Abbas - Final Model

Abbas - Final Rigged and Posed Model

I finished rigging the model and have posed him; I am adapting the original steampunk concept and using it as an influence. I wanted him to appear quite majestic but also inherently old, so I gave him a slightly crooked back and posture. Now that I have him rigged I will bring him into Unity for a final render and build with improved lighting.

Abbas - Rigging

Once again starting the rigging process using the Human IK skeleton. I have become quite adept at this part of the process due to my previous project, however the weight painting and posing is still fairly new to me so that may take slightly longer. This is however the home stretch and posing my character will be one of the last things I do before I create a final render.

Abbas - Final Low Poly Model Textured

This is how the low poly model currently looks with the texture maps applied. I am extremely happy with how it turned out; the maps are by far the most successful I have ever done and I feel like this character is a huge leap in what I have achieved previously. I think the lighting that I set up in Maya really helps the textures and colours to pop more, so I will have to replicate a similar set up in Unity or Unreal, whichever I decide to present my character in. All that remains now is to rig him and pose him to add a hint of character and context to him, as well as build a small piece of scenery or a character plinth for him to stand on to further create a sense of place.

Abbas - Texture Maps

Here are the baked out maps from xNormal. I'm really happy with how they turned out eventually; they took a fair bit of tweaking, fixing errors by painting them by hand but I think the end result is quite impressive. I look forward to assembling these maps into materials that I can apply to my low poly, I'm hoping that the result will look close to how my high poly appeared. UV mapping is still by far my weakest point, so focusing on UV mapping, edge flow, seam placement and texture creation will definitely be my focus over the summer as I work on smaller projects. These are some of my more successful maps as they have retained a very high level of detail like the pattern on the waistcoat, so hopefully this high level of detail will show up on my actual low poly model.

Abbas - Finished High Poly with Vertex Colours

Here is the finished high poly model in zBrush, complete with vertex colours that were painted by hand using the polypaint tool in zBrush. This is the final model I will be pulling the detail from to bake onto my low poly. I am very happy with how this turned out, I think the level of detail is exactly where I wanted to be; fairly high detail but still quite stylised and painterly. In this respect I feel I have achieved my goal of a 'Clone Wars' style that I outlined in my proposal and moodboards, and I think I have translated my very stylised comic book-esque art style into 3-D very effectively. The clothing was the most difficult for me as I did not have a clear outline of what I wanted his clothing to be before hand, however this gave me the freedom to develop the design as I experimented in zBrush and this resulted in quite a Victorian style outfit, which fits in with the steampunk aesthetic I was aiming for. Now it's a case of baking out the maps and ensuring that they look as high quality as possible to bring as much detail as I can into my low poly model. I am toying with the idea of further enhancing my textures in Photoshop once the maps are baked out. This workflow of painting the main bulk of the colour and texture in zBrush and finishing it off in Photoshop is one I am very find of as it allows me to use my art skills in Photoshop to my advantage.

Abbas - Building the Low Poly

Using a combination of decimating and zRemeshing in zBrush, I was able to extract some of my high poly with minimal fuss. Unfortunately it was not an entirely painless process; I had to quad draw the torso, arms and legs from scratch, but this allowed me to rebuild the topology and only use the amount of detail that I actually needed. As a result, my torso is quite conservative in regards to the poly count, I even added in more edge loops as myself and my tutor felt I had gone too low poly and unnecessarily sacrificed detail. The head and hands extracted from zBrush quite nicely, with minimal clean up required in Maya. The real trouble was getting the two separate meshes to flow into one another; the head had much more detail as I didn't want to lose structure in the face, but I wanted to keep the body fairly simple, so I had to triangulate the mesh around the wrists and neck where it would not be visible to achieve the topology I desired. The topology is looking good at the moment, I need to extract the coat that I modelled in zBrush but hopefully the remeshing tools will work in my favour and the process will be painless.