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.
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