Lord Beritra Progress

Still working on him. Still not managing to finish it in the few hours I have after work each night -.-

His textures are coming along, though still more work is needed. This is his final mesh at least now though.

Lord Beritra Update

Was hoping to get this model finished today, but not quite there yet. Some of his textures need work doing inside ZBrush to make sure things line up on the UV maps. I thought I had planned for this while unwrapping, but apparently I hadn't thought of everything. Thus, the paint-to-model approach will be needed!

Here is the progress so far. All done inside Marmoset Toolbag.

Yeah I know he probably doesn't have florescent blue eyes, but you never get to see them in-game, so I took some create liberties. If you move the camera to look at him straight-on, he has much the same appearance as he does in-game at least.... meaning you can't see his eyes at all behind his hood. :)

Xiahou Ba Game-Ready Mesh Projection

After some of the previous disasters regarding re-projecting the high resolution details down to the 'game-ready' mesh, I decided to roll back a step, fix up the mesh a lot more, as well as splitting it up more appropriately, and completely UVing the model properly. The resulting model in Maya looks far better now, also cleaning up his hair and making sure it won't have hard jagged edges on the final model. His eyes have been properly constructed now, with a reflection layer over the eye balls themselves.

Unlike my previous 'Jo White' project, the shadows will be painted directly into the eye ball textures themselves (if required at all), instead of using an overlaying mesh to control this. Or at least this is my thinking at this stage of development. I may find through trial and error that the way I did it before is still a better way in general.

This is Xiahou Ba brought back into ZBrush as all of his separate meshes. The blue parts signify the areas that will not have anything baked out for them, and should be left alone. They are there simply to 'fill in the blanks' for reference purposes.

Note: Just randomly noting here, previous post had image enlargement LightBox functionality broken which was annoying enough, and now this image I just posted here keeps uploading with a horrid red tint to what should be neutral grey... no idea what's going on now. Oh well.

Xiahou Ba - Fully Clothed

Finally finished the initial clothing meshes for Xiahou Ba. He is now in ZBrush and each part of him is being sculpted within an inch of its life. I plan to use several new techniques I've learnt between now and my older 'Jo White' project, including micro-meshing and using customised noise to add extra-fine details. His textures might also involved a much more photo-centric approach, rather than being fully hand-painted, but I'm not entirely sure what way I want to go with it yet.

This is still at an early stage of sculpting, but the idea is to get all of him up to this standard before going back to each piece and really refining them. I need to be careful not to loose his soft, puffy-face look too; one of Xiahou Ba's defining elements I think. :)

Xiahou Ba Progress

Development with this project have been slow with the extra 2D work I've been doing lately, along with customizing my new Filofax book, but its still ongoing at least. Here is the progress so far. The next stage is to build him hands and feet (probably separately from this sculpture first, then Frankensteined on later). Once I have him to that stage where he has all of the parts of his body he needs, I can refine him over and over again until I'm happy, then retopologise him, and pose him, then possibly sculpt the pose again to fix any issues and make it more natural. I may also retopologise him roughly as soon as his full body is created before refinement, simply to not rely on ZRemesher, and make the mesh work the way I want it to.

Rudimentary skin shader :)