This one goes out to all the ladies...

I've finally begun sculpting the mesh in Zbrush and this torso, complete with abs straight out of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, is the result of our time in today's class. Don't get too excited ladies, he doesn't even have legs...

Polygons

I spent some of today and yesterday refining the design of my character; modeling the rest of the assets; and focusing on certain details that I wasn't clear as to how I would handle them (such as buckles). I am now pretty much finished with the low poly model minus the hair, fur, and breathing device; however, I think I will start working in Zbrush before I worry about these things. When I do get to the hair, Ive decided to handle it using overlapping planes, rather than the mass I have in the works as of now. But for now, all I need to do is go in and add edge loops like a crazy mo-fo to all of my hard surfaces so they don't deform when they are subdivided. I think I will begin this process and begin sculpting tomorrow. For now I will enjoy the rest of my evening. Adieu.

In questioning how to accomplish several modeling issues (if you can call them that), primarily surrounding how to create good hair for character models I was recommended the book Character Modeling 2 from the d'Artiste collection. I wish I had seen this earlier since it seemed to have the process behind modeling all of the gears characters, which are the zenith, or at least the standard, of character modeling at this point. It is now officially on my Christmas list. It will be mine, oh yes... it will be.


Here is a link;
Character Modeling 2

Well its obviously been a while since the last post. I was intending to post the finished low poly mesh some time ago, but, well... life happens and I am way behind. If I am not working in Zbrush by next class, you all have permission to slap me. Anyway, I am getting close now, here is what I have thus far.

Modeling is Go

I started working on the low poly maya model today. As you can see I decided to go with a more traditional approach, rather than the high-poly to low, that I spoke of in my last post. I decided that I would like the practice of doing Maya modeling. Heres what Ive started on. Its not much right now but , its a small step through the door.

I dun learned me some stuff

Today I watched the Gnomon tutorial, Character Modeling for Next-Gen Games, in preparation for this project, which ultimately had some good advice as well as an interesting workflow method. What the artist did, was quickly block out a human structure in Maya (looked like a block man) then went immediately into sculpting the general anatomy of the character in Zbrush. Once he had completed the anatomical reference, he brought in subtool after subtool making up the clothing for the character, most of witch were also block structured, and then detail sculpted each part to a finished high-poly state. He completed an entire high-res mesh in this way then exported the medium subdivision levels out to Maya. There he used a plugin called Nex, which was much like the re-topologize tools in Zbrush, allowing him to draw vertices directly on the high-res mesh to create the low-poly game model. The nice thing about Nex was that he was able to switch between using maya's tools as well as the plugin's own, which gave him more versatility. He then layed out the UV's and then using the freeware Xnormal, baked the normals of the ultra high-res .obj's (ones that maya couldn't even open) to create the normal map based on the UV's for the low poly mesh. Xnormal was also capable of doing the occlusion bake as well, and the results were pretty impressive. Not a bad tutorial to watch. Unfortunately it skipped over the vast majority of the technical nitty-gritty, which is pretty much the sole reason I want to watch tutorials like that. Oh well, you might want to check it out if your planning to work on next gen character.

Heres some links:

Tutorial

xNormal

Nex Plugin for Maya