FMP - Week 13 - Part 1

Feedback from tutors and some edits to colour scheme and overall vibe

I emailed my tutor as I felt something was off with my character but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and he told me that the saturation on the character was a little too high if I wanted to go for the God of War grungy vibe, and as soon as he said it I saw it instantly. 

So I went back to my Cyclops and edited the overall saturation of the character, toning things like his skin and claw down, and his shoulder piece all the way down from the bright pink that it was before.

I also took away the ropes on his arm and leg which were previously a separate subobject on my low poly character, but decided that they looked better just baked straight onto the body of the character, I lost a little in silhouette with the ropes, but gained a lot in detail and believability that they are now scraps of cloth wrapped around his arm and legs. 

Here's what I have now: 

I feel like it looks like night and day in comparison to what it was before, here is a side by side just to show.

FMP - Week 12 - Part 3

Update on texturing process: trying to work more with roughness levels to add interest. 

Something I struggle with in texturing is that it is not a 2D plane like with digital art. Within the realms of digital illustration, you have values, colour, contrast, many different topics to explore to make a painting pop, but all of them fundamentally two dimentional. 

With character models, however, the character can move within a 3D space, it can be rotated any which way the viewer likes, and more importantly, you as the artist are no longer in charge of the given light source for this model. Therefore you need to think about how lights would reflect off surfaces like metal, leather, skin and seashells in different ways so that no matter what lighting the character is in, it looks believable. 

This concept is all well and good in theory, but implimenting it in practice can be quite tricky, and the advice I'm trying to work from is to work in passes and always pay attention to the different view ports so that I can actually see the roughness levels on the surface of my character. 

But that aside, here is where I am at with my character so far: 

It's certainly nowhere near finished yet and there is still a lot to do, but I am liking the textures that are slowly building on his skin, and I really love the colour gradient of his claw, and then from his claw to his arm, I think it adds interest and it definitely looks like the focal point for my character. 

Moving on from this I'm just going to be adding more depth and detial, maybe changing the type of fabric for some of the cloth pieces to add some variation here and there! 

FMP - Week 12 - Part 2

Texturing characters, and the wonderful world of baked texture maps. 

I was taught recently how to go through and use texture sheets to add dimention to characters without even busting out the graphics tablet yet and it turned all of my work up a notch I swear. 

The process works as follows ⬎

1. Take a baked texture sheet such as Ambient Occlusion, Curvature or Position
2. Add it to a fill layer and colour it
3. Add a levels to it to control the intensity of the map
4. Voila! Depth of colour and contrast with barely any effort.

Just to show how incredible it is, I'll show the difference here. 

Before the maps were applied to the body: 

After the maps were applied:

It never fails to fascinate me how cool it looks! Obviously there is always a limit to how far to push the values of these maps, however fun it may be, so I need to make sure I stay on top of that, definitely. 

FMP - Week 12 - Part 1

From baking to texturing, working with passes and base texture sheets. 

It may just be me, but I feel that texturing models is the area in which I've improved the most while at university. A lot of the software we use we often just bumble our way through until we figure it out, but I realise the importance of asking for help and feedback whenever my tutors show me something new about the software I thought I was accustomed to by now and it blows my mind. 

Substance Painter is the software I've used and will be using to texture, and I've started by going through and using the vertex paint map (created from colouring my subtools in Zbrush and then baking the map out in Marmoset) to block in colours for all of the parts of my model.

This is what my character looks like after this initial pass:

He's handsome, I know. But as clunky and strange as this looks at the moment, this first pass was mainly to just get a feel for the colour palette I'd be working with. 

Moving on from this I'll be going through and texturing using the baked maps themselves to add dimention and contrast, something I learned only recently and has opened up a whole new world of texturing for me! I'll try and document that here on my blog as well. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 3

Final bake (for now) and then we're onto texturing! 

After lots of work, and lots of back and forth as I talked about in my earlier post, I'm finally in a place where I'm quite comfortable with my bake. I documented this in my posts during the creation of my Overwatch character, but I am very new to baking in Marmoset, having only done it once before, but I already see why it's favoured over Substance by many as you can effectively sclulpt the cage around the model itself to create your desired effect. 

But rambling about the wonders of Marmoset aside, here are the screenshots of how my bake is now: 

It's worth noting now that as you may have noticed, the body of my Cyclops has this light blue hue and his belts and accessories have the sea green. These colours reperesent the two texture sheets I have applied to the model, one for the body, and one for his armour. 

There are still some areas that I would go back and tweak if I had the time but I'm conscious of staying on track with my schedule so I'm going to be moving onto texturing for now, and I'll return to these issues if I have the time at the end. 

I do like how none destructive the whole character modelling process is and how on the most part, you can go back and fix anything you like from any stage of the creation process should you wish, it'll just require a little patience and reimporting here and there. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 2

Onto baking, and how your unwrap is never as good as you think it is. :(

Today I got started on baking my model and I always seem to forget just how much of a pain baking can be. 

Effectively it's a trial and error process, and every time you bake a model you get a little bit better at it because you know now how to fix X problem and can do it faster next time. But, as it must sound, its incredibly time consuming to do this back and forth between the unwrap of the model and the baking program to see why certain things don't align etc. 

Straight off the bat my brain decided that it wasn't going to work and forgot that you need to specify within Marmoset that you need to use 2 texture sets and I was ridiculously confused that my preview bake looked like this:

But that only takes the click of a few buttons and then fixed.

Then the feet of my model were not baking for some reason and I couldn't figure out why, so I went back into 3ds Max and realised that the foot of my model was actually teeny tiny amongst the unwrap and wasn't getting anywhere near enough texture space. 

Fixed. 

Then I realised that the ropes on the characters arms were baking really strangely and looked awful so I tried to bake the ropes directly onto the body of my model but that looked even worse so I evenetually decided to go back to the idea of baking the ropes onto the separate mesh that I had made and it finally worked.

I think you can tell how I have a love hate relationship with baking now. Love the outcome, hate the process, but I suppose that sums up art alltogether. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 1

Unwrap time! 

The title is short and sweet and so will be this post, over the weekend I got stuck into unwrapping my model so that I can then get started with the baking process ASAP as I keep trying to remind myself that texturing requires waaaay more time than I ever think it does and I need to allow for that. 

So here is how my unwrap went: 

The top image is the unwrap for the body of my cyclops, coupled with the most beautiful face unwrap I've ever seen in my life on the top right of the image, with that big eye he looks like such a happy boy! But all jokes aside, the top unwrap is the body of the cyclops plus the skull and cross bones on the front of his belts. Underneath, the unwrap there is all of his belts, the cloth scraps, his shoulder piece, eye and teeth. I call it 'Accessories' usually because I just throw all of the misc parts together in one texture sheet here.