Today I think I've gotten Xiahou Ba to the final stages of sculpting in ZBrush, and it might be time to start thinking about colouring him. Using noise maps I have added extra fine detail: a first time thing for my work. The maps work very well but some technical issues can arise I've noticed. For example, telling ZBrush to apply the deformation as a 3D projection doesn't always give best results, ending up with stretching in specific areas of the model. Instead I found I got better results overall telling it to apply to UV space. However as you can imagine, this means it is relying on the UVs being laid out in such a way that this will work. My model from Maya has ever mesh mapped using Automatic Unwrapping. While far from the ideal layouts, these do give optimised, clean layouts at the click of a button. I did this simply in preparation of premature baking of any textures and normal maps for testing, but it turned out it was handy for this purpose too. I did however still have to manually correct parts of the shirt model to get the noise map to loop over the top of his shoulders without deforming. This task ideally needs to be carried out on every mesh that uses noise maps, but for now they all seem to be holding up fairly well.
This image shows the noise map applied to his shirt. The map was made quickly in Photoshop and worked very well for what I wanted it for. The only thing I had to change was the order of the tones that pulled out and pushed in because they were inverse to how I was expecting them to work for whatever reason. Here is the map:
I have begun to colour him but only to get a sense of how I want his final textures to look. This was done the same way as I usually do it; all hand-painted with ZBrushs' default tools. As I briefly mentioned in a previous post I may colour him using a mixture of hand-painting and photo mapping using Spotlight, but I'm still not sure which way I want to take him.
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