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 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).

Xiahou Ba - Detailing & Initial Colouring

Today I think I've gotten Xiahou Ba to the final stages of sculpting in ZBrush, and it might be time to start thinking about colouring him. Using noise maps I have added extra fine detail: a first time thing for my work. The maps work very well but some technical issues can arise I've noticed. For example, telling ZBrush to apply the deformation as a 3D projection doesn't always give best results, ending up with stretching in specific areas of the model. Instead I found I got better results overall telling it to apply to UV space. However as you can imagine, this means it is relying on the UVs being laid out in such a way that this will work. My model from Maya has ever mesh mapped using Automatic Unwrapping. While far from the ideal layouts, these do give optimised, clean layouts at the click of a button. I did this simply in preparation of premature baking of any textures and normal maps for testing, but it turned out it was handy for this purpose too. I did however still have to manually correct parts of the shirt model to get the noise map to loop over the top of his shoulders without deforming. This task ideally needs to be carried out on every mesh that uses noise maps, but for now they all seem to be holding up fairly well.

This image shows the noise map applied to his shirt. The map was made quickly in Photoshop and worked very well for what I wanted it for. The only thing I had to change was the order of the tones that pulled out and pushed in because they were inverse to how I was expecting them to work for whatever reason. Here is the map:

I have begun to colour him but only to get a sense of how I want his final textures to look. This was done the same way as I usually do it; all hand-painted with ZBrushs' default tools. As I briefly mentioned in a previous post I may colour him using a mixture of hand-painting and photo mapping using Spotlight, but I'm still not sure which way I want to take him.