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.

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 Update #3

Tonight I added his necklace and fixed his belt, both technically and stylistically. He now has a much more rock-themed belt to match his retro clothing.

I noticed the model currently stands at just over 100,000 triangles, making it a bit on the wrong side of optimised for games, however this will eventually be rectified once his sculpting is finished in ZBrush using this mesh as its' base. The majority of the model will then be retopologised down to a low resolution mesh with not only normal maps baked, but also textures created from the high resolution geometry data, such as his necklace for example.

Xiahou Ba Clothing Progress #2

Xiahou Ba now has his shirt as well as some amendments.

The next step is the necklace, hat, and wrist bands. I like the way he is turning out now, just need to keep it up. I will take a short break from him for a few hours or over two or three nights to do some 2D work now.

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 Clothing

After a bunch of ideas of how I should dress Xiahou Ba for this project, I finally decided to do a 'retro' style 1990's take on his clothing as an odd outfit for him. This is a very rough scribble-over ZBrush render to get an idea of how his cloths will work together in the end. So far I am about 90% of the way through modelling his shorts, with only a few more details to add to them such as his belt buckle, back pockets, and possible some more seams. At this point I should also point out that the colours on the concept are very much not final.

Once I have completed the initial base-mesh of his trousers I also need to correct some of their shaping, then move onto his shoes, necklace, wrist accessories, and hat. His shirt should be fine to all be done in ZBrush, with possibly manual retopology if it requires.

Caleb Landry Jones

Decided to do another 2D piece while working on my Xiahou Ba, so chose Caleb Landry Jones as a subject. I was listening to the 'Game of Thrones Season 4 Soundtrack', and a lot of the 'You Are No Son Of Mine' song in particular at the time, hence wanting to do something a bit more dark looking. I tried to get the tones and colours right all over the image but I'm still not 100% happy with it, although drawing attention to the eyes (particularly the left eye; our left) worked out well in the end I think. Created in Photoshop CC using my Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet as always.

The piece was originally done at 2000 x 1600. It reduced well but the noise added to the original looks a bit weird up-close I think....

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.

Xiahou Ba Turntable Progress

I finally got 'Xiahou Ba' to grow hands and feet, and refined him a bit more, although still reasonably far from the point of his initial retopologisation and such. I decided to use this new skin material from a tutorial I followed, although it wasn't until the end that I realised it won't look all that great until the model is at least textured too, so I fell down on that part. However, when used on a base colour it isn't so bad.

Here is the progress. Note that the .GIF below is something like 8MB so it could take a few seconds to show or play properly. 

The .mov was actually smaller in file-size, better quality, and original scale, so I'm still questioning myself as to why I made a .GIF out of it.... but oh well. Oh and also Noise in specularity is the best thing since sliced bread! :D

Yes, yes I've seen the bald patch too now that I've exported him.... The hair model is actually a mesh from his PS3 model, so not sure what has happened there; most likely I somehow missed that part of the mesh when selecting it to bring into ZBrush, and hadn't noticed till now. -.-

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 :)