10/11/11

Thesis Project: Alex Surfacing Progress

This week I started to work more heavily on the tiny details of the Alex model.  I went a little sculpting crazy on the clothing and a few of the parts got a little convoluted.  So I did a little back tracking and smoothed out some of the more extreme folds, making the areas much more subtle.

ZBrush seems to handle high-resolution modeling much better than my current copy of Mudbox, most likely because it's a 64-bit program.  I have enjoyed using it for detailing skin textures and other surface patterns.  This week I started the fine detailing of the model, which involved putting a lot more subdivisions into each mesh.  I think the total point count for the model lies somewhere around 17 million points.  I won't be importing that directly into Maya, but rather one that is closer to something like a million.  The higher resolution details makes it much easier to get details out for the normal map when I start rendering in Maya.


I also started using ZBrush's Polypaint tools to create the basic color maps for the character.  I will need to do some additional work in Photoshop to get it looking right, but for the most part, it is looking a lot like the concept artwork.  Well, actually, it's looking better than that.


ZBrush also has done some impressive additions to their lighting system, which allows for HDRI creation.  Unfortunately, I haven't gotten the hang of it just down, so the gamma of each of these images is a bit off.  I tried tweaking it in Photoshop, but didn't get the exact results I wanted.

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