Textures and Screenshots

This week has been busier than any week so far, especially us artists have had an insane amount of work to get done and it is not going to slow down before the end of this project. Today we had deadlines for handing in promotional material containing at least a finished Logo, four screenshots and four concept art/dev images as well as playtesting with the other students.

Screenshot created by my fellow artists

Us artists did not get to the playtesting since we had to work towards our deadline and we had a visitor helping us out with shaders and Unity.

I have been working simultaneously on the texturing of the character and the Logo, but I have also spent time with the other artists going through lighting and the regular giving feedback as well as searching for fonts. I started out the week by doing final touches, UV-mapping the main character and the armour and exporting all parts of the low- and high-polys so that I could send then to my team mate so he could bake normal maps and ambient occlusion.

While UV-mapping the UV checker turned into rainbow war paint

When the UV-mapping was all done I got started on the diffuse maps, since I have had so much else to do I did not manage to complete them entirely yet. I have blocked in all base colours and started to add details. I quickly noticed how difficult some parts were to paint as I had to figure out how the UV-s translate to the model, the eyebrows is one example of this as she looked very surprised in the first iteration.

I did have the normal map to work from but it did not prove to be perfect, I am thinking that I should probably use the ambient occlusion map to help me out with that. I did come to the conclusion that the tricky parts would be so much easier to just paint on the model, so we went in to Z-brush and managed to figure out how to paint on the model. Late at night we felt it was time to stop and I exported the sub-tools so that my team mate could bake them. It turned out that you cannot do that as the colour did not get exported with the sub-tool.

From the colouring process in z-brush

This meant that the day of the deadline which we had planned to spend on the screen-shots alone, had to be spent trying to get the textures from z-brush and into the game for playtesting and screens. We found a solution which meant that we had to create UVs and textures within z-brush. After three hours of crashing the program and searching Google we found that z-brush cannot create UVs on a model with that much resolution. This was a major set-back as all work spent on painting it has to be done again, without painting on the model making it easier.

Very early iteration of Diffuse maps

I had to give up and hurry to merge the model with the UVs with the one that has been skinned, this meant only copying and pasting the skin layer, so that will need to have a look at. The model was then sent to a second team mate to plot to the placeholder animations before being sent to the coders to put it into the game with the unfinished textures.

The ambient occlusion and normal maps are complete and look beautiful but the diffuse maps still need work and I need to create emissive maps for her runes and eyes. This is what I will be spending my weekend on as I want to be free to work on animations and UI next week.

Both the UI and the menus need new, non programmer-art, graphics and we also need to create particles and fancy effects and feedback.