go at yesterday was a sitting animation, Bryn came up with the idea of having the Lure sitting up high on one of the fingers of an environment asset he had made. At first It was pretty tricky trying to get my head around posing a model and with what animation layers. The first thing I learnt from this was to only pose after the animation layer is turned on, if you don't the bones are constrained and stretch the model. After I had the model in the pose I wanted I used the auto Key tool along with the foot platform constraints to make the legs swing back and forth.

The animation still looked very static so I arched the back a bit more and also a bit of swing and twisting in the arms a long with a subtle nod of the head to just keep everything looking alive.


After this the second animation I made was pretty easy to make which was just a very simple idling animation of the character posed standing with slight movement to simulate breathing. I made this so that we could have the character waiting at the end of a corridor for the player to catch up.

Lure - Rigging and animation

When I started working on the animations for the lure I had a very basic idea of rigging and that it involved creating bones for the model, attaching them to the model somehoqw and weighting them correctly to control the deformations of the mesh. I didn't really know to do any of this so I splashed out on a copy of Digital Tutors Rigging in Max which gave a complete overview of the process.

After playing around with creating my own skeleton for a while I did a little research into CAT Motion which my tutor Mark had mentioned. CAT Motion used to be a plugin for 3DS max but in the 2011 version was integrated into the full package. After messing around creating human shaped Cat Parents. I came a cross a short series of videos on youtube which run through creating walk cycles to be used in UDK.

This set of videos was extremely useful for what I need to do, it was only in the last video that it became tailored to UDK so I was able to use it for what I need for unity. I created the same base human Cat Parent that he describes in the video and spent a good few while laying it out before spending at least and hour editing the envelopes in the skin modifier, pretty much following the tutorial word for word at this point. I then wanted to create my first walk cycle, this would be so that the Lure could walk through the environment ahead of the player. I carried on with the YouTube tutorial and referred to this exact episode:

I combined a couple of the motion editor preset's to get quite a slow calm walk and ended up just tinkering with the independent variables for each section of the CAT parent. I specifically turned down a lot of the roll on the shoulders and hips as this point the walk looked quite feminine. I also changed the jumper and trousers for the lure as the geometry wasn't perfect for animation. I moved the sculpts around a bit adjusting the joints and shoulders before re-topologising and re-baking the normals. This time the meshes worked a little better for animation and I was left with this:

Lost - Illuminance

On of the things I played around with a lot recently was the face on the reverse of the skull which would face forward on the lost. Initially I experimented with adding different faces made out of cracks to the bump on the skull. An idea came up to have the face glow as if light was shining through the cracks. I did a bit of research and found out about illuminance maps which will emit light from wherever there is colour on the map. Here is the result I got with the added map.

The great thing about this effect is that the face will shine even when there is no light shined on the object, so the object could sit completely in the dark and the face would be visible. After I made this map I added illuminance to the eyes of the Lure as well.

Lost - Texturing Human skin

I tried a bunch of different ways to texture the skin for the Lost. The first was using cropped pictures of elephant skin to get a heavily wrinkled grey texture which I thought would look quite appropriate for the neglected look of the character, I took that texture and adjusted it in photoshop blending in some more natural skin tones to give it a bit more realism. After a while I started again since the wrinkles just didn't look right no matter how I edited them. This time around I added a porous texture to the bump similarly to what I did with the skull except a lot more subtle before playing with different images of skin to get this final texture:

You can also see that I stencilled a swirling soot like texture on the hands and feet to give the impression that he has been around fire.

Lost - Costume Assets

I wanted to try applying opacity maps to the hair and skirt of the Lost after reading the tutorial on hairplanes. First I created a base mesh for the skirt as well as the hair and sculpted them both in Mudbox, creating creases in the skirt and a flowing strand like shape for the hair. Here is the high poly sculpt for the skirt.

Here you can see the results of the bakes on the left and then the standard diffuse in the middle. On the left is the two objects with the opacity maps applied, which again look better once rendered or in game.

With the hair I deleted all the inner facing polys which left me with a flat plane shell, this was necessary for the opacity maps to work. In 3Ds max these materials have to applied as 2 sided, or else they dont show from the reverse, I have also found a double sided shader script for unity.

Lost - Creating the Body

Now that I'm able to re-topologis the model after I've sculpted the high poly I have decided to start with the high poly sculpt for the body of the Lost. Here is the high poly sculpt:

I am quite happy with how this sculpt out, the lost is meant to look malnourished so I made the ribs quite prominent as well as making the fingers and feet quite skinny and drawn out which in turns make the model look quite feral.

I had to spend a long time making the low poly in Topogun since this is the first time I have made a complicated object like a human body in the program. After Taking the new low poly into max and baking this is the result, which looks fine except maybe the fingers and toes, which shows I will have to get better at unwrapping models and allocation uv space.

Lost - Creating the skull

I decided to start the Lost with the skull as it's the most defining feature of the character. I also decided to make the model by primarily sculpting rather than creating the base mesh in Mudbox. So I started with a sphere in Mudbox and sculpted out the basic shaper using this for reference.

At one stage I exported one of the lowest levels of the sculpt into 3DS max and adjusted the geometry before taking it back into Mudbox for more sculpting. After the skull was as shaped as possible I tried a couple of techniques on Mudbox using stamps to add more detail. I made two stamps in photoshop and imported them into Mudbox, the first was a crack which used to stencil in some fine cracks on the skull and the second was a slightly rough texture to add the porous texture that bones have.
Here is the Sculpt:

Again I took the lowest level of the sculpt into 3ds Max to bake onto, after deleting unneeded geometry I baked the normals using Xnormal and applied the normals to the low poly:

After this bake I started looking into re-topology tools and came across Topogun, I invested some time into experimenting with Topogun and produced a new low poly for the skull, the useful thing about re-topology tools like Topogun is that it allows me to work in sculpting programs like Mudbox with out any worry of how the topology is laid out until I decide to re-topolise the high poly. Topogun works by loading the high poly as a reference and basically lets you draw the new low poly over it. Along with Topogun I was also introduced to a max script called maxretopo which worked in a similar way by drawing vertices of a low poly object to the surface of the high poly, in the end I imported the low poly model I made in Topogun and quickly used maxretopo to finely adjust it.
Here's the final low poly with normals:

The poly count was drastically reduced using this method, almost halved. Also I think the bake came out a lot better on this model especially around the nose area of the skull.

Lost - Concept

The concept for the lost is a malnourished and neglected child which wears a skull over its long unkempt hair. The idea behind the lost's appearance is that it is a manifestation of the protagonists guilt over her inability to save her son, unlike the Lure the Lost serves to distress the protagonist and punish her by playing on her negative feelings. I'm starting this model second because it is the second character the player will see during Rove. In one of the levels he will be seen creeping around.

Lure - Adding Hair Planes

Today I had a quick experiment with adding hair planes to the Lure. The Lure already has his hair textured on but I was messing around to see if I could get some nice 3D hair with opacity maps so that I could get the end of the strands to show through. In order to do this I searched around and found this tutorial: http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

This ran me through the use of applying opacity maps to my hair textures as alpha channels and then saving the images as targa's. I then applied the textures with alphas to separate planes in 3dsMax and positioned them around the lure:

This is the head with added planes in 3Ds max viewport, the alphas obviously look a lot nice when rendered or in unity but even then I'm not a hundred percent happy with the results so I'm going to keep experimenting to see if I can make them better, I may have to leave them out for the game if I can't by then.

Lure - Texturing

To texture the lure, I used a combination of mudbox painting tools and photoshop. The reason I used both was that mudbox allowed me to easily navigate the model and place textures to the right sections on the UV map, which would be hard to get my head around solely in photoshop. I used photoshop to create stencils which I then applied in Mudbox before exporting the diffuse maps out of the paint layer. I then used photoshop to add more detail and tweak the diffuse maps. One advantage to making the maps this way is that im able to desaturate the bump map and use it to add a bit of shading to the diffuse and vice versa convert elements of the diffuse to bump using the xnormal photoshop plugin which I then blend into the bump map for extra detail.

Another thing I have tried to do while texturing was to make a complete map for the entire Lure model. What I mean by this is that at the moment each individual section of the model is separate and has its own uv maps. Using render to texture in 3DS max, I have tried to attach each section of the model together and then after unwrapping it all into one uv channel bake the applied textures to the new co-ordinates. It worked but I have decided to go ahead and just use the separate maps as I lost a lot of detail in the bake to the new uv map and want the model to look as good as possible in game. Here is the way I rendered the new map:

I was able to bake the existing materials to the new co_ordinates as they were applied to each section of the model before I attached them all together. In order to bake the materials to the new map I had to have the old co-ordinates in u
UV channel 1 and the new co-ordinates in channel to and then when using render to texture make sure I selected channel 2 as the output and also what maps to render so in this instance I selected normals.

Here are the new diffuse and normals maps that I was able to create using this approach, the loss in detail is probably due to the wasted UV space when I made the new unwrap as well a slight loss of quality when rebaking.

Lure - Unwrapping and Baking Normals - Head

I tried a variety of different ways to unwrap the head model. One of the issues that kept cropping up was the section behind the ears since the high poly had much more defined ears than the low, everything I relaxed the section of uv's they would cluster up, to get around this I unwrapped a slither of the ear separate from the rest of it.

The low poly meshed I used to bake was a slightly modified version of the lowest level of the sculpt again. Since the lowest level was still pretty high on the poly count I removed some edge loops from the mesh in places that wouldn't effect the overall geometry much. The I export the high and low into xNormal again and baked out the normals, this is the result of the bake:

Lure - Unwrapping and Baking Normals

Again I had very little experience in uv unwrap and absolutely no experience in baking normal maps from high to low poly models. To get around this I decided to unwrap and bake each section of the model independently.

Since this sculpt wasn't too drastic I used the lowest level sculpt from Mudbox as the low poly and the highest as the high poly, these were exported separately as obj's and imported into max where I unwrapped them. I was introduced to a program called Xnormal which was said to hold better baking results than when baking from within max.

I applied projection modifiers on each low poly model so that they overlapped the high poly models, and then exported both the high and low versions separately again as sbm's. I imported all of these in sets of two and baked the normals with xnormal. These are my results:

Lure - Sculpting 2

The second base mesh worked a lot better but before I got to far into the sculpt I added a couple of adjustments to it. The first was to just define the nose area a little bit more, the second was to add some basic ear shapes to the sides of the mesh to sculpt on as the ears didn't sculpt too well from a flat side.

From here I spent a lot of time on the nose and eye sockets, I want the eye sockets to be the right shape to enclose the eye balls as well as still looking like eye lids. I experimented with different noses before settling on quite a soft child like nose. I then added some extra details such as the nostrils, lip edges, and ear ridges.
After I was fairly happy with the facial features I spent a bit of time sculpting the hair onto the model, I wasn't sure whether the detail would show once the model was textured but I thought that it was still worth spend a fair while just to polisht he sculpt as much as possible.

Lure - Sculpting

In the end I chose these three parts out of the two different base meshes I had made. I had to experiment quite a while in Mudbox before I started to get the hang of it and was able to use different tools to get the creasing on the clothes the way I wanted. Here is the high poly sculpt for the Lure character:

I'm pretty happy with how the sculpt came out especially the ironing creases along the trouser legs and the seams on the sides.

The next part of the sculpt is the head, here is the first sculpt I have made using the base mesh which had openings for the eyes and mouth. It didn't really good well at all as the openings really effected the sculpt tool whenever I went near them.


As you can see in the Image it was really hard to keep a good shape around the openings, especially as they pulled and stretched with every sub divide. In the end Im going to go ahead with the other base mesh and see how I get on.

Lure - Creating the base meshes - Head

I had a bit of difficulty starting the base mesh for the Lure's head due to lack of experience. I had no idea where to start from so I looked around at other artists work to see if I could get an idea to start from. I carried out with box modelling and made this:

The main things I weren't sure about were the eye sockets and the mouth and whether or not to leave open holes for them after seeing a video of a speed sculpt which used a base mesh with no openings I made another mesh without them. I'll test out both of these when I start sculpting and go with whatever works better.

Lure - Creating the base meshes

Here is the first base mesh I made for the Lure's body, I started from a body and extruded it around the shape of an reference image to get the right size and shape, one thing I wasn't happy with was the trousers for two reasons, the shape is still very box like and also since these base meshes will be exported into Mudbox for sculpting in the the mesh to be evenly laid out so that it will subdivide well.

This is the second base mesh I have made in order to deal with the elements of the last base mesh that I didn't like, focusing a bit more on the shape of the trousers and also adding a sole to the shoe as well as smoothing out the jumper a bit more. I know need to work on the base mesh for the head and then begin sculpting these in Mudbox.

Lure - The concept

The First character I want to start working on will be the lure as it will play as a game mechanic for Rove. The concept for the lure is a young boy who is similar in appearance to the protagonists deceased son, the idea is that he will lead the player through the game by making random appearances ahead of the player to encourage them in that direction.

I want the character to have a school boy appearance which will be characterised by the grey trousers and woolly jumper, also his face should be relatively featureless to give almost a ghostly feeling to him.

After He is modelled I will need to rig and animate so that we can have him walk around the enviroment ahead of the player.

Introduction

In BA7, the first project of my final year, I grouped up with Bryn Morrison-Elliott to produce a simple game concept which we intended to make for BA8 where Bryn would be the environment designer and I would be the character artist. The concept was titled Rove, and followed the hallucinations of the protagonist who suffers from Schizophrenia. The purpose of the concept was to introduce ourselves to the actual techniques involved in creating a game, although Rove is intended to be an interactive art piece rather than a game since it will have no actual game play and aims to deliver its narrative through its environment and characters. I will use this blog to show my progress through bBA8 and the development of the characters for Rove.