Style Matrix - Final week and submission

Aviator character Post mortem

The third and final week came around so quickly but looking back I really completed a good amount in my remaining days before hand in. Right at the start of the week I was retopologising my hi-poly mesh. A new technique I hadn’t seen before which allows you to effectively trace over your hi mesh and forming with planes a lower poly mesh. These meshes then fit together accurately in order to bake one on top of the other projecting the detail from the hi to the low. The process of retopologising itself is simple however it took a good 2 days to do my whole model including the cap and hair as the Zbrush programme kept crashing and would lose my progress. Unsure as to what was creating the crash I had to just persevere with the programme saving every few minutes. Eventually I got it done but looking back at my lower poly vs my hi-poly I could have made the geometry a bit more lenient to the hi-poly form coupled with the fact I was approximately 2,000 tris under budget I really feel the final bake result may have looked better if I had used the geometry more sparingly.

During this week I also built the harness gear in basic form in 3DS max. I decided to do an alternative method of using Zbrush whereby I imported my lower-poly mesh into the programme then built over it with subdivision mesh. I wanted to test out to see which of the two methods was better to do as well as utilising the geometric base I started with to keep the straps as flat as possible. This all took me about a day to do. The following day I tackled baking and found the programme Xnormal easier to bake out a normal map from rather than generating one from a texture which is what crazy bump used to do. My first normal map however had incredibly harsh lines over it and I couldn’t figure out why this was the case. After asking around I discovered it was because my base mesh didn’t have any smoothing groups. At some point during the UVW unwrap stage I must have cleared all the smoothing IDS which is why the lines were appearing. Annoyingly I had to painstakingly go back over my lower poly model and apply logical smoothing groups to it again. This did the trick and fixed my normal map. Unfortunately looking back Ive now noticed little ghost arms on the trouser legs of my Aviator character. Im thinking this is because the programme projected the arms by the sides of the character down onto the trouser creating the impression. To address this issue in future I will probably separate garments of clothing and bake them individually.

harness_low

harness_render

Another issue I had was baking the Occlusion map which I know Xnormal can do no problem but for some reason when I went to bake and render the texture nothing happened and the progress bar remained stationary for over an hour. This was a big worry as I really didn’t have time to waste. The programme substance painter was suggested to me in order to bake out the ambient occlusion map. Although the map it produced was incredibly messy but it did work to some degree. Had I had more time left I would have investigated further into why my models didn’t want to bake correctly.

As usually I left texturing till the last minute and I can’t say I’m overly pleased with the final result. The dirt on the characters face is particularly unrealistic and the skin visuals themselves could use some improvement. Looking back at my work I think I really should have included more maps such as roughness and maybe even specular to improve the appearance of my character. I still cant help but feel the end look of my character doesn’t reflect the effort I put into the sculpt of the hi-poly.