Final Cinematic

Here is my final cinematic for this module. All in all I  am quite happy with the turn out of the final product, I feel that the diorama looks quite good for what it is, and the added land around the area has worked well. I think the atmosphere and mood work quite well and help emphasize the scene and give it the push I wanted. With the character I still feel that a lot of detail has been lost from the high poly which I am upset about as it makes it look like I havnt pushed to try and create a really in depth character. But I did try all that I could with my current knowledge and I am happy I decided to go with a character. From the beginning I felt I would learn more doing a character than an environment and I now know that I was right in thinking that. 

Over the course of this module I have learnt how to create high to low poly models which I then baked down. I have improved my skills in rigging and feel more confident in that now. I've also pushed my modelling skills to create more natural shapes instead of just modelling a complex box live I've been used to. And I've learnt how to use Zbrush better, on top of all this I have learnt about the workflow of creating a character and although it will need building on I now have that extra push against others that chose to do an environment.

I know if I were to do have done an environment it would have been a much safer option and I would most likely come out with a better grade, but I know I wouldn't have pushed to learn new things, so although it wasn't my greatest idea of learning something new in my third year I am happy I have as it has given my extra skills and knowledge when going into the industry. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNIm6v8B9Gs&feature=youtu.be

Comparison between stages

I wanted to put up a comparison between the stages of Uncle Sam. I placed up the stages from blockout stage, to high poly model, to posed low poly character that's textured in Marmoset and then finally and then finally final model in Unreal

I feel he was at his best in Marmoset as the normals came across the best with the textures. For some reason a lot of detail was lost when it was taken into Unreal. I know this is because in marmoset has different lighting settings and with a HDR map which helps render this. I struggled to try and get the lighting better to help show off my character. 

I wanted to make a close up of the heads at the same stages as the images above. I feel once again that the head in Marmoset looks the best, as I was able to get the lighting to reflect some of the information out of the normals and it really does show off the pores on his skin. It is a shame I was unable to show it off in the final form as it makes him look like quite a generic character with no real individuality. 

week 12: change to diorama

I decided to duplicate the ground and then scale it up a lot so you could no longer see the fall off point of the horizon as I felt this did look quite awful when looking past the diorama. Of course when I scaled it up it made the texture extremely blurry, I was able to overcome this though by making the diorama tile the texture. I did this by going into the material editor and addind a texCoord, this allowed the texture to tile on the mesh. I am happy with the end result and feel it makes the horizon large and bleak. I thought of the idea of scattering trees, but then felt this may make it too complicated and unneeded and I didn't want to over complicate it.   

I decided to do some vertex painting on the ground, this was to add some variation in the texture and I also wanted to make it look wet around the water area. I did this by first creating a darker texture of the ground diffuse and then changing the material of the ground to allow vertex painting. This has had a positive impact on the scene and really breaks it up and gives it that extra push.

I then went on to do this with the trees and bark as they would be affected by the water as well. I feel this has worked well and has really added to the scene  

week 12: rebake the trousers

I now wanted to get the trousers fixed so there would be some detail in them instead of two cylinders placed together. When this first happened I was actually stuck for the first time and couldn't think of any clear way around this, but after some thinking I thought of this one way that could possibly work. If I were to get the low poly and position it around the high poly and bake it out a number of times to capture certain parts of the trousers which I would then take into Photoshop and merge together.

This first image is of me posing the trousers to fix the high poly, I am shaping up the left leg to match the left high poly leg to capture the details through xNormals.

Here is the final result, I took three different maps from the left and right leg as well as the crotch and merged them together. I also did the same for the occlusion map. For the parts I didnt need of the normal maps I would delete them and use the clone stamp tool where needed till I do the desired result.

Here it is rendered in marmoset, I wanted to quickly render out in here just to see that it had worked. The reason the stripes are part of the normal map is because while I was taking the screenshots I was playing with the diffuse map in crazybump and overlaying it with the original normal map, this has since been changed.

I am happy with the overall result and glad I was about to recapture the high poly detail.

week 12: Final Presentation

Here is the presentation I created for the final cinematic in week 12.

I first began to talk about my original idea of having Uncle Sam as my character and having him placed in No Mans land, as I felt this would be a strong contrast between the two.

I then talked about the work flow I went into when creating my character, I also mentioned some parts that went wrong along the way.

I then spoke briefly about the process I went through to coming to my final diorama idea.

Afterwards I spoke about issues I faced during this module, including my blazer. issues I had with rigging and the recent problem I faced with the trousers losing detail.

Finally I spoke about what I've worked on since Alpha. 

#

I did also have a slide to do with the cinematic clip which you can view here.

And here is the YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSok2wzYfxM&feature=youtu.be

week 11/12: lighting

Now that it was all in UE4 and I was happy with the overall quality it was now time to play with the lighting and get the right atmosphere. I wanted to try and recreate the sort of atmosphere you would see from a WW1 picture where it was quite desaturated with a greenish filter. I understand that it wasnt actually like that and was down to how the camera would take the picture, but I thought it would be effective it could try and recreate this style. 

I wanted it to be quite clouded over and gloomy. After playing with the settings for a while in UE4 I was able to get close to this effect. I had to up the brightness as the one I felt may work made the scene look too dark and I lost a lot of detail due to this so I had to up it slightly, I still feel I got quite a good atmosphere to my scene however. 

With the clouds and sky I was able to change the colour slightly to have a green tint to it, this then had an effect on the whole scene which I think adds to it quite a bit.

The pictures below dont show off the lighting very well, I may retake screenshots and post back here to show properly how the lighting appears.  

week11: updates

Some updates I felt could all go in a blog post together.

I wanted to work on the trousers and change the UV layout so the stripes would go down the leg instead of warping around. I achieved this by changing how the UVs were positioned, I was able to straighten them up into rows and this worked quite well. On the picture below you can see the difference between the two legs, The leg on the left shows the uvs normal but the stripes curving around. And then with the leg on the right you see the strips going down, this is because I changed the UV layout. I feel this works much better and looks more natural and realistic. 

Here is what the UV layout now looks like.

Update since then: I have realised that by changing the layout I have messed up the high to low poly bake, as the normal and occlusion map are following the old UV layout. And of course now I can not re bake them out as the position is different. As of yet I have not been able to think of a solution, so I suppose we shall have to look forward to the future and see how I work around this.

I wanted to fill up the scene a bit more to give it more of a push, so I thought of the idea of having some debris in the water and thought that branches would work well. I went in Maya and exported some branches from the trees I modelled and placed them around my scene positioning them how I thought looked best. I also reused some of the trees and scaled them down to try and give more of a variant. I feel this as worked quite well and has really added to my scene.

I have also made the base higher poly by first selecting the mesh and pressing the 3 button which shows a preview of what a high poly version looks like. I then converted this so it was real, at first I was unsure about doing this as it was quite high poly and I was worried it would slow down UE4 but I found out that UE4 could handle quite alot, so when I exported this back in I was happy to discover it didnt change the frame rate at all.
Doing this has made the transition from ground to water much smoother and look so much better.

This is what it now looks like in scene with the new ground.

One final update is that I have improved my helmets, I have now made them much higher poly with a smoother edge. This has defiantly made them look better. 

This is how it now looks in scene all scattered around. 

week 10: Rigging/Posing

Now that I was happy with the model it was now time to rig the character, Since I was not going to be animating Uncle Sam I thought the best way to do this would be to go into Zbrush and pose him using the rigging system in there. 

Once he was in Zbrush I created a ZSphere and placed it in his chest and scaled it to fit. I then went on to create many more ZSpheres that joint up to the original ZSphere, doing this created a simple skeleton of Uncle Sam. Once I was happy with it I went to bind mesh, This made it so now when I moved a joint the model would move with it. I spent some time posing him until I was happy with the end result. The next step was to go into the Adaptive Skin tool and to make the adaptive skin, however when I went to do this ZBrush would then crash. I ended up losing quite a lot of work because of this as well as the skeleton in Zbrush. I repeated this about two more times trying slightly different ways but each time ZBrush would crash. So after losing the majority of the day trying to pose in ZBrush I had to leave it and try and create a rig in Maya.

Now that my character was back in Maya I needed to start creating the rig. I started by using the same work flow as in ZBrush. By this I mean I created the first joint in the waist this time and worked my way down the legs placing them where needed. Since I wasn't going to animate this I knew it would be okay just to add the joints in and not place any controllers as these were not needed. This helped cut the process down a lot. 

Once I was happy with the layout I went to skin and used smooth bind tool. This now bound the mesh to the joints and I was able to pose him. 

I would then pose him in quite extreme positions to see if there were any parts of the mesh that were being effected by joints that shouldnt be. If there were I would use the Paint Skin Weights Tool, this would allow me to tell what the joints should move and what shouldn't. This was quite a slow process as I was doing this at home, and I had my computer crash three times while attempting it. But in the end I was able to do it.

I wasnt able to get the original position I wanted with him having one foot on the helmets as the mesh would look weird in this position and I struggled to fix it. So in the end I had to have the basic position I originally planned. I was able to get the two arms into a good position which I was happy with and was able to move the fingers to look natural and realistic. 

This is what the skeleton looked like once it was completed. 

Here are some screenshots of the model finally posed with a close up of the hands

week 9/10: gun

I wanted to add a gun into my scene to be scattered at the foot of Uncle Sam with the helmets to further push to idea of there being fallen soldiers around him. 

I first did some research to find what weapons were used in WW1, and I found this gun, I thought it would suit the scene best as it was quite large and would easily be seen in the scene.

I then found a good side profile image of it and exported it into maya and placed on a plane.

I then began to create a basic shape to fit the silhouette around the shape of the gun. I made this in many separate parts as I felt this would be easier to model and to then UV unwrap and texture.  

This is how it looked once all the pieces were created and placed together.

The gun was quite a blockout as I only focused from one angle so it was flat when looking from an angle, I fixed this by pressing 3 which gave it more of a shape by adding more polys. I then deleted polys where I felt they were not needed but still kept the shape. Once I was happy I played around with the shape until it looked right.

This is what it looked once it was textured, I created the texture myself in Photoshop by playing with the different tools until I found what I wanted.

Overall I am happy with the end result, and even though it is still at very blockout stage, it is all that I need for what it will be used for. If I were to have a gun as a main asset which would be focussed on more then I would have put more detail into it. But for now it works well.

week 9: redone Blazer

Since Alpha I wanted to change the blazer's collar as it did not work very well and didn't look natural. So I went back into Zbrush and changed the way it looked by mainly using the move tool. I feel this worked well and made the collar look more realistic and flow better.

I then exported it back into Maya and then did the same technique when creating the low poly, but instead of creating an entirely new low poly I was able to use my already existing one and edit it to fit the flow of the new blazer.

I think the new blazer looks much better and more realistic.

Still to do....

So after the Alpha stage I wanted to do a quick blog to put down what is still left to do.

• Work on Uncle Sam
• Change blazer
• Change trousers
• Redo the low poly to fix changes made to clothes
• Pose
• Model a gun/UV/Texture
• Possibly make changes to trees
• Possibly make small changes to environment, e.g. add in pond roots. 
• Re-texture everything!
• Maybe make a personal water shader?
• Reimport things into UE4
• Work on lighting
• Finish scene
• Work on cameras
• Render out
• Work on blogs
• Hand in
• Sleep

Although it looks like there is still alot left to do, the majority of it is just building up on what Ive already created so it shouldn't be too hard. And although we still have 3 weeks left, I feel I will be able to get it done in 2 and a bit if I really get my head down, as I would like to try and finish it up a couple days before hand in.

Week 9: Ghannt chart review

To be able to see this properly, you will have to click on it.

The Purple line is when I had Alpha presentation.

By looking at the ghannt chart, I haven't completely followed it, I have kept close to when dates should have started and ended, with the exception of the clothes. The reason for this is because I didn't really realise all the steps that had to go into making them complete. I just gave myself for example two days to create the trousers. But I didn't realise this would involve, making a blockout to take into Zbrush, which I would then add in the detail and make look like trousers. After this I then took it back into Maya to then create a low poly version of the high poly, which I then had to bake down. I imagine if I did do this all in one sitting then it could possibly be done within the two days but it would have been much harder.
Also I didn't take into account my work flow. The way I did the chart assumed I would just work on one piece until it was done. But in reality I did everything in parts, so I would create all the blockout's first, then I did all the Zbrush, and then I would take them all back into Maya to create the low polys. So of course doing it this way meant they wouldn't be finished within the two days, BUT! would all come close to completion by the time I was meant to finish overall with the body. I imagine this could have been the case if I didn't have all the trouble with the blazer.

Although I didn't completely stick to the ghannt chart I did refer back to it a number of times and I did keep it updates. and I found this helpful to try and stay on track.
Also when it came to textures, the ghannt chart assumed that these would be final textures, but I did just simple blockout ones for Alpha, so this is another problem I encountered with it.
According to it as well I should be finished by week 10. I am happy I set so two weeks worth of contingency time and didn't plan it so I finished right on week 12 as this may have pushed me back to the last minute. So by giving myself this time to apparently finish for week 10, it how allowed me to have more time to work.

I feel it is important to always create a ghannt chart to ensure you stay on task for projects and that you meet deadlines, but being in our industry it is quite hard too as you are unsure what may happen at any point. Also we are artists! so no plan should keep us tied down to day by day schedule! although it is important to always try to stick to it and make sure deadlines are made! ha.

Week 9 : Alpha presentation

After many painful and sleepless nights I had finally done Alpha presentation!
I shall quickly show the slides I had created and the overall feedback I got for it.
The first slide I was of course the alpha flythrough, but I then went on to talk about the problems I faced, this ofcourse as I spoke about in previous post was the blazer. I also mentioned how my lack of knowing how to create a character slowed me down as I had to watch many tutorials and playing around with Zbrush to find various ways to do certain jobs. I also spoke about doing the low poly modelling and how I was unsure on how to do this until I had help from another lecturer. 

I then had a slide on changes that I've made since the blockout presentation. I spoke about how I decreased the size of the diorama and that I had added in helmets to show more of the impact my scene appears to be showing. 

On the last slide I talked about what was still needed to be done before hand in, I will make another blog talking about this more in detail.

I wasn't really sure about how the feedback went. What I came away with really was, if the character doesn't work out then scrap it and hand in the diorama. This doesn't make me feel confident in the slightest and after all the hard work I went through to then be told you can just bin in isn't the best way to motivate me. Throughout the last few weeks when I had been worrying about this I had said to family that I know in the end as well that I wont even get a great mark for it, to which they would reply 'im sure your hard work will show, and that you have had to learn so much will defiantly help you get a great grade'. After this though I'm sure that I will get a pretty average grade unless the character is perfect. 

Other feedback I got was that one of the camera angles looked good.

It was also suggested that instead of helmets I should have skulls. I feel this however is quite extreme and makes the message obviously clear and leaves notching to the imagination. I also feel in the space of time left to model a skull will be quite hard, especially to make it look good.

Overall I am not sure about the feedback and don't feel it has helped, or made me want to finish this module to the best of my abilities. 

Alpha Cinematic

Here is the Cinematic I have created for Alpha stage, I am fairly happy with it at this point considering he is not posed. I quite like the atmosphere to it with the dust particles and the light reflecting off the water. This however will be changed as I wish to have it a dark cloudy day and the water to be more murky. This will most likely change the feel, I hope for the better.
When I go to do this for the final cinematic I shall have the different cameras fade into one another to make it look more smooth and so it doesn't flit from one camera to another.
I also want to try and have some flashing lights in the background to represent bombs going off, they will be very subtle but I hope they will have some impact on the scene.
I feel with the camera that goes around the diorama works well and you get a good sense of the theme, but I feel it may be a bit jumpy and will need some work doing to it.
One problem with the cinematic and having it in UE4 is that I have lost a lot of detail from the normals, and he looks allot more flat and simple. I am going to have to try and work a way around this to gain back all the detail I have put in the face and clothes.
But overall I am quite happy with the stage I am at.

You can also watch it from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y0uLHSZe4M

week 8: poppy

I decided to add a poppy into the scene and have Uncle Sam wearing it as I thought this would be quite symbolic and add to the theme of WW1.

I did the same process as the rest of the model. I started by first creating a blockout of the poppy in Maya, and then exporting it into ZBrush, I then worked on the leaves and creating the overall shape. This however came to just under 10,000 polys so I had to create a low poly version of it. I thought that trying to create a low poly version would result in losing too much of its shape. I then realised that you are only going to see it from the front, I decided that a good way to go about this would be to create a plane, place it over the poppy and then bake all the information on to the flat plane. When I tried this out, I found that it worked very well, it created a nice clean normal map. And once I imported the plane into Marmoset I found that the normals did work very well.
I now needed to create a texture for it with an alpha channel, so in Photoshop I added a simple red to the petals, green to the leaf and stem, and then black to the part in the middle. I also added some faint noise to break up the texture. Once I was happy with that I went into the channels selection and where the poppy was placed I marked that out as white, and the area I wanted to be hidden was made to be black. I saved this out at a 32bit targa and in Marmoset I added the diffuse map which only showed the poppy with the normals and left the rest of it black. This worked very well and I created a good looking poppy that was only one poly, down from 10,000

Here is it in Marmoset with just the Normal map, as you can see all the detail has transferred over well. 

Here I have now applied the diffuse map, and on the tools on the side I added a transparency with a cut out. This allowed the alpha to come through and only showed the poppy. I am happy with the end result and it looks like the poppy is 3D even though it is only on plane. 

week 6-8: Blazer

I wanted to write a separate post about the blazer as I found this part of the model very difficult at every part of the process of creating the character. So I thought I could write about it in one post instead of spreading it over many different posts.

So to start with the basic blockout of the blazer, I spoke briefly about this before on the blockout post. But I found this awkward as I was worrying about the topology and trying to make the connection between body and sleeve clean, of course now I realised I did not need to worry about this, so it is a good learning curve! but I also found it quite hard modelling the collar part, being able to bring it out of the base mesh and to then give it the shape it needed proved to be a bit time consuming. Also bringing out the tail part and making it double sided proved to be quite tricky as I had to duplicate it, reverse the faces and then connect it all back together. This was also quite time consuming.

When I took this into ZBrush, I then struggled to define the flow between blazer and shirt, and for a long time they blended together, I found this quite hard to fix as I was still quite new to ZBrush so I struggled using the tools properly, but after some time using the pinch and move brush I was able to achieve it.   

While trying to model the collar I noticed that a seam would appear in the middle of the collar, almost dividing the two parts. At first I thought I could fix this by just using claybuildup brush to cover the error and hide it, but this did not work. I went back into Maya and found that there was a hidden face between the two edges which caused this to happen. So I was forced to fix this and then start again with the detailing in ZBrush. 

Once I was finally happy with the high poly and I took it back into Maya to low poly, this was where I wasted a lot of time. I was doing the process in which I was using the modelling toolkit like I spoke about in previous post, and it was all going well with the arms and the bulk of the blazer with quite a nice edge flow, but once it got to the fine, thin details such as the collar and the tail part the faces would being to collide in on them selves. This happened when I would smooth out the mesh to straighten up the faces, the faces would then think that they should be smoothed onto the other side of the model which then ended up with a number of errors in the mesh. At this point I got quite annoyed with the low poly mesh and left it as I wasted so much time trying to fix it with no outcome. So I looked in tutorials to try and create a low poly mesh in ZBrush with a clean edge flow, I was able to find a number of different techniques but I had trouble with each one. The results would vary from being too low poly and completely losing shape, to having a decent topology but still being too high poly. 

After talking it out with my lecturer he told me that the only solution is to do it in Maya, but be very careful while doing it and have to work on the collar and tail manually without relying on tools. So I restarted the mesh and did just that, it took quite some time to get the edge flow decent on the collar and tail but in the end I did achieve the needed result after wasting many days.   

The next issue I had was then doing the high to low poly bake, once I baked it down the normal map had a number of errors in it, where in Marmoset would look like parts were sticking out where they shouldn't, I solved this problem by going into Photoshop and using the clonestamp tool and the blur brush to fix and hide the errors, this gave a nice clean result which I was happy about.

Update.

When creating the rig in ZBrush I had to add extra bones as the tail would move when the legs would move, this slowed down production, and in the end was not needed as ZBrush failed as you will see in a later post. 

The same happened in Maya when I was using the weight tool to determine what part of the mesh was affected by which joint, this blazer was once again affected by the leg joints. I was able to fix this by painting the tail black while having the leg joints selected.