Character Avatar & Other Work

Linked the the refectory project, we then had to create a humanoid character avatar. I chose to make myself.

We need to create a Diffuse and Normal map, as well as have the character rigged for animation.

This involved creating a Diffuse texture in photoshop, from reference images of myself. Building the low polygon avatar also using myself as reference, sculpting the high poly avatar in Mudbox, and rigging the Character in Maya for animation and testing the rig in unity.

Here is the low polygon version of the model, I put in some close up shots of the face to see the topology. It took me a while to get to this point. Later on I added in eyes as a separate mesh.

After creating the low polygon model (actually quite a bit later in the project) I created the diffuse texture. This was difficult, and after a while I got a result, how I don't think it looked too good, and I should have spent some more time on it, especially the face.

This diffuse includes the AO map, which made some parts of the face look a little strange.

I also created this texture on the eye from an online image to get a quick result.

Here is the AO map standalone.

Tanguy helped me get the folds of the t-shirt right in the sculpt, he encouraged me to do a sketch first which really helped.

After I spent a while tweaking it and working towards it I got a result I liked, it isn't perfect but I feel it works well, there is some nice sharp detail and the mesh does look interesting, even if some parts of the sculpt are a bit rough.

Here is the finished normal map, there was a bit of cleaning up I needed to do in photoshop, though not too much.

Another part of the project was rigging. I spent most time on this setting up the bones. After those were set up I simply added a heat map and slightly tweaked the vertex weights, the rig was rough but it was functional. At this point of the project we were running out of time so I took the quick route.

Unfortunately I lost my copy of the Unity rig file, so I couldn't upload a screen shot of it, the folder seemed to be empty in all backups, so something must have gone wrong. The rig was decent however with big movements, like moving the arms above or below 45 degrees, there was some clipping and strange deforming.

The final render I was happy with, I could have done a lot better but for a first character I feel it went well, especially with how quickly I did a few of he steps because of time.

I think better time management on this project, leaving room to iron out some bugs in the maps and work on the diffuse some more would have made the final result a lot nicer.

Aside from our main projects, we also had a few lessons with Robin where we learned other things.

We learnt the basics of Zbrush, how to get around some of the interface, however I unfortunately do not have any screens of this.

We were also at one time on the way to practicing dDo and nDo, however we didn't make it in the end, I think we decided that it was a complex way to start, so went went through nDo and how it works and left it there. I learned a few Maya tools in unwrapping that have been useful since, it was just a tick box, but sometimes that is just what you need.

We were given a plane with no UVs.

I got to the point where I had most of the plane unwrapped, and all texture space was even.

 The "Keep Image Width/Height Ratio" check box was very useful as it avoided having to scale any UVs whenever they were created.

I created this in nDo for some practice when we were going through the basics. Overall I found the programs quite easy to use.

One cool things we did was learn to use the Maya 2014 quad draw feature. We seemed to get to grips with it quite quickly as it was a very easy feature to use, however I also discovered some places where it can get confused and struggle, this gave me a further idea of how to treat topology as I am using it and with models in general.

(WIP screen?)