This week i've been pushing on with getting the characters uv unwrapped and textured by transfer mapping the materials from zbrush using the middleware package xNormal. Texturing is one of the areas I am not as practised at and haven't done very much of for several years, so this was a chance to refresh my memory and work out the appropriate pipeline to get the poly paint information from zbrush into 3dsmax.
In retrospect, one mistake I realised I made whilst working on the human was that I probably should have consolidated all the separate parts into as few texture maps as possible to save memory and keep things stream lined. Instead what I did is texture each bit individually one by one as I brought them into max. This wasn't so much of an issue to begin with as I only had 5 maps to apply, but when I started to add specular and normal maps I realised that 15 textures was probably a bit to much for one character model. Even though I designed the character to have interchangeable clothing that I can customise later, these would still most likely use a texture atlas to save space so this is something I will need to keep in mind next time I do a similar character.
Luckily because the horse doesn't have many overlapping items of clothing I was able to use a single UV map to texture this model. For quite a few of the meshes I found that after I had unwrapped and exported them I needed to go back into zbrush to rescale the final mesh to the sculpt. Somehow the pivot point had gone astray in zbrush and the meshes were not sitting inside each other anymore, so a few textures are a little bit bodged on and needed some clean up in photoshop to readjust parts.
With the texture maps created they all needed cleaning up in photoshop to remove errors and get the best result when rendered in max. This involved colour correction to make the skin on both the human and horse more natural and the right level of brightness. From xNormal I baked out cavity and ambient occlusion maps to apply in photoshop as extra bits of dirt and grime that made the diffuse stand out a bit more. I also needed to smudge the edges of the maps in certain places where the poly paint hadn't quite transfered properly onto the uvs. This process was mostly iterative, checking the models by rendering in 3dsmax before quickly updating things in photoshop.
The final thing to model and texture were the eyes and mouth for the human which needed to be made from scratch. I have been considering close up shots of the character doing facial expressions and possible some lip sync for my showreel to bring that character to life so this area needed lots of detail to give a realistic result.
Huzzah! That is the halfway point for this project done, I now have the most important assets for my showreel produced with the exception of a sword and spear that will be needed for combat moves. I expect I will use placeholders for them when I get animating and texture them towards the end. For now I need to crack on with rigging!
Huzzah! That is the halfway point for this project done, I now have the most important assets for my showreel produced with the exception of a sword and spear that will be needed for combat moves. I expect I will use placeholders for them when I get animating and texture them towards the end. For now I need to crack on with rigging!