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.