Week 3: Aviator Project Hand-In

I began this week with the texturing of my character. The polypaint had taken care of a lot of the base texture, but there was still la lot to be done. There had been a problem last week with the bake of my character that I could not seem to figure out, but after showing another student I realised it was because of some of the settings I used in Xnormals. I normally use Ray Distance Calculator to create the best possible projection cage, however sometimes, possibly due to a minor issue in the high or low poly model, the estimation for the cage is completely off. This happened with the legs of my character. A problem which I originally thought was just a seam, turned out to be where it had actually baked the inside of the opposite leg. And the same with the fingers of my character. So I went through and re-baked the areas that had gone wrong, this time not using the calculator, and instead just entering my own cage limitations. Once the bake had been fixed I got back to texturing, which took quite a while using all the maps I had baked to produce a nice diffuse texture sheet. I used a combination of the Vertex colour information, Ambient Occlusion, Cavity and the green channel from my Normal bake to get the lighting information I needed without having any additional maps on the final model. There was a lot of painting by hand involved on the texture sheet, which I felt was justified as this was a partially stylised character.

Alongside texturing I rigged my character. I didn’t wait until finishing texturing as I thought texturing would be easier once I got a better understanding of what my character would look like in a natural pose instead of the unappealing T-pose. The rigging turned out to be fairly simple for a low poly character, although some joints really struggle to deform properly with that sort of tri count.

Looking back after most of it had been finished I started making notes on all the things I need to keep in mind in the future with characters. First of all, model the hands spread out. It’s really quite hard to rig characters ringers when they are all really close together. I should also remember to keep them spread out in the unwrap as well. I learnt that when it comes to Zbrush, if I’m not 100% happy with something, then I shouldn’t leave it, I should iterate on the design until I find something that works. For example the undershirt on my character was really lazily done with barely any thought put into it. I also really need to keep in mind that when it comes to clothing folds, often less is more. I tend to jump straight into detail without concerning myself with the larger forms. A really important one for me to remember is being careful about what I model at the joints. The sleeves on my character end at the elbow and are essentially two overlaying cylinders, which when rigged don’t deform too well. Lastly, a smaller one, I should have done a better job with the goggles, they ruin the hat, which originally one of my favourite aspects of the character.

I didn’t get much feedback this week, apart from right at the end of the week after hand-in, Mike Kelly spoke to me and gave me some pointers that will be useful for making this character portfolio ready. He pointed out that the Cravat could do with looking better, and the fur needs some material definition. He said it would be nice to see some colour variation in the leather jacket, as it is one area of the character where the colours look really flat. Also just to finish off the character, make a small diorama and maybe an animation to display on sketchfab.