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.

Xiahou Ba - Maya Development

Project Xiahou Ba should be finished within the coming week or so. The finishing touches have been made to the sculpt and polypainting over this weekend, and now all of the diffuse and normal maps have been baked out from ZBrush, combined where necessary, and plugged into his Maya model.

The next stage is to create all of the composite maps to improve the diffuse maps, and create any other required maps such as specular and alpha maps. After that I will begin rigging, which leads to posing and rendering for the final outcomes.

I have baked his belt spikes and his necklace in Maya to give them textures and normal maps (and the alpha map for his necklace), all of which went very smoothly. I also created his hair and completely UV mapped it too. He still needs a few more bits like his mouth and his eye lashes creating properly, but he is now 90% finished on the model-front.