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!

To start the process of getting the character game ready and suitable for animation I have been retopologising the horse and human to create a low res mesh that can be textured and rigged. This involves drawing verts onto the sculpt to layout the polygons in the best possible shape that matches the original character. It takes a very long time and I have had to make sure that the topology has edge loops around the joints that will allow the mesh to realistically deform for animation. 

Here are the two finished meshes for both the horse and human in 3dsmax ready to be textured. In the end the human came to 7000 polys and horse 5000 polys, which are quite high res for a game characters and I may need to consider cutting that down if I end up sticking them in an engine. For my portfolio that doesn't matter as much as I will be focusing on a quality animation result. However I have tried to keep the poly count at a reasonable level as it will slow me down if I have to rig the characters with ridiculous amounts of detail.

Part of the reason why the human is so high res is because I have been producing each of the parts separately to give me more options. The naked character was done first as a base for the clothes in case I decide to do some combat animations that will need enemies to fight. Because they will share the same rig it wont take long to simply reuse the naked version and get a few more different characters to animate.

The naked human took the longest to do because there were many fiddly areas that need lots of resolution for them to be animated. These include the fingers and face which need edge loops that allow for the many complex shapes these parts can create.

I decided to group all the torso clothing into one piece to simplify the mesh in this area. I expect that I will delete a lot of the geometry on the naked human underneath this to reduce any clipping that occurs when the rig deforms.

Working out the topology on the horse was a bit experimental because I have never animated one before and can't quite expect how the mesh will deform. To help me figure out edge flow I took a look at Edward Muybridge's work on animal movement and the way a horse moves. This helped me understand where the main movements would be coming from and how the joints will need to squash and stretch when animated.

I am a bit behind where I wanted to be by this point, mostly because I've been busy with my job over christmas. I do have a lot more time now though and I will be able to pick up the pace a bit. In two weeks time I plan to have both characters UV unwrapped and textured with diffuse, specular and normals. Once the characters are fully complete inside 3dsmax I can start rigging them up and getting them ready for animation.