I'm currently giving a modeling and texturing lecture for two third semester art courses at the Games Academy in Berlin, and decided to create a character from scratch to cover every aspect of character creation workflows.
We've set the goal to create a base mesh, grind it through Mudbox, retopologize it (so the students get a general base mesh they can use in the future, too), create base meshes for clothes and armor, sculpt those too, and in the end, use the retopologized mesh to create a new lowpoly mesh that includes those too.
The only style guideline I've set was that we're aiming for a slightly carricaturized look a la Brink.
My friend Sascha Henrichs is creating a weapon with the same two courses under similar premises, and finally, far far down the road, everyone will have a character with a weapon and hopefully see him or her running around in UDK.
So far we've created a simple base mesh in Maya and used this for the initial sculpt.
We've set the goal to create a base mesh, grind it through Mudbox, retopologize it (so the students get a general base mesh they can use in the future, too), create base meshes for clothes and armor, sculpt those too, and in the end, use the retopologized mesh to create a new lowpoly mesh that includes those too.
The only style guideline I've set was that we're aiming for a slightly carricaturized look a la Brink.
My friend Sascha Henrichs is creating a weapon with the same two courses under similar premises, and finally, far far down the road, everyone will have a character with a weapon and hopefully see him or her running around in UDK.
So far we've created a simple base mesh in Maya and used this for the initial sculpt.
Then we've spend some time on the initial sculpt. Although I've been constantly saying to keep it simple and to only block in the volumes, most people got drawn into the detail work - in the end, I did too. But I guess it's a good thing, because I've felt that my understanding of anatomy improved quite a bit (the lecture is about modeling techniques, not anatomy, in case you're wondering).
As I said, my level of detail is probably a bit too high for what I had planned, but sculpting this was so much fun that I had a hard time letting it go.
Today we exported and re-imported our 0-Level-mesh to create UVs, started painting in some edgeflow guidelines and started retopologizing.
The next step will be to finish the retopo, create a unique UV layout and bake a displacement map from the initial sculpt on the retopo UVs, either by using Mudbox itself, or XNormal. I guess we'll do both and compare the results.
Then, we will use the Sculpt from Displacement Map feature in Mudbox to recreate the details from the initial sculpt on the retopologized mesh. After that, as I wrote above, Clothes, Armor, etc.
It's been a lot of fun so far, aside from the occasional bug-driven rage (usually not on my end), and I really look forward to see the results of this little adventure.
Today we exported and re-imported our 0-Level-mesh to create UVs, started painting in some edgeflow guidelines and started retopologizing.
The next step will be to finish the retopo, create a unique UV layout and bake a displacement map from the initial sculpt on the retopo UVs, either by using Mudbox itself, or XNormal. I guess we'll do both and compare the results.
Then, we will use the Sculpt from Displacement Map feature in Mudbox to recreate the details from the initial sculpt on the retopologized mesh. After that, as I wrote above, Clothes, Armor, etc.
It's been a lot of fun so far, aside from the occasional bug-driven rage (usually not on my end), and I really look forward to see the results of this little adventure.
Posts
0 comments on "new character.. well, not quite"
Post a Comment