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:

Xiahou Ba Final Model Production

Over the past week and a lot over this weekend, I have been working on Xiahou Ba's textures, cleaning them up and adding a lot more detail through the use of lightmaps, cavity maps, Nvidia's xNormal plugin for Photoshop, various custom Photoshop brushes, and so on. The model is finally starting to come to an end before it goes into rigging and animation / posing stages for final renders.

POST WITHIN A POST: Notice how different the top image is to the bottom image posted here. This is a really irritating problem I've been having for the past month or so with uploading images to this blog and now finally found the answer. In my Google+ account it by default has 'Enhance Uploaded Photos' set to Normal (meaning yes), which has made my uploads look all the wrong colours and have unwanted effects all over them. Turned it to 'Off' and all works fine now. Stupid system. Really should be off by default........

There is still a way to go before he is truly finished here. Notice that his materials all look quite shiny with the introduction of his specular maps, but this will change when more appropriate shaders are applied; currently he is using full Phong shaders. The same can be said for other areas that require more advanced shaders to bring them so life, while still relying on real-time graphics. The eyes particular still look dead and plain, but with real-time reflections on their lenses they should look much better. His thin pink wrist band requires translucency to look right. His metallic parts such as his spikes and belt buckle also all require real-time reflections to be brought to life.

As a side note I also want to change his hair-style a bit to give him more fringe, but this is as far as I will take him on this fine night :) Also I found 'Depth-Peeling' transparency sorting in Viewport 2.0 is by far the best type now, reflecting the results your would expect to see in games.... so that's good :D

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.

Xiahou Ba Progression - Difference Between Baking Normal Maps in ZBrush & Maya

While I continue to develop my rendition of Xiahou Ba from Dynasty Warriors 7/8, I have been running some tests with the texture data I'm getting back from the high resolution sculpt in ZBrush. The UVs are holding up very well which I am pleased with, but I noticed some of his normal maps have a little to be desired still; they often seemed a bit faint or flat in areas, compared with the true 3D sculpture.

Looking into this problem online for a while, I started reading posts from people saying ZBrushs' normal map baking is very weak and they don't even use it for this reason. Instead, they use their original 3rd-party application for this job, such as Maya, Modo, Max, or XSI.

(Softimage XSI no longer exists as of 2015 by the way)

With this idea, I decided to bring a high resolution mesh from ZBrush (Sub-division Level 5) into Maya, along with its 'game-ready' counterpart. I then used Maya's 'Transfer Maps' tools under its 'Rendering' tool-set to bake the surface information from the high resolution mesh to the low resolution mesh in the form of a normal map. The results certainly are different, and it does seem Maya does produce slightly superior results:

This GIF animation shows the actual difference between the bake from ZBrush, compared with the bake from Maya. The frames are spaced 2 seconds apart, so give it time.

To accompany this, I will provide you with the high resolution bakes themselves. The top image shows the results split next to eachother, and the bottom images show the full results side-by-side.

From studying the differences between the two map bakes, both completely unadulterated, you can make some general observations straight off the bat:

• Maya's bake contains stronger reds and greens, increasing the overall intensity of the normal map compared to that from ZBrush.
• ZBrush by enlarge has a cleaner resulting map straight away, with less tangent distortion around the neck and bottom of the torso on the map. However it is important to point out at this stage that Maya can fix these issues with tweaking of its options; it is simply the case that ZBrush appears to be more optimised for this kind of work from the get-go.
• ZBrush appears to have possibly distorted the baked results very slightly, most noticeable on these bakes around the nipples and under the arms. Despite saying that however, I'm still not 100% sure it really is distortion, and it could be Maya that has distorted the results instead and that they simply just look a bit better. This would all be down to the target search area set up in each software package accordingly.

In other words, it might be that Maya produces better, stronger results overall, but they require more tweaking around the edges and more tweaking of the options before each bake than ZBrush. It would theoretically be possible to also intensify and adjust the normal map bakes from ZBrush to get better results also, however this process can be very difficult to do without breaking the continuity of the maps (seams can suddenly become violently visible if you simply increase the contrast on the maps).

These GIF animations shows the results working on the actual model. Especially pronounced on the greyscale images, you can see that the baked map from Maya gives a much greater sense of 3D than that from ZBrush.

I would not call this testing conclusive. While Maya holds better results than ZBrush for this model, the same might not be true for other models. Also remember that both of these maps are made using somewhat standard settings in both applications, and so further tweaking of the options may produce better results and worse results in both software packages respectively. However the issue with ZBrush baking normal maps to look much flatter and less intensive is something that has no options to modify. For this reason alone, I think further testing with Maya might hold better results for my future projects.

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 Clothing Progress

Finished his shorts and shoes now, as well as fixed up his belt a bit more, although it still needs work. Next is his hat and then his wrist accessories before bringing him back into ZBrush for final sculpting and Polypainting.

Xiahou Ba - Initial Retopology for Base-Mesh

I've finished the initial retopology stage to be used as the new base-mesh in ZBrush. This mesh will have all of the current detail projected onto it, and I will then progress from there instead of the Dynamesh mesh that I currently have in ZBrush. This process should make the model much more efficient and easier to work with in the future.

I have tried to keep this mesh as clean as possible, using only quads for better deformation, and trying not to alter the edge-flow too much as this often causes tight angles to appear on the sculpture surface at higher resolutions. This mesh is not build for 'in-game use'; it is only to be used as a base-mesh. The final mesh topology will be built once the character is fully sculpted from this model, and that will be the mesh that takes into account animation deformation and required resolution changes for each area of the body.

This was all done in Maya 2015 using its vastly improved 'Modelling-Toolkit' tools. The resulting mesh is 6876 triangles, marked down from the original decimated mesh of 169,176 triangles, and that came from a mesh of around 1 million triangles.

Project 'Marcus White' - Closed

Hello world! Long time no speak!

I will be updating this blog on a regular occurrence again now, but before I do I just want to point out (in case it was not obvious already) that project 'Marcus White' is now officially closed. I have decided to stop working on him because it has been so long since I last did that looking at his model now, I can see so many problems and mistakes on him. I know I can do a lot better now, so plan to start (and finish) a new 3D project in the near future. For now I have been building up to doing this by practicing my 2D skills again on digital canvases.

Before this project is hidden deep on my computer, I decided to take it into Maya 2015 and do some real-time renders of it using Maya Hardware 2.0 to show off what I was working with before I stopped.

(The final state of the retopology process to the right)

On a note there, since Maya 2014 and especially now in 2015, the new tools for retopology in Maya are damn awesome! I use them more and more often at work now to help in the process of creating very complex, but accurate high resolution meshes. They work wonderfully!

Above is a real-time skin shader (no textures so the colour still looks very flat unfortunately, though it does have a *cough FAKE cough* sub-surface scattering effect on it which works nicely. He also is lightly reflecting a high resolution HDR image that was has been blurred in hardware too.