Advanced CG Week 5

This week was a busy week, and encompassed both environment and character set-up. I decided to jump back and forth between the two rather than work strictly on one aspect of the animation. This made the work-flow less tedious, and I made a lot of progress in both regards because of it.

The first goal of the week was to get the main character textured. To do this I took the base mesh, imported it to Zbrush and created displacement maps for the folds of the clothing. I then painted it in zbrush, and exported it into photoshop for some finer detail.


Though it may be a bit hard to tell, I added a bit of dirt and grunge to the shorts of the character, as well as a bit of dirt on the boots and gloves. I wanted to give the main character a slightly worn look, but not make him out to be beaten, with tattered clothes and on his last legs. While I want him to appear fatigued, he will be in relatively good health in the animation. He'll be a little bit worse for the wear, but not destitute.

The second goal of the character was to get the skin textured correctly. I currently have subsurface scattering applied onto the skin section of the mesh. Even though the mesh is all one piece, I applied a separate shader to the skin so I wouldn't affect the entire body. Having SSS on a pair of shorts would be pretty strange.

The picture above shows a better shot of the slight variation of the skin tone through subsurface scattering. Various subdermal pigmentations show up depending on the intensity and angle of the light. Obviously there aren't any eyeballs in that shot, but that along with the scarf and shoulder-pads are next on the list of things to do.

Pictured above and below are shots showing the progress on the environment. Right now I have a lot of the chamber displaced and textured. Currently maya crashes every other render in Windows, but it's the only OS that has Zbrush so I have to stick with it until I'm finished texturing. So the progress of getting everything tweaked is slow, but steady. I've begun playing with the lighting of the room. It's still got a ways to go, especially since there will be multiple light sources around the room.

This shot above gives a general idea of how it will look. There will be lights on top of the center piece, as well as around the giant tablets circling the room, which will be taken care of tomorrow. I still need to play around with the light fog coming down from the ceiling, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Going back to character stuff, I got a lot of things done with the character rig. It's got all of the controls in place, and situated how I want them. The skin is bound to the skeleton and I'm getting the deformations that I want out of it.


As you can see in the picture above, I've been messing with the skin weighting. It's going really well and after spending a good deal of time, I'm very pleased with joint creasing and bending. The hands took a ridiculous amount of time, but that's the price you pay for going all out with a 4 finger setup (my last only had 3).

Next on the agenda is to continue working on environment props such as the lights, get the eyes and scarf finished, and start figuring out how I'm going to do the shading and particle effects for my shadow dudes. I'll also need to make a sword, but that shouldn't take too long, since I made a base model for the pre-vis.