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.

Ongoing Xiahou Ba Rigging Failures

Bare in mind before reading this, this is the 3rd time I've pretty much typed this issue out trying to get help to fix it from Polycount and Area forums.

The issues are less than when I previously posted thankfully, however they are still far from correct. 

The stage I am at now is simply putting the motion capture skeleton into T-pose to match my characters pose, keyframed on frame -1 so that it doesn't affect the data in any way. This T-posed version is the duplicated to make sure both rigs are exactly the same, but of course the duplication does not keep its keyframed animation data.

Using Maya's built-in HumanIK system for retargeting animation data, I create a new skeleton rig for each skeleton. Then you simply tell the character's skeleton (the duplicate), to follow the original motion capture skeleton as a source of data. This works, but goes very wrong.

Above shows both the original and duplicate rig on top of one another. I have also told the major joints to show their local rotation axis to show that they are set up correctly and are both identical to one-another. You can also see HumanIK believes there to be no problems with either skeleton.

Above here shows you what happens when I tell my character's skeleton to follow the motion capture data. The skeleton of my character becomes all bent out of shape. Below shows you a better rendition of what is going wrong here:

This is very frustrating. The issues looks like it must be caused by a difference in joint rotation between the two skeletons, but there isn't one. I'm not sure why the skeleton moves its root (pelvis bone) up a bit from where it should be too, or why the wrists are bending when the animation is played instead of the elbows as they are on the motion capture data. Both skeletons are set up anatomically correctly in the HumanIK editor, so surely this should not happen either.

All I can do is wait for someone with better knowledge in this to get back to me and hope its a simple fix. So close, yet so far.... I must be missing something really silly!

Xiahou Ba Rigging Failure #1

Now that I have started my Christmas holidays for the year, I have decided to proceed with the final stages of my Xiahou Ba project. This involves any ironing out of texture issues I may still find, but mostly rigging and rendering. I originally planned to be able to apply free downloaded motion capture data to this model from Mixamo to use simply to make my characters more lively, without having to go into the massive effort of animating myself; something that I am not great at.

To do this requires bringing in the motion captured file with my own project, and retargetting the animation from their skeleton to my own. The process sounds simple enough, but from my past work at university I already knew this would be a nightmare.

I set up both of the rigs as defined HumanIK rigs for Maya to reference, then told my character to follow the original animation of the imported skeleton. While this process worked, the results were far from satisfactory.

As you can see, there is a lot of stretching and generally broken animation here. It appears to fix this the model would have to be standing in the same stance as the rig from which the animation is being referenced. While this is not impossible to do, it will take a lot of time and possibly cause some problems, but it will be the next step now for this project. I would very much like to get this working as it should.

Xiahou Ba Test Renders

With the textures (probably) finally finished, I decided to do some render tests using Mental Ray in Maya 2015. The shaders are all mia shaders but his skin is not a sub-surface scattering shader because I was having issues trying to get him normal maps to render nicely on it. This is an issue I will spend more time with later on with final renders.

There are several things that need changing on these render, but very few of them now I think relate to the actual data he is created with, such as his model and textures. The faults are with the techniques I used for rendering each area of him, and am I aware this lighting setup has much to be desired also.

His eyes have lenses built over them as a separate layer of polygons; a standard practice in current / next generation characters. This 'lense' layer also have an alpha texture that creates a gradient from transparent black, to fully transparent. This simulates shadowing on the eyes no matter what angle you're at, giving them a deeper, more realistic feel. However, it might be that for proper renders (so not real-time, in-game scenarios), that this technique is not required. In this render it is present, but the way the lighting casts off of it gives the eyes a dull, dead look compared to what was desired. 

Also each individual shader was set up reasonably quickly, some of which using the presets that Maya provides for things like 'Chrome', 'MattePlastic', and so on. The downside to this is that some maps, often specifically the specular maps, haven't had much of a chance to shine. You can see them present in the shirt and shorts the most, but other areas such as the skin really needed them to have a boost. This render below does show them off somewhat better simply because he has no shirt on: