AIE – Assignment 2 – completed

the character assignment is done and submitted today, it was originally due last wensday, but for whatever reason we were given till today to submit. it seemed like most of the class needed it too, i know i had some problems with submitting on the day and wasnt able to do so because the character was not importing into UDK properly. staying after class helped me figure out what the problem was, forgetting to delete history from my mesh before binding skin to it was one mistake. the other was forgetting to delete history or freeze transformations from joints that had been moved with the transform tool. this caused them there to be a transform after the joints had been parented, causing some severe annomalies in UDK when playing animations. there was also a scale issue, but that would have been easy enough to address if it were the only issue. so basicly having considered this and not knowing another way to remove these transforms, i exported the skin weights and rebuilt the skeleton, making sure i deleted histories and freezed transformations. skin weights re-imported partially, as the method maya uses is not completely effective for meshes with mirrored UVs, so i still had to redo about half of the weights even after re-importing the original weights. making all the controls/set driven keys was a good practise too, and didnt take very long. so heres the final version rendered in UDK. alpha map was not applied on the submission, nor was the lights on the suit, i can do all that later on in the week.

looking forward to the next assignment now, a game prototype

picture showing the character with my rig controls version 2.0

AIE – assignment 2 update

we’d began rigging last week and i’d gotten most of that done before the weekend. painting weights in maya seems like it could be better than it currently is. other than that, rigging is kinda rewarding and satisfying, seeing your character take their first step and all that. i did get to put some time into the texture, so it has now most of the dust/grime crap i wanted. still no scratches or spec map tho. i might try and do that tonight if all goes well with the remaining rig controllers i need to make.
submission is on wensday…

AIE – Assignment 1 resubmit

this is the resubmitted version of the level assignment. i was asked to add variation on the ceiling, floor and collums, and i think the shading seems to be different were ever there is a edge inserted for me to apply a new shader, making it very obvious and ugly. it didnt seem to do it for the floor though. as for the overlapping mesh, that was simpler to fix, though there was one section which just wouldnt line up right, the way it does in maya. since that section is blocked by a closed door (which doesnt open) and thus not actually accessable, i might aswell just delete it. as for the rest of the group, two seem to have dropped out of the course or put it on hold till next year and the other guy didnt seem to want to work together to combine our work. not much of a group now that i think about it.

AIE – General update on things

at the moment im working on resubmitting the first assignment, in preparation for meeting up with a member of my group tomorrow. the floor texture has been resized to 256×256 and re-applied to all the elements and the same texture has been applied to the wall collums in an effort to make them stand out from the normal wall more. both are tiled to be half the size of the regular wall texture. also the collums/wall parts have had their UVs adjusted in case i have to do completely different textures for them. this leaves me with 2 256×256 textures.

with the character, i’d not had any signifigant progress in actual class. i was stuck at the baking textures stage for far too long. i was unsatisfied with the bakings i’d managed to make using Maya, and the time to make it took to bake those maps was excessively long, 2 hours for just one part. the results i’d gotten from 3d coat were worse, but much easier to work out. xnormal was what i wanted to use from the beginning, but i had ngon issues importing mesh into that software. those are easy enough to fix, but for some reason it was still rejecting my mesh. it turns out that i was only fixing the ngons on the high detail mesh and assuming the low detail mesh were not the issue (since xnormal didnt specify which mesh had the issue to begin with). so triangulating both solved the problem. another annoying problem i found was that sometimes when exporting objects as OBJ files, the object would double up, there would be a duplicate in the exact same world space, essentially doubling or tripling the polycount of the exported object. im not sure what’s causing this, i might ask about it tomorrow or on monday. but anyway, now, im ready to continue with the texturing of that character over the weekend, as next week we should be rigging.

man my hands are so cold…

AIE – Assignment 2 – update

character low poly is made, with about 500 triangles remaining. i had some time yesterday and thought i’d try and work on the bust to go inside the suit. with Catherine’s help, we’ve figured out that the nose is wrong, too short, the distance between my eyes and the bottom of my nose is not enough. so i’ll perhaps try and fix that up.

AIE – Assignment 2 – update

If i manage to complete a good low-res version of this character in good time before monday, then i will attempt to make this bust into a one suitable for the character concept. it’s me, scanned using a xbox device i didnt know about till the other day.

also, relating to Assignment 1, my group had their feedback debriefing today for re-submitting the assignment. i think it went well and was full of lots of advice. i’ll have to throw some work into it during the next week i reckon because its due on the 8th. i have to fix a couple texture issues and then fix up some overlapping mesh problems in gamebryo.

AIE – Assignment 2 – update

so im at the stage where i’ve mirrored the character, that still needs some cleaning up as some parts dont line up exactly. other than that, i think its off to zbrush to put in scrapes and scratches. the holiday is over.

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AIE – Assignment 2 – update

still working on this thing… no huge dramas so far, some bits and peices went missing, but the were easily recovered from earlier saves. im not sure why things disapear like that, i can find them still in outliner, but they dont appear in the view port and they dont render out, so who knows whats going on. high detail version is nearly finished. im skipping the interior aspect for the assignment itself, but will probably come back to it at some point later on to add a character behind the helmet glass.

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AIE – Assignment 2 – Update

second week of modeling this space suited character idea. its coming together slowly, most of it is done. im currently adding detail to the torso section to make it fit the arms and legs more. the laser gun is still just a basic shape and i havnt begun on the rocketpack or the characters actual head (i plan to make a bust for when the helmet is removed or incase the helmet glass is transparent, but i can drop that if need to). anyway, theres a couple screen shots to show what im upto at this stage.

AIE – Assignment 2 – Concept stuff

so im done with the first assignment and we’ve begun concepting the next assignment, which is to be a character of sorts. initially, i wanted to make a cthulhu, but i later decided to try for something that will have a face and fingers to try out some rigging of that sort of thing. so i decided to make a guy wearing a futuristic/sci-fi kinda space suit, i wanted a bulky and mechanical look.

Reference Sheet

Silhouette Sheet