Senior Thesis I: More UVs and Textures

UVs are looking pretty good this week, after hours of work planar mapping each part of the body. Some minor overlapping requires some tweaking, but overall the UV layout is where I want it to be. I've been blocking out some of the basic colors and textures this week, and I've been looking into jean textures for his pants. Detailing is also important to get down, since even with the simplistic textures and mapping seen of Persona character models, details like stitching and other clothing elements are clearly visible. Nailing down these small nuts and bolts will really help make the model pop, and add some complexity to an otherwise fairly simple design.

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Senior Thesis I: More UVs and Hair Modeling

 

Wow.

Hell of a different one tutortial can make. After seeing that the single piece mesh for the hair was becoming really poly heavy, hard to model and just not accurate, I decided to scrap the idea. It is a  few hours wasted, but the alternative is proving to be much more promising. After watching a Lynda tutorial on modeling hair with NURBS curves and extruding along them, it appeared in my opinion to produce a much more accurate result. I set about making a duplicate of D'artagnan's body and smoothing it, which would make the drawn curves hug the contours of his head more precisely. After hours of sculpting and deforming, the new hair looks much closer to what the character looks like. Also despite the exaggerated, cartoony look of the strands, the potential final results will probably be more similar to the style of Persona's modeled hair, which was very simple.

The UV layout process also continues to be a hurdle. Initially the Auto Unwrap UVs Tool that comes with Maya's Bonus Tools seemed very useful, and after watching its tutorial of the AREA I used it successfully in other projects.

Here's an example of some of the testing I did with the tool. It is an upper leg piece from another project, which unwrapped quite nicely and allowed me to sculpt in Mudbox.

However, the nature of the tool I found to be somewhat limiting as well. When used on a seamless mesh which will have multiple shells, such as D'artagnan's, it seem that you have to create all of the shell borders all at once. Using the tool on an isolated section of the mesh produced favorable results, but when attempting to crerate another shell with the tool, the previously shell would either revert or become distorted. Even going through the process of laying out borders for the entire mesh produced questionable results, as many of the shells produced were very stretched and distorted compared to shells unwrapped individually.

With these things in mind, I will research if there are ways to protect individual shells by baking or other means. In the meantime I will focus on the more important UV shells that need to be created, namely the clothing sections. The planar and auto mapping system proved mostly effective previously,  and I have been working towards stitching UVs together.

Senior Thesis I: Modeling and UVs

I've run into a few hurdles this week due to some modeling problems and overall process development. I discovered some non-manifold geometry on D'artagnan's foot, which probably resulted from the continuous duplication, mirroring, and merging process while modeling. This week I also worked towards finishing his hair mesh, which proved difficult due to the way I had originally modeled it. The grooves designed are intended to create more randomness in his hair, though at the same time this makes it tricky to extrude across these grooves. Combining some vertices helped fix some problems, though now I must be aware of non-quad based geometry during the smoothing and texturing phases.

Speaking of texturing, this process will be becoming the focal point of the coming weeks. At first I contemplated sending the basic mesh to Mudbox to begin creating more detail, but going back to the character designs in the Persona series, the models are less complex than that. It appears that the designers mostly relied on texture mapping to create the details of clothing and other features, which leads me to believe that the models for this project should follow the same course, at least for now. Figuring out the process (creating the best base model, laying out UVs, and creating texture maps) is probably the most important breakthough of the week, and will definitely make things easier. Sean has also pointed me towards the Bonus Tool in Maya, along with Lynda videos available to help with the UV process. The Auto Unwrap UVs Tool alone is a godsend, making cutting up different parts of the mesh into UV patches much more intuitive and simple. The new tools combined witha greater understanding of how to unwrap UVs with undoubedly speed up the texturing phase.

Senior Thesis I: Sketching, Modeling, and Design Doc

This week's focus was primarily on the creation of a design document for this project, as well as preparing a presentation for class. Writing the design doc brings up a number of questions about what I am attempting to do, and is encouraging me to fleshes out some of the narrative concepts and logistics behind the project. I've been withholding information on the project's story up until now because of the limited scope of this project, the modeling of characters. It didn't seem right to introduce an elaborate plot when only a few assets and characters would actually be shown. In hindsight, this may have been counter-productive and may have left some of my audience in the dark. Hopefully the design document will be a step in remedying this.

On the production side of things, I have done more posing sketches for D'artagnan, and am working towards finishing his model. Sketching has really been a great help for visualizing his look and traits, and has just in general been a joy to do. The designing and drawing process has always been what I am most proficient at and enjoy the most in any project, definitely provides insight on the possible career paths I can take in the future. As for modeling, I am experimenting with creating modeled hair as a separate object, and I believe that it is leading towards good results. In regards to the model's application in a game engine some time in the future, I still have to research what are the best ways to go about modeling, ie. if a character MUST be a single mesh object or if some separate parts are allowable.