Welcome to this month's WIP episode/entry. As promised, it is a showcase of the process I have gone through with the Minauld Wallace character. During the process, I had to brush up many of my more redundant skills in Blender, and learn a few new tricks that the updated software is now capable of.
So here's a breakdown:
Modeling
Modeling is my forte. It always begins with a concept sketch. The standard thing to do is use a front and side view, but you can sketch as many views as you want to get the best detail in the modeling process. I did a close up of Min's head after the body because I felt the first sketch was too "man-ish". One gripe most critics have had is that she is too masculine. There is a point, and I think her femininity will come out in her voice and mannerisms. I am thinking along the lines of Ed-o from the Cowboy Bebop series (SPOILER: Ed turns out to be a girl).
This was my most feared step until now. In earlier versions of Blender, UV unwrapping was limited to either primitive projections (cube, sphere, tube, etc) or some complicated flattening which was only editable if you spent weeks tweaking each point. I had some experience with Maya's UV un-wrapper, and was ok with its functions, but when I returned to Blender, I discovered that the unwrapping kept getting overhaul after overhaul. Current versions allow you to draw "seams" to aid unwrapping; pin specific verts so that each time you wish to update your unwrap, the mapping won't go all fubar on you. Here are some examples below of the unwraps I achieved within MINUTES:
I have always been a fan of Ambient Occlusion taken to a grainy, grundgey extreme which reminds one of a French film noir. I couldn't really paint this without going to great pains over the UV maps, so when I discovered "texture baking" I found my holy grail. My workflow now goes something like this:
UV Unwrap (including seaming and pinning verts)
Select base colors for your mesh (eg: skin tone for skin; rough material colors for specific materials)
Bake materials
Bake AO
If you've used some procedural or tileable textures, bake a texture pass
Take all layers into GIMP (or Photoshop) and layer them up: Material pass on the bottom; Texture pass; then AO pass.
Add any textures you wish from library of files and place them over the unwrap
Duplicate your AO layer and blur. experiment with transfer modes.
When happy with the look, export a final, flattened texture
Another area which constantly gets improved in all 3D apps. I discovered at a DMF talk by the boys over at Promotion Studios that Blender has a function with armatures where you can use "bone heat" to skin a mesh. This is literally a "one click" solution which generates the vertex groups based on the "heat" emitted from each bone in the armature. It gets it about 95% right the first go. You can either weight paint the mistakes, or assign weight manually to each erroneous vertex group, and then your skinning is complete.
Minauld has proved to be the experiment for all these methods. It has taken me a month of trial and error to get methods in place that I can now repeat within days on all the other characters. Kynan's meshes are quite hi-res, and I have tweaked them slightly where necessary to bring down the poly count for skinning and texturing, but overall, I've been pretty satisfied with the meshes I received. I still have to set morph-targets for the face, and some more extreme poses, but I'll re-attack that soon enough.
Next month, Look forward to a talk with Kynan, the modeller behind the Stanton Sandboaters.
Speaking of progress:
I have finally decided on the script I am going to use. It will be based on the pilot draft I used for the animatic - I found watching it back it had alot of stuff I really liked. The thing is I need to boil it down to the most crucial scenes. I am working hard to put enough set-up and explanation in the opening scenes, so that the audience feels as though these characters are doing all they can to achieve their goals... even if failure abounds.
Next year, I may be rebooting this process, using the work I have done so far as a study of sorts. I will be doing some redesigning of sets and props, as well as starting rigging tests on each character. From January onwards, I will be working to a close schedule (which I am in the process of finalizing). As much as I would love to give a list of excuses as to why I havent followed my previous one this year, I hate blogs which gripe about why they aren't doing something, so I won't in order to stay out of their rank and file. I know you'll appreciate it. :D
Paul Caggegi is a Sydney-based Video editor and 3D Motion-graphics designer. He is currently working on a short sci-fi anime vidcast series entitled "Character Development"
Subscribe to iTunes Feed
0 comments:
Post a Comment