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. 

week 8: baking high to low/ Texturing Character

Baking was one part I was worried about when starting this process, but I found it quite straight forward and I was able to capture some great results.  I made sure that the high and low poly were placed on top of each other, I then exported them separately into xNomals and baked them down, creating a normal map as well as an occlusion map.

I wanted to test to see if it worked correctly. so I exported the low poly file into Marmoset and added the normal map, and as you can see below I think it worked quite well and I was able to capture a lot of detail.

I did the same process with the rest of the models.

Week 8: placing it together in UE4

Now that I was happy with all the meshes and the standard of my character I wanted to get it into UE4 to render out for the alpha presentation. 

I first started by importing it all into UE4, I then used the layout I had in Maya to help place the trees and bridge parts. Once I was happy with that I imported the textures, created a simple material for each part and applied them to the correct mesh.

Below is an image of it all in scene with textures applied 

Here I have all the helmets in the scene, I placed then randomly around the Uncle Sam to look like a pile of helmets, this is to resemble all the fallen soldiers during the war,

Here are all the barbed wire pieces placed around the scene, I think these look quite good and once again improve the quality of the scene. 

Here is a shot of the scene with everything in. I am liking the look of my scene in UE4 at the moment and feel it will end up looking quite good .

I wanted to apply a smoke material into the scene to give the scene more of a destroyed look as if bombs had recently gone off and this is the aftermath. when placed on the ground it would block out too much of the scene and you couldnt see anything, I wanted to give just an impression of  it with it blowing across the floor. So I placed it under the scene and to the right slightly so it had time to build and when the smoke would be at its peak, that would be when it passed through my scene, I felt it worked quite well and increased the quality of my scene,

I then needed to place a water material into my scene, for now I found one I liked in the material part of UE4 and I went into the material editor and chnaged some settings to make the waves smaller and also give it a green tint to fit in with my theme. I think at the moment it looks good and after Alpha I shall go and improve on this.

I needed to now create the cameras for my scene, I wanted the first shot to be of uncle Sam pointing towards the camera and then panning out to show the rest of the scene. I then will have some close up shots of the character, then followed by a shot showing the scene, possibly panning around. I will then finish with a camera starting from the edge of the scene moving back onto uncle Sam once again pointing at the camera. 

I would create a camera and then edit the timings of it in the matinee by placing keyframes for how long I wanted a camera to show. Once that was done I was able to render it out, take it into premier and then save it ready for Alpha.  

week 8 - Changes to Diorama -helmet

I wanted to give an impact to my scene and to help place Uncle Sam there, so I had the idea of possibly implying there were dead soldiers around his feet. Of course modelling the bodies would be too hard so I needed something to imply they were there. And I thought of having helmets as these are a good representative of the soldiers.

I first created a high poly of a helmet and then a low poly, I then baked it down and gave it a quick texture for alpha.

Here is a quick image I placed in after alpha to show how they looked in scene.

Another change to my scene before alpha is that I have decreased the size of the base. when I was looking at it I felt uncle Sam was lost in the environment and it wasn't emphasizing  him. So I decreased the size and moved the barbed wire, trees and bridges to help fit the scene. I am very pleased I made this decision as I feel it has given more of an impact on the scene and helped improve the emphasis of uncle Sam. 

Here is a comparison between the new smaller scene and the larger old scene. I really do feel the change of  size has improved the scene and brought it all a lot closer together.

Week 7-8: creating the low poly for Uncle Sam

Now that I was happy with the state of the high poly I needed to create a low poly version of them. I was unsure about how to do this at first but a lecturer came and showed me one method on how it can be created, by using the Maya Modelling Toolkit I am able to create faces which can form to create a mesh. I found this a very satisfying tool to use as I had control on the face layout when doing the topology.  

So I would start by exporting the high poly into Maya, I had to do this one at a time as it would make the computer struggle trying to handle the millions of polys, I was only able to do this at University as my computer at home could not handle it. I would then select the high poly mesh and click on the magnet at the top of the screen, this would make the mesh live which allowed me to model around it when making the faces.
I then began to create one face starting off on the low poly mesh. I then built around this untill I had rows of polys, if they started to become uneven I was able to use a smooth tool which would even out all the edges and make them straight, this tool was very useful.

Here is the final result, The trousers on the left are the low poly, and the ones on the right are high poly. Although I havnt modelled in all the creases I know this can be added in when doing the bake. I am happy with result and was able to bring the poly count down from around 1 to 2 million, down to around 2000, which is a bring improvement.

I did the same process with the shoes.

With the head I created one big low poly mesh which combined the head,hair and the beard 

When doing this I was unsure how it should be layed out as a face's topology is different, so I looked on the internet and found that faces would curve around the eyes and the mouth

http://www.secondpicture.com/tutorials/3d/3d_modeling_a_human_head_with_polygons_in_3ds_max.jpg

This is my final result, I am fairly happy with this and feel the topology works well .

A comparison between the two meshes. 

I then did the same process with the hand

Here is the final result, I was able to take a high poly mesh which was quite a few million polys and reduce it down to under ten thousand, while still keeping the shape.