Xiahou Ba Polypaint Update

I've been doing more work on Xiahou Ba, including researching more into how to prepare him for 3D printing, however this will not be done until after Christmas at the very earliest.

He is now polypainted, at least to a beginning stage. The next step will be to decimate this mesh as one mesh, bring it back into Maya 2015, and retopologise it for PS3/PS4 era resolution. This final mesh will be UV unwrapped, brought back into ZBrush, projected down onto, and then all polypainting and any clean-ups required to the sculpt will be made. From this point it will be business as usual with baking down normal maps and textures, but this time with a lot more effort being put into every stage where possible.

This polypainting is part hand-painted and partly done using Spotlight with some real-life photos as textures. This is the first time I have employed this technique. The system works very well and the results aren't bad, but it really does show how good quality photos to use as textures in the first place would make a huge difference. I used several of my resources from www.3D.sk for this, however I found that simply trying to map one person onto the model as a texture was not going to work. So I split elements of each photo up in Photoshop, such as lips, hair, eyes, ears, various skin patches, and so on. This way I could be much more direct with what I needed in ZBrush. The idea worked great, but I noticed in the end this method produced oddly realistic and yet patchy colours and tones to the sculpture. This made his tan look somewhat weird in the end. I tried to fix the issue as best as I could by dabbing colours and lightly altering them and brushing them back over the model to unify areas of it more. It worked quite well but as a result a lot of the initial Spotlight painting has effectively been lost.

One other area that I tried to accomplish using Spotlight was to get the little hairs on the belly, arms, legs to come out nicely on the textures. However I think a better approach will come later with using Fibremesh and baking the results down to textures instead. This will give more control and far better bump results (hopefully).