#Artwar Character Contest: Briannon | Part 2 - Sculpting

All right, so last time I wrote about the design process of my character for the #Artwar contest, Briannon, I wanted to follow up with a post on the modeling and sculpting. Well, when I finally had by idea on paper and was ready to get started, I had this brilliant idea that this was a great time to try and learn new things. (Now with a week left of the contest and so much work to do, I am starting to question the brilliance in my idea).

First thing I did was to try out Maya LT, which I have actually never even opened before. Thanks to my knowledge of 3D in general, I managed to get "something" at least. It did however take forever and I absolutely hated the popup-menu system for everything that has a button in 3DS Max. I can say that if I had allowed myself to use Max instead, I would have gotten a great deal further than where I am at this point. In some miraculous way, I did eventually manage to create a good enough basemesh that I could import in ZBrush and go from there.

Basemesh in Maya

Even though it did take me a bit longer than it probably should, the body was pretty straight forwards to do. The challenge here lay in getting the anatomy right, especially on the horse part of the body.

First pass on body in ZBrush

My next challenge was the hair, but with a lot of research and experimenting I managed to create and combine braids into an intricate hair style. For the future I will want to work on how to better sculpt the ends of the hair and making separate strands to get better volumes. One thing that was very helpful that I found mid-sculpting was the feature of making the window transparent so that you can place references underneath.

Experimenting with hair and braids

Hard surface accessories and armour is something that I would normally model in 3DS Max and then only import into ZBrush to create surface details, but since I have banned myself from using Max for this character I needed to find another way. After my experience with Maya when making the basemesh, I was really reluctant to go back to it. On the other hand, ZBrush is to my experience not optimal for hard surface modeling. Not having attempted to do something like this in either software, I had to do quite a lot of research (including mostly crappy and often barely understandable video tutorials) and experimented a bit with both.

Hair Sculpt

In the end I actually did all of the sculpts in ZBrush entirely, not using what little I made in Maya. I did this by using masks, either painted directly on the model or by projecting alphas, and extruding from the existing sub tools. Strangely, something as simple as the twisted cord used for the torc and lower bracelet, was extremely challenging to find a good way to do, with a result that I wanted. I tried following other people's rope tutorials but did not like the outcome, or the quality of the tutorials were too poor. Instead of the multiple cylinders that they use, I projected a twisted alpha on a ring and used the deformation tools. The acorn, waterskin and the bag however, were  made from spheres manipulated by the move tool or zspheres.

Shoulder design tests with alphas

Bracelet made with alpha

For the oak leaves and moons, I projected alphas on planes and created morph difference meshes and the just cleaned them up with deformation tools and bent the leaves and added some detail. For the 'triangular moons' and armour/jewelry details I also used alphas, by testing a technique shared by Orb in Blizzard's 2015 ZBrush Summit talk.

Necklace WIPs

First version of wood and resculpt WIP

The final challenge was creating the wooden parts. Since I want her to be part oak tree it needed to look like bark. The problem with oak trees is that their bark is very thick and rough and, although they are beautiful trees, not very attractive looking. I just could not get it to translate well on the more delicate character, possibly contributed by the fact that I have never sculpted wood before. Therefore I decided to represent the oak part a bit differently, I actually referenced an oak tree where the branch had wilted and the bark partly come off as well as looking at how others had solved the issue of sculpting wood. It was a bit tricky to sculpt, and it could probably be even better with practice and time, but I got the grade of 'I can tell that it is wood' and I am satisfied with the result.

I have probably forgotten to mention a great deal of things and could definitely delve deeper into how I made each element for future reference when facing similar problems. :) But this is in general how the high poly sculpt was done, I definitely learned a lot and hope I can remember it all. The result is looking even better than I had hoped, so even though I am a bit stressed about finishing in time I am really excited about this character! :)

Final Sculpt

Bonus Pic

Nihteana High Poly Armour

Last week I finished the high poly model of Nihteana, the first thing I did was to complete the shoulder pads. These skulls were also used to hang from her belt, but without the decorations.



I had a basic skull/shoulder pad that I made in 3ds Max, from that I dug out the shapes more and sharpened the details. Then I added the decorations by drawing the on by hand. I would have used a pattern to do this but I did not know a way of doing this on a surface that curves on several axes, or curves at all.



This was also a problem when creating the bracers, I had the shapes and edges complete in order to maintain the hard edges. To solve this I tried adding a sketch that I had made to test the placement of the pattern in 3ds Max through adding the texture as polypaint. There were some issues getting it right, but in the end I used spotlight to paint it on and get a general idea of the placement.



When I had it placed I used the pattern as a guide to carve the decorations into the bracers by hand. As I mentioned I could not find a way to draw the larger patterns onto the curved surface but the flowers were small enough to use the image as a brush. Since the bracer is not completely symmetrical I was also unable to use the mirror brush, meaning I had to carve the entire thing by hand.

Back to ZBrush

Since we finally got our release out I have been able to get back to working on Nihteana. There were a few things that needed fixing but most of the work was to create the missing pieces, such as armour and belt. I had not prioritised them earlier since I wanted to test the main body in animation before completing her. In case there were any problems it would be easier to adjust before adding details. Once I got to that point however, I had to switch tasks and work on environment assets and the release that was made in early January.

My greatest issue with the model was the elbow, I had problems trying to figure out exactly were the muscles should go and how the skinny dead arms would look. I figured out that I had thought right but executed it wrong, meaning that I needed to move the muscles on the lower arm to match the "elbow bone" better and create more of a crease. This meant that I had to go back to ZBrush to adjust the Highpoly model.

This is how it looked before, the elbow bone is at the back side on the bottom of the arm, while the fold is on the front side of the arm.


When fixing it I moved the fold to the upper part of the arm, so that it would be in a straight line from the bone of the elbow.


I had also decided to enlarge her hands, to achieve a more stylised and creepy look, again this meant making adjustments in the Highpoly. The hands were also a bit flat so I rounded the hand, lowering the sides with the pinky and thumb and raising it around the middle finger. Even though I thought I had adjusted where the fingers start on the hand (they do not start from a straight line) it was also looking too straight so I pushed it towards the hand between the pinky and ring finger and away from it between the ring and middle fingers to make the silhouette more interesting.


Because of making these adjustments I destroyed some of the details, meaning that I had to re-enforce the knuckles and sinews. As I had to to this I tried to emphasise them even more than I ad before.


 

I was planning on showing the armour pieces and belt that I have been working on, but this turned out pretty long so I will save that for the next post. :)

Shoulders

I got some really good feedback on how to improve my edge flow of the shoulders even further (thanks Nat!) and I have tried to adapt it towards that. I know that there are a lot of triangles on the back and thought about fixing that, but I remember one of our teachers saying that triangles should not make a difference since the computer triangulates everything anyway. Therefore I decided that I wanted to keep control of how they triangulate.

I am sure that there are still things that can be improved upon the shoulder but I feel that I have gotten a long way and have probably learned a thing or two about modeling shoulders.

Apart from the edge flow I have worked in z-brush to rotate her high-poly arm into position and adjusting the shoulder so that it looks good. After that I went back into Max to adjust the lowpoly just to fit the high-poly better.


I also added some muscles to her arm as from the feedback we have been given, some people do not understand the vision we had about creating contrast with size, so we wanted to see how it would look with some more muscles. We felt that the result made her character design better and decided to keep it. Therefore I had to do some alterations in Max, adding some geometry and moving vertices around. While I was working on the arm anyway I also tried to define her elbow just a little bit more to enforce the style we want to achieve.

This might seem to have taken a lot of time, which it did, but most of the day I have been busy writing lore, some of which you can read on our team's dev blog today. We are planning to do a series of lore posts, this was the first one giving a short introduction to Tamarrion herself. You can read it here: https://tamarriongame.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/lore-day-1-tamarrion/

Boss Sneak Peek

So this is yet another sneak peek, this time it is not of Tamarrion but the new boss character that she will be fighting in a near future.

I have been working on this character while doing other school and Tamarrion related assignments for a few weeks now and she is starting to come to life. I started working on a base mesh in Max over the weekend and today I finished sculpting her upper body in Z-Brush. There is still a lot to do, but I just wanted to post a little update to show what i have been working on.

If you want to know more about Tamarrion just visit our facebook page or our website that is now up and running!
https://www.facebook.com/tamarrion
http://tamarriongame.com/

Polypainting

Since the issue of polypaint not being able to be exported resolved I continued painting on the high poly model. Apart from the skin, especially the face that is the most complex part on the model, I have done little more than basic details. I have added light to all edges to make them look worn, and darkened creases.

As we want to create a hand painted look I have basically just blocked out where it should be lighter and darker. I would have done the same in Photoshop before going into details, had I done it all by hand. I think that it does not affect the time very much in any direction. The painting itself does take a bit longer to actually paint because Z-brush does not have as easy and accurate controls as Photoshop has, on the other hand it does give me increased accuracy as i can immediately place the colour shifts exactly where I want them, or as close as Z-brush's controls let me. In Photoshop I would have to estimate, save, check Max to see how it looks, make adjustments, save, look... until it looks right.

My conclusion from this, experiment I guess you can call it since I am trying to find new and improved ways to work, is that it is a fast and easy way to block in details. It is far easier painting on the high poly where you can clearly see all creases and details than it is working on UV templates. Even though it does take slightly longer to actually paint, it is sped up by the fact that you can use a mirrored brush so that you can paint general details on, for instance, two leg guards at once and that you can see exactly where the paint should be placed and how it looks in 3D.

Since I have only used Z-brush a few weeks and tried polypainting in it only two days there are probably many tricks that I don't know about that would give better and more accurate results, for instance sharper details. From what i have experienced so far though, I do not see that it could be an alternative for Photoshop when it comes to cleaning and detail work.

 During the first bake the hair was not correctly baked and the high poly of the corset went missing so the Diffuse for the body had to be redone, as it got too late at night we have not been able to rebake at the time of writing this. The eyes, boots and hair decorations also look strange since they were not included on the high poly, they have been painted separately so the two maps will need to be merged. The limitations I discussed are very clear here, in particular the pants, as the paint is very blurry. It is very possible that it is only due to my unfamiliarity with how to use the brushes and program though.






















There were also some problems with the armour Diffuse, probably caused in xNormal. The belt is my fault since I was tired and merged the belt buckle to the belt on the high poly, which means the belt buckle was projected onto the belt. This is easily fixed by just painting it over, that area will be covered by the buckle anyway. The orange gaps on some parts, for example the belt, are a bit of a mystery though. If xNormal had problems projecting, or seeing, the edges, they should be white, we have no idea where the orange came from. Apart from that the armour pieces came out beautifully and it is just a matter of getting the details down.

So Happy

In my last post I described how we had been unable to find any solutions to baking diffuse maps from Z-brush since the polycount was too high. It turned out that we had been up all night and wasted most of the morning in vain as the polypaint I had created would not be able to be used.

Being the way I am, I refused to accept this.
After two and a half hours of intense googling and experimenting in z-brush I found a possible solution to the problem in xNormal. I tried exporting one of the subtools again and noticed that it said "exporting polypaint" which meant that they would have followed with the .OBJ-file. Apparently xNormal has default settings which ignore per vertex colour, which was exactly what we were trying to export.

As it was impossible to find a clear step by step answer to how to solve this I will try and explain it as best as I can, hopefully it might give someone less of a headache sometime.

I used color to paint the high poly model and then merged together all parts that belonged to the same piece. For example the chest piece has a logo on it which is easier to paint as a separate sub-tool so that the colours do not bleed, but it is easier to manage fewer files, so when I was done I merged them into one sub-tool.

The next step is to simply export the sub-tools one by one as .OBJ-files. The polypaint will automatically follow.

In xNormal you must then uncheck "ignore per vertex color" in two places. One is on the high poly itself in the high poly tab and the other is in the "bake options" tab.

After that it is just a matter of choosing your preferred settings and bake the maps.

I will after all be able to use my five hours of work, I can continue placing basic colours on the high poly so I can see where all details should go and then fix the details in Photoshop and get a hand painted look. It turns out that the only part that was in vain was part of the stress we felt yesterday. From wanting to give up and cry, everything feels so much better now and I am so happy!

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.

Week 3

We ended last week with a team meeting where we discussed how the project had gone so far, focusing on last week. It was mostly the leads informing the other sections on the team on what our own section had done and how that correlates to the original planning and scheduling. All team members also had the chance to take up any issues that had occurred during the first two weeks.

One reason for having this meeting was that we had come to our internal deadline for the playable prototype. Since we already had something close to that within a few days of the project we felt that the planning and first two weeks had been a success. It was only, as mentioned in previous posts, in the art section that the artists seem to be slightly behind. We do however hope that the work we are doing now will decrease the time needed on texturing tremendously, which will put us back on schedule.

Ingame Prototype as of Last Week

As today is Monday and the start of a new week, we had a weekly morning meeting where we went through what we need for the ALPHA (internal), which we have planned for in two weeks, and what of that is to be complete within this week. Our meeting structure is so that we have morning meetings daily, in those meetings all team members will one by one say what they will be doing that day as well as bring up any questions or problems that might be of interest of the entire team. The team is of course encourage to ask immediately whenever a problem or question occurs, programmers and artists answer to their respective leads which answer to the designer and the producer. On monday mornings we have a longer meeting where we go through the entire week's goals before discussing what all members are doing that day. Fridays we have another weekly meeting where we will discuss how it went with what we had planned, how far we have come and whatever problems occurred. At the end of each day, before leaving, I, as the producer, ask the team if there is anything they need to bring up or ask, if not it is left until the morning.

Mondays are also the days of meeting with teachers to check up on our progress, this meant that I spent the entire midmorning in meetings, first with the team, then in a producer meeting and finally in an artist meeting. In the producer meeting we discussed how far we have come with the project, if there were any hardware or programs that we might need as well as had a look at the project plan and design document. Everything seemed to be in order, all documents looking good and the teacher happy with the fact that the programmers are at this point 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule.

Ingame Prototype as of Last Week

The art meeting felt a bit short, we did not have time to show everything and fully explain, I think it might have been to an advantage if the teachers had had a look at our vertical slice prior to the meeting. They did give us a lot of valuable help though, they confirmed our idea of experimenting with the placement of the camera to make visible the proportions of the characters. They also questioned the choice of letting the player direct the camera which means that everything must look good from 360 degrees. This is something that the designer is quite set upon though and is important to gameplay and we will only be doing one indoor environment so hopefully it will not be a problem.

They also advised us to think a lot about the colour palettes and perhaps split complementary colours. They suggested that we do mockups and slide around the HSB-meters in Photoshop and take screens and compare what looks best. Something that we have thought a lot about was also mentioned, that the colours of the main character must fit with all levels that we want to make.

I thought about adding something about my progress on the high-poly but this turned out so long that it will have to be short. Z-Brush seems to work for us although it is a challenge and takes some time. I still have quite a lot to do with it, for instance I have not yet started on the face, hair and armour pieces which makes me feel a bit stressed. I have though done the groundwork on the body, legs, hands and feet, although the latter two still need some attention. On the other parts it is mostly a matter of sharpening up the details which I will not do until the entire model is at that stage.

Z-Brush

Yesterday I continued on the mesh of the main character in 3DS Max, at the end of the day I had reached the point that I was ready to take it into z-brush and have a go at it. I had blocked in all the armour pieces but decided to only export the body itself, leaving the armour for modeling separately at a later point so they are not in the way.

I managed to get far enough to export the mesh from Max and importing it as a tool in Z-Brush, that was when things started to get tricky. It is a program that I have never used before, but I managed to figure out how to move the camera around and enter edit mode before giving up for the night.

This morning I asked for a crash course from one of my fellow artists who is very familiar with the program, this allowed me to start sculpting although it did not work out exactly as I wanted. I do find the controls a bit clumsy and the tools a bit tricky to use, but I imagine that it might just be that it needs some time getting used to.

One of the things that I tried to work on was the leather corset, it has the very basic details although I could not manage to create the sharp edges that I want, everything just seems to smudge together. Perhaps I need higher resolution on the mesh, or perhaps I smoothed the character to much before. I think that smoothing her was not a bad idea though, as I needed to remove the very square shapes and form her body. Most likely it is just due to my inexperience with the tools, I hope I get the hang of it tomorrow.

I do think that it is a bit of a risk using a new software in a project that only takes place in such a short period of time. Had not one of the team members been experienced with the program I might have decided differently.

I will have to rethink parts of the schedule as this method slightly changes the pipeline, in a way I could say that the base meshes are complete and that I should add High-Poly cards for the assets to the SCRUM. At the moment we are only continuing on the base mesh cards, which does make it seem as if we are more behind schedule than we are as they are due this week. This means creating a low-polymesh for the final meshes but we will be able to use these models to create textures.

The reason for choosing to do it this way was that I believe it can have a big impact on the textures and, if we are lucky, help us out a lot with the textures later. I was very much inspired by a tutorial I found by an environmental artist's work on World of Warcraft and was very interested in trying out that method of texturing. Another reason was having discussed with my fellow artists, especially the environmental artist who felt that our artstyle would benefit from using Z-Brush and wanted to use it himself.

If we manage to control the program to a satisfactory level in a short time period I will think of it as successful, but we do have a plan B as well which is closer to the pipeline that we have followed in previous 3D-courses. This means doing all modeling in Max (base mesh to low-poly) and then handpainting all textures in Photoshop.