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.