Xiahou Ba Developments

There is still a way to go yet, but hopefully all of this stage, baking of normal maps (whether it be from ZBrush or Maya), texture maps, etc, will all be done this weekend.

These renders still have a few patches on them where the base-colour and very extreme colours are still showing through. These need to be fixed up as I go along. That bug I posted about below is still showing up from time to time even when on new layers so I'm not sure what is happening there. I've largely stopped bothering with layers now, but in doing so I'm getting problems and having to re-sculpt and re-paint some areas a few times over: the exact thing layers are supposed to work properly for.

He now has a tattoo on his arm of 'Jin', the kingdom that he is from in 'Dynasty Warriors'. There will be a few more features like this on his character, but mostly on his clothes now. Soon I'll likely start development on his platform that he will stand on for renders and later, 3D printing.

Xiahou Ba Polypainting Clean-up & Detailing - Polypaint Artefacts

Now that Xiahou Ba has his final 'in-game' meshes with the high resolution sculpt and paint information projected down to them, I have started giving him any finishing touches he needs. in the process however, I have ran into a problem regarding Polypainting and the use of Layers in ZBrush.

I have fixed this issue now, but thought I had better post it here to show how to fix the issue for any fellow Googlers.

The top image shows the issue at hand; there are artefacts where I have tried to paint over already-existing paint. The paint can be hidden but only when using 100% pressure over it, which obviously is not what is wanted.

• The problem occurs because of the use of layers.
• When you make a new layer, it will say REC to the right of the layer, signifying it is now recording what you do to your sculpture to add it to that layer. When you are done or want to change layer, you click the REC symbol to make it close the layer.
• If you later decide you need to add more detail to an existing layer, this is where the problem occurs. Trying to paint over data that has already been laid out on that layer will cause artefacts because essentially there is an internal alpha map ZBrush is using to sort the layers of colour as efficiently as possible. This 'internal alpha map' is set up when the layer is closed, and only full pressure can add to it later.
• To fix the issue you can do one of two things:
• Bake all current layers down and don't use layers much if at all when polypainting.
• Or the better option; if you decide you need to add something else to an existing layer, make a new layer above the current one, adding your detail on here instead. Once you're finished, simply merge this new layer down with the one that you want the detail added to. Its a bit of a strange thing to have to do, but that's how it is for now at least.

Xiahou Ba Polypaint Update

I've been doing more work on Xiahou Ba, including researching more into how to prepare him for 3D printing, however this will not be done until after Christmas at the very earliest.

He is now polypainted, at least to a beginning stage. The next step will be to decimate this mesh as one mesh, bring it back into Maya 2015, and retopologise it for PS3/PS4 era resolution. This final mesh will be UV unwrapped, brought back into ZBrush, projected down onto, and then all polypainting and any clean-ups required to the sculpt will be made. From this point it will be business as usual with baking down normal maps and textures, but this time with a lot more effort being put into every stage where possible.

This polypainting is part hand-painted and partly done using Spotlight with some real-life photos as textures. This is the first time I have employed this technique. The system works very well and the results aren't bad, but it really does show how good quality photos to use as textures in the first place would make a huge difference. I used several of my resources from www.3D.sk for this, however I found that simply trying to map one person onto the model as a texture was not going to work. So I split elements of each photo up in Photoshop, such as lips, hair, eyes, ears, various skin patches, and so on. This way I could be much more direct with what I needed in ZBrush. The idea worked great, but I noticed in the end this method produced oddly realistic and yet patchy colours and tones to the sculpture. This made his tan look somewhat weird in the end. I tried to fix the issue as best as I could by dabbing colours and lightly altering them and brushing them back over the model to unify areas of it more. It worked quite well but as a result a lot of the initial Spotlight painting has effectively been lost.

One other area that I tried to accomplish using Spotlight was to get the little hairs on the belly, arms, legs to come out nicely on the textures. However I think a better approach will come later with using Fibremesh and baking the results down to textures instead. This will give more control and far better bump results (hopefully).