February 2nd

As it is the evening before the deadline this will be my last entry. Acting upon a suggestion from group member ‘Brett Lewis’ I decided to try out Marmoset Toolbag, a standalone games engine simulator with the results being better than I could have hoped for. The software was easy to use and straight forward with all the control I could wish for when rendering a character demo. Once post processing and lighting was set up I rendered of a turntable video ready for the  presentation tomorrow. 

Finished Character in Marmoset

January 30th

With the deadline just around the corner Rigging was yet another new frontier however I did posses basic knowledge in the process involved through two of the character tutorials I had read at the start of the semester. Creating a skeleton and skinning was a fairly simple task so long as it was carried out slowly and methodically. Weighting proved a little more problematic due to an issue where vertex paining wasn’t appearing, another issue which was remedied by exporting and importing into a new scene. Having done some very basic biped animation before, posing was a fairly simple process that just involved grabbing joints in the outliner window and rotating them until the character was in the desired pose. I did have to return to weighting once or twice because some vertexes had less than 100% influence but this was easy to fix. 

Skeleton shown in Outliner

Final posed character in Maya

January 25th/27th

Having produced the normal maps and brought them up to a satisfactory standard as well as the AO maps I began merging the separate parts of the character and compiling the separate UVs into one 1024 UV layout. Texturing remains a weakness of mine made all the more worse by the deformation that organic models bring the table. Eventually however I finished the diffuse and attempted to scale the character up (see last entry). In theory I believed that since this was all digital, scaling up really wouldn’t effect anything, my lack of understanding however proved fatal resulting in a horrible graphical bug which made the model un-renderable. I eventually managed to fix it by Exporting the character at its new size as an OBJ and simply reattaching all the textures. 

See highlighted areas for most obvious examples of the bug

January 18th - Map generation.

This session entailed me rendering off the Normal maps and occlusion maps for the character. I did have an issue with the normal maps in that some anomalies appeared on them and I wasn’t really sure what was causing it. After trying to render of the normal maps in Maya, Xnormal and Zbrush I finally figured out that although I believed I had set my character to 1.75M tall he was actually 1.75CM tall. I can only assume that the memory I have of setting the units for the character was actually me setting the units for my Games D & M character. Either way I couldn’t change the scale at the moment because then my high poly wouldn’t align with the low poly. I came to the conclusion I would have to edit the maps in Photoshop and increase the characters scale when it was textured.

Week 11

Following reading about a Zbrush plug-in called UV master in a Magazine as well as hearing it mentioned on a number of websites and tutorials I decided to give it a shot. Having used other UVing tools in the past however (Roadkill) I was sceptical since they had always yielded unsavoury results. I was carrying out this session on a whim simply so I didn’t forget to try it and genuinely believed it would flop and I would end up UVing the normal way in Maya. I was pleasantly surprised to find however that the plug-in was remarkably flexible and allowed for a great deal of control over seam placement via its control painting feature. In conclusion this turned what would usually be a tedious and tiresome process into a relatively quick and stress free part of the pipeline. I will defiantly be using this plug-in again in the future and highly recommend it.