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.