Maya 2016 Normal Map Bug

Technically this is not a bug. It is just a different default way that Maya 2016 now loads textures compared to all previous versions that can be frustrating when you don't know what's happening. Here is a demonstration on my State Alchemist project when I first brought in his normal maps for testing:

Beta normal maps applied to a Phong Shader in Maya 2016. Viewport 2.0 (Default), DirectX11 Render Engine. (OpenGL Render Engine produces the same results.)

As you can see, on the left the normal maps do not evaluate as expected. If you simply went through the paces of adding the maps on in Maya 2015 or below, you would immediately see the result shown on the right. 

At first it is not entirely clear what is wrong with the maps, but luckily I had seen this before in Unreal Development Kit a few years ago while in university, and so had an idea of where to start looking.

You can see the thread on my university project here to see the same issue in the UDK game engine:

http://catburglarsgame.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/udk-normal-map-research.html

Essentially the maps have been forced into a colour-managed environment, thanks to all the new viewport colour controls introduced in Maya 2016. As a result, the colours of the maps have been slightly altered internally, and so do not render as expected.

Luckily there is an easy fix!

Above is the issue. You may notice that the texture panel in the attributes editor to the left looks a tiny bit different to Maya 2015 now. Here's what has to be changed:

Changing the colour space to 'Raw', we are telling Maya not to enforce its own colour management on this texture file, and therefore it will work exactly the same way as it always used to in previous versions. However, it is still somewhat annoying to now have to remember yet another extra step during material setup....

Now you can see the problem has been resolved. As far as I am aware, there is no option to make Raw imported textures the norm unfortunately. Let me know if you find a way though!

State Alchemist Progress

I've continued to develop my State Alchemist project. He is now full UV mapped and has been brought into ZBrush, where I am creating his high resolution mesh bit by bit. After this, he will be textured in a combination of ZBrush and Photoshop. 

A State Alchemist - Fullmetal Alchemist

I've been working on three projects at a time lately, as much of a bad idea as that is....

So I've finished project Xiahou Ba finally, though I'm looking to get a small animation of him rendered out at some point, so will wait until then before posting his final renders. Since then, I have started a torso sculpt using Xiahou Ba as a base. The final outcome however, should look nothing like him. He will also be a simple sculpt, nothing more.

Alongside this, I have been recreating my old Jo White project, mostly to address her low quality yet high resolution texture issues. However, when I started to look at these issues I found a bunch more with her general design that I will now address too. These were all problems caused by not spending enough time on parts of her, especially towards the end of the project. 

My third project came to me while watching the original 'Fullmetal Alchemist' anime, as well as seeing what Koei have been creating with toon-shaders: 'Arslan Warriors'. This is the subject of this post. 

This is my 'State Alchemist' model so far. The end result is a hope of a reasonably low resolution model that makes use of toon shaders to look like anime.

The above image shows some design ideas behind the model, as well as future corrections, and a quick paint-over to figure out details later on. Many of the details will be achieved through texture maps as opposed to geometry to keep polycount down for this project. 

The first image shows blue arrows following the extended cloth areas. They signify that on the final model, these parts of the model will be rigged up to be dynamic cloth. They are modelled spread open like this to give them more surface area, allowing them to crumple and fold more realistically when gravity takes hold over them. 

The second image shows areas that need correction after studying the design I'm going for.

Zaffina from Blade & Soul Artwork

Continuing on with the artwork of my characters in the up-coming MMORPG, Blade & Soul (in NA/EU), I have drawn my main character. She was originally from Aion, but has translated surprisingly easily to Blade & Soul with its detailed character creator.

This is the colour version of the image. All of these pieces have colour versions and were filtered using Reticulation in Photoshop CC to get this effect. The warmth the noise brings helps to blend the tones together more coherently, producing a more realistic feel.

Blade & Soul - Cao Rui

I did a different portrait first. This is or will be 'Cao Rui'. Again, he originated from Aion as a Gladiator class, and will be my Blade Master in Blade & Soul.

Blade & Soul BETA Artwork

So I tried out Blade & Soul, an MMO that has already been out for 3-odd years, but is only now making its way over to the west. The game was great, and I highly recommend it!

With it being in its BETA phase at the moment, I could really mess around with the character creator and not have to worry about buying plastic surgery tickets later on when I decide that my characters look wrong. I made a Force Master, taking on the name of my main avatar in Aion, 'Zaffina', and a Summoner, taking on the name of my Elyos Ranger from Aion, 'Zact'. 

This is my Summoner in-game:

I decided to draw a more realistic version of his character where I tried to bring out the role he plays as a character I originally created in Aion. He is a young man who is too naive for the world of war that he lives in.

Next I plan to do a similar portrait of 'Zaffina', bringing out her character colours. This is her in Blade & Soul:

Love my 18-300mm Sigma Lens!

Though I had had this lens a while now, since going on holiday to Venice in September in fact, this was the first time I set it up properly to point it at the night sky. I managed to snap this lovely picture of the moon, though in future I may look into getting a telescope with a camera adapter for it to take even better photos!

Splendours of China Books Coming Soon!

After about 4-5 months work, these books will be ordered tomorrow from Blurb! I've ordered several tests of various aspects of the books the company creates, allowing me to gain a better understanding of what I need to do to get the most out of the service. One such book was the 'Art of Aion' book posted a few posts below. 

These books all tell the same story, but in different ways. Centre-stage is the photobook, which also includes an abridged version of the journal text alongside 440 pages of photos! Then there is the story book, which covers the entire journey in detail, and is also accompanied by a few photos. The last book is a plain text book printed in black & white, and is the entire story, including more thoughts on different subjects and more ramblings on. 

Hardback Image-wrapped, Standard Semi-Matte Photo Paper, Full Colour printing.

Hardback, Bleach-white Standard Paper, Full Colour printing.

Softback, Black & White printing, Economy Cream Paper.

Hopefully everything goes well and they all come out just as expected! When they truly are finalized, they will be posted up here as interactive .SWF books. I have not decided yet if I will try to sell the photobook through Blurb though.

Why my shoulders don't deform properly

So I should have seen this coming. In future I must remember to check over my mesh more carefully before continuing to bake maps from ZBrush to it. 

As you can see, the topology around the shoulders is flowing incorrectly, travelling down the arms instead of up and over the shoulders. 

Aion Artbook

This is something else that I have been working on. I originally only created it to test a few things about the quality of Blurbs book printing services, but the project quickly gained momentum with the amount of data I had to put into it.

Aion is an online MMORPG that I played on and off from 2009 > 2015, sinking a lot of time into it. While this is often seen as a bad thing, I did meet some great friends through this game, and loved playing it with them! To make the most of the ridiculous amount of time that I played it, I thought I may as well make it the subject for a book.

You can view the finished version of the book that was sent to the printers, here:

WARNING: This book is 20MB in file-size, so it might take a minute of two to load up. When it does, you should see a white page with AION's logo on it. Click or click and drag the top corners of the pages to turn through it.

Book Unavailable until late April 2016

View Full Size here!

My photobook of my travels through China over March > April is taking a while it seems. I'm adding a written journal in with the photos too, and its taking a long time to make sure there are no mistakes and that I'm not leaving things out. 

Currently I'm throwing together some tests for the printers to see the quality of the end book, and to guide myself with colours and contrast required in each photo. I plan to have this all done by the end of July, at the latest! I'm eager to get back onto sculpting!

I started a drawing in Photoshop the other day but I've not had time to progress with it any further yet. Once this book is done I can refocus my efforts to my next project, and get my portfolio site back up and running! 

In the mean time, here is an example of what I've been working on these past few months:

Splendours of China Book

So since I got back from China roughly a month ago, I've been busy sorting through all 12-13,000 photos, and arranging them and adding metadata to each of them with all kinds of random information such as GPS locations and weather information from the days they were taken, etc. It has taken quite a while to do properly, but its finally done now!

The next stage was to develop a photobook of the holiday. I was originally going to go with the same company I went with last time, Book Printing UK, but a friend at work told me about what he believes to be a better place to get it done, Blurb. Upon reviewing both options, taking into account options given such as sizes and paper qualities, I decided Blurb was the way to go this time.

It is fun creating this but its also somewhat a daunting task with the amount of photos I have, and the amount of information I want to put into the book. I kept a travel journal while I was out there which will be re-written properly, and put into this book in the appropriate places. I also want to talk more about the history for specific areas and objects, as well as China in general, so its a lot of things to consider.

The above page layout will be used in the book appendix to show a double-page spread per city of photos taken. It allows for 234 photos per city, but that's already not enough for most cities. At least selecting these photos is easier than trying to find good photos to use as section covers and the book cover from the thousands of photos taken!

Back from China!

I'm back from my holiday in China! Soon this blog will resume as normal once I've settled back down here at home and had a chance to sort out my memories, stories, and many, many photos from the trip!

Xiahou Ba Long Overdue Work

So lately I have been doing a mixture or overtime at work, a lot of gaming, and getting everything ready for my three week holiday to China! So my personal work (Xiahou Ba project in this case) has taken a back seat lately.

Over the past few days I have been working on Xiahou Ba from time to time, as well as still thinking on how to make him for a 3D print, and my likely next project, Zhu Ran.

Most of the work has been still trying for the motion capture data to work, and I'm getting a lot closer with every try. I'm currently in the stages of what will *hopefully* be my last attempt with a good outcome. I have found one or two small issues with some of his textures which have been and are being ironed out. For example, on the area below his belly button the normal map went a bit wrong. Either that or the sculpt data did and I never noticed it until now somehow. I have fixed the issue in Photoshop, and it all looks fine there now.

I also spent some time in a separate file in Maya, making all of the final Mental Ray shaders that will be used on the final renders of Xiahou Ba. These also include sub-surface scattering shaders made for his head, eyes, and body; basically anywhere where his skin is visible. Initial testing on flat squares shows all shaders to be working correctly with no need for major work, however this may change once applied to his actual 3D model, especially in the case of the sub-surface scatter shaders.

Each Mental Ray material rendered on separate polygon squares.

The render quality here is somewhat awful if you can still tell on this shrunken image. The final gather rays are too few, leaving mottled, blotchy patches of light on him. Also the original render was pretty dark so I adjusted this in Photoshop later. The render is using a large HDR image for image-based lighting. The eyes are working pretty well now that I remembered to make the lens parts of his eyes not send or receive shadows. The renderer hates rendering his hair; takes ages :) I may revisit his hair in attempt to reduce the stretched, angled gradient look that you see when looking at Ba front on as seen above.

Much like my 3D work (and 2D work), my portfolio site redesign has also taken a back seat lately. I originally had plans to update the entire site in January 2015, but that never happened, although the site did make some significant developments during this time in local testing, including a custom-made JavaScript gallery and PHP messaging form contact page. The new release time period for the new site is now the end of this month, February 2015.