Well I'm going to keep this short, I've had a great time at Ravensbourne, learnt allot and made some amazing friends! I hope all the time and effort me and my group put in is really recognised, coming in to uni practically every day, working from 10 till 9 almost every day and giving up our Easter break to come in and work also. I've learnt allot on this project, developed my skills and produced some of my best work resulting is a film it quite proud of.
Good luck to everyone on the course and see you around! :p
Below are the shots I composited for the film using After Effects. I animated allot of masks in most of these shots to get them looking as good as possible given the time constraints! the larger images are in my folders for the assesment.
Here is a lamp i modeled and textured for the graveyard scene :)
Having looked at the grass Jake painted for the grave yard i felt it needed more work, so i added alot more grass as it was quite thin. There was also some grass that was going through the track, so i had to delet a fair bit and re paint the grass back in.
below is a collection of images that went into making the zombie hand that bursts through the mausoleum doors. I took the hand i modeled for the girls and extended the geomitry to make more of a fore arm. I then exported the geomitry as an obj into mud box and painted up the diffuse, bump and specular layers.
Below is a brand new mausoleum i made, as the old one disappeared off the face of the earth. The only thing i had from the old one was the two pillars. So using the same technique to get the chunky jagged edges as before i did another one. The mausoleum has a few UV maps because its texture is quite high quality and there was allot of geometry. I painted all the textured in photoshop having planar mapped the model. the jagged edges worked out quite nicely as it allowed for seams in the texture, where a different material was coming through in the stone, so no sewing the UVs yay!
The group's target to get the exterior finished to render out is well under way. Myself and Anna have positioned the trees and stalls out side, as well as the big wheel and helter skelter, going through each shot tweaking them to frame the characters as best we could.
Here I modelled The stalls Anna drew up in her original concept work for the outside exterior. Here i positioned and re shaped the planks that Anna originally made for the windmill. I re UV mapped them and textured them. For the Cloth i created a plane and applied an Ncloth deformer to it. i anchored some of the planes verts to the four stall stilts, so when i animated the cloth they would not be effected, gaining the droop you see on the cloth. i painted an alpha map for the texture and worked away at the edges to get the weathered torn look i wanted the stalls to have.
Below are tree models i made for the exterior environment. i did the texturing in mud box with relative ease. The most challenging thing about making the trees was working out how to do the leaves. I experimented with making a small selection of leaves and making that into a brush, which i painted onto the tree, but it looked a bit stupid. I couldn't get a thick gathering of leaves, so we opted for the trees to be bear and more autumnal. to UV map them i cylindrical mapped the larger branches and the trunk, then automatically mapped the remaining smaller branches. This was done for each of the trees.
Cho is now done! fully modelled and textured :) I put allot of hard work and time into this model, making the model as best i could. making sure all the geometry works with the proxy model for Dan and just something that i could be proud of. every part of this character was modeled and textured by myself.
Cho's hair needed to be done, not previously knowing how to model their hair Anna and Jake decided the best and most simple way was to model the hair as one simple block shaped appropriately, which would be taken into mud box and Zbrush to be further sculpted to get a better shape. Then to be re exported and modelled further in maya. Anna's hair looks really nice from what I've seen and the texturing looks nice also, however i went at it from a slightly different approach, i didn't use Zbrush to sculpt and i needed to pay more attention to the texturing of her hair because is was lighter, showing off the texture more. My 1st attempt to model Cho's hair was pretty bad, as you can see it looked like a sack on her head. this came from following the hair style in the original concept drawing, but it clearly was not going to work with the approach the group was going with for the hair styles of the girls.
I though about different styles i could give her, i really like Anna's bunches, the way they tail off to a point is the best way around the issue of not having a clump of hair, but that wouldn't suit Cho, nor did we want them to have the same hair. I came up with the short bob, which we all thought looked nice and suited the character, so i went about refining it and giving Cho a head band. I did all the shaping in maya, then exporting it into mud box to texture.
the fringe and side burns are two separate UV maps as they are both alpha maps. mud box has some good preset brushes which i used to paint the hair. starting with the fringe i just built up the texture in a series of layers, which i then exported into Photoshop and merged them into a single layer. for the alpha map i used the eraser tool in Photoshop to work away the blunt fringe, but it was looking lame. i looked at Anna's alpha and i saw that she might have done hers using the smudge tool. Using hers as a base, i used the warp tool to manipulate her alpha to loosely fit within my UV map for Cho's fringe. I then worked into it from there with a smudge tool until i got something that looked nice for Cho.
I went on to paint the main part of Cho's hair, going about it the same way i did with the fringe, working up layers to get a good texture using the mud box default brushes. As I painted it I made my brush strokes work with the flow of the geometry to get as natural a looking hair, in our stylized form, as possible. I lastly painted the alphas for the side burns, again using the smudge tool in Photoshop to get the wispy look i wanted.
I UV mapped Cho's head using a spherical map, then I tweaked the verts around her eyes, nostrils and mouth so there was no stretch when painting finer details on her skin, such as freckles. Having finalised the UVs I exported Cho's head as on obj into mud box and pained the Diffuse layer with relative ease as there was no problem with stretching textures. yay.
HANDS
When texturing the hands I did a previous test to see how well mud box would map a texture on the geometry when an automatic map was applied, given the random separation of the mesh it created a lot of seams. Mud box freaked out when I painted on the hand, showing lots of the fine transparent seams, particularly around the fingers. So, I planar mapped the palm, back hand, and cylindrical mapped the fingers. This worked out well when I painted the blemishes and freckles on because the texture had no noticeable seams this time round. When it came to painting the nail varnish on I initially attempted to paint the nails in mud box, but the colour kept bleeding over the edge of the nail as the fingers were not mapped for such close attention to detail. I had to planar map the nails individually and then painted the nails directly in Photoshop on the UV map, which worked out well. The texture around the wrist of her top, where you can see some white geomitry has been fixed. there have been a few instances like that occur throughout modeling Cho. To fix it i had to tweak the UVs in maya to make shure that the texture I painted was fully covering the UVs, this is where mudbox tends to not map everything 100% to the very edge of an objects geomitry.
As you can see I've UV mapped Cho! I'll go through how as I talk about each individual item I textured :)
LEGS
Painting Cho’s legs was pretty good as far as stressful things go, although I had to get used to getting a brush I made in Photoshop to work well within mud box. I UV mapped the legs using a cylindrical map on each. I then took the mesh into mud box and painted on the base texture, using a brush I made. This brush wasn’t the one I had the problem with, it was the star brush. I used the projection tool in mud box to project the star brush I made in Photoshop to create her pattern. Initially I painted rather then projected the stars, and it looked terrible. Not only that, but the brush was making a dark shadow around the star, which was to do with where I made the brush and overlaid it on top of the already painted base texture. The projection didn’t give off as much of as shadow around the star, so I was able to touch the texture up in Photoshop with the replace colour tool. I went on to tweak the base texture in Photoshop by adding a filter that replicated a more material like quality on the tights.
WELLYS
To Texture the wellys I painted a block base colour on the UV map in Photoshop. I then took the boot into Mud Box and painted on the mud to give the boot more texture. It took a while to get both boots looking as though they were from the same pair because when painting on the mud, one of the boots would have a less amount of mud or a less smudged amount of mud etc. so it took a while to get them looking similar enough. I exported the layers from mud box and put them together in Photoshop, having done that I created the bump by inverting the colours and tweaking the levels to get a good bump on the boots in Photoshop.
JACKET
One of the apparent perks of using mud box was not having to be so particular with the UV mapping. However this was a big fat lie in hell and UV mapping still needed to be done accurately. So, I UV mapped the jacket using a cylindrical map, which worked out really nicely because I was able to get the seam to go along the zip of the jacket so it was discreet. I had a lot of trouble with the shoulders though. I took more tim e to carefully map around the shoulders so there was as little amount of stretch as possible when painting the texture. As the shoulders was a separate shell of UVs to the rest of the jacket, when I painted on the geometry in mud box there was a really obvious stretch in the texture where the seam was. I fixed this by over laying the UVs of the shoulders over the rest of Cho’s jacket; this might look a bit careless and messy when looking at the UV map, however it is what gave the cleanest result with the final texture. I painted the texture for the jacket in Photoshop using various filters to create a texture that looks like material…ish. Then I took photographs of a jacket and Photoshoped the material folds in as a different layer to add to the warn in texture of the jacket. I was able to paint a bump map for the jacket in mud box using a brush I made previously for the tights at a larger scale.
BELT
To paint the belt I UV mapped it by selecting all the faces and applying a cylindrical map to the mesh, I then had to tweak the verts accordingly so the texture wouldn’t stretch when I painted it in mud box. When I was taking photos for the jacket folds I took some photos for the jacket belt as well. I manipulated a photo in Photoshop to work as a brush in mud box for the belt. However, when I uploaded the obj file into mud box and began to paint the texture it want crazy and wouldn’t paint anything without a stretch. The same is applied to painting the bump layer; it was just destroying the belt. I thought my UV map might have been the problem so I re-UV mapped the belt using the same approach but I took more time when positioning the UVs. However, I still had the same problem, if not worse this time. so rather then paint the texture in mud box I did it in Photoshop which gave a more accurate texture but still slightly off, but there wasn’t much more I could do to improve the result having previously re UV mapped it a number of times, as well as taking into consideration the groups time schedule.
TOP/SLEVES
I UV mapped the arms with a cylindrical map and the chest with a planar map. I exported the mesh for both the arms and chest as an obj file into mud box so I could then paint the Diffuse, bump and specular layers which went without any hiccups.
