Month: April 2023

Introduction!

For this half of the unit, we have to create a 3D monster using sculpting and paint-over methods! It gives me the chance to properly learn Zbrush, and add to my roster of skills moving forward with my work, so I am extremely excited to learn it. Like the 3D Character half, there is an assortment of themes that we can follow for our monster, of which I will display below.

For this project, I am choosing to make a Beast/Animal, who’s emotion is rage, and motivation factor is Drone. I chose these as it gives me the opportunity to experiment with different types of design, ranging from modern to steampunk, and I will explore different avenues and ways of which I can do this throughout the weeks.

Sculpting Exercises!

Before we go and start sculpting our character, I need to learn the fundamentals of Zbrush, and how to properly utilize all that it has to offer. We started by first looking at basics and also using a template sculpt to mess around with. We learnt how to insert other meshes, what brushes we should use, for example DamStandard (BDS) and ClayTubes (BCT) for the best results.

Here is an example of a head template I added stuff to:

This session also included a quick tutorial on DynaMesh, Zbrush’s remesh software. Very simple, a click of a button, and then ctrl drag to remesh your object.

Alongside this, I had a go at sculpting a head at home, with proper anatomy and dimensions. It was a very fun process, and I really enjoy sculpting in Zbrush, even after only a week of learning it, so I quite enjoyed this exercise.

That aside, criticism is the way for me to move forward here, and my lecturer did a good job pointing out where I went wrong with this sculpt, and from his criticism, I understand that my sculpt looks way more stylized compared to realistic in terms of proportion.

Animals and Thumbnails!

Considering I am creating a Beast/Animal, I need to study what types of animal I want to use for the project, so I can understand their anatomy, and also create a design that accurately reflects how their anatomy works in the real world, so I can have a believable monster. Considering my emotion is rage, I chose a shark for my base animal to reference and sculpt around, to constrast this, I wanted to also use the praying mantis, as whilst it doesn’t directly convey the emotion of rage, its swiftness in its movement towards prey is intimidating.

Originally for this exercise, I tried to draw the anatomy from looking at it, and then afterward I would copy the anatomy from the images. Notably, that my shark drawing wasn’t sharp enough in its shapes, and that it was either too long, or too short. A good note that my lecturer said, was that I should try and experiment with different species of shark, as they all have varying anatomy, as well as real world images, as those are more dynamic, and actually has me plot the anatomy as supposed to just copying it eye from eye. I will attempt this again.

With the mantis, I almost got the 3/4ths of the head, but my general head is a bit blocky, and the body has a few limbs that are out of place. Also my anatomy studies aren’t detailed enough, and are just general shapes, which may not really help when it comes to putting this into my design.

Here are my first few sketches and designs for my monster, on the left you can see how I tried to block it out with the anatomy, and then piece it together on the right side. I tried a contrast of mixing elements, I quite like how the legs work in the second one, but I also like the design of the head, back and arms on the third one. As an ultimatum, I will combine the aspects of thumbnail 2 and 3 to create my design. I will also draw it in a bit more detail, to understand where I am going to convey the drone aspects, as well as experiment with the different eras of technology in my concept.

Rigging and Weight Painting!

Now unfortunately, due to the nature of Grub’s design as a character, I was unable to run him through mixamo, as the software had absolutely no clue how to rig Grub in general. As a result of this problem, I had to result to manually rigging Grub. I first tried to achieve this by making use of Rigify, a blender addon that helps with generating rigs, but unfortunately, it also had no idea how to make IK’s and other rigging essentials work for Grub.

As a result of this, I had to manually rig my model, making use of IK, and weight painting Grub entirely by myself.

Something you may also notice, is that the hair is much like the old hi-poly version from previous weeks. It is, but also it has been retopologised, specially by Zbrush’s Zremesher. I managed to get it down from 120,000 polys to around 25,000 polys by clicking 2 buttons, and it ends up looking so much better than my decimated version of the hair.

Moving onto the weight painting I did for this project, the process took a while even having used blenders transfer weight function to make a basis for the clothing, but ended up struggling a bit, as the cloak and trousers would keep clipping and dragging the wrong weights which was quite infuriating. I noticed however, this wasn’t a weight problem, but a general problem with topology, as the two parts of the trousers were physically attached, so i seperated them to fix the problem. Besides, here are some examples of my weighting process.

All of these work with IK that are assigned on the rig, and look quite accurate. The hair looks the smoothest out of all, as that was the part I weighted last after learning a really efficient way to smooth out the weights by using the blur brush. If I ever had problems with the weights, I would drag out the skeleton, and remove any un-needed weights or incorrect weights, and that worked quite well.

Texture Painting!

To make Grub look like Grub, I needed to texture paint him. Due to the limits of skylanders being my IP, I couldn’t go for photo-realism (not that it matched my style regardless) so I went with a more pixel based texture style, and did this by using blenders texture paint mode, and there are specific fall-off settings for brush drawing that means the outer is pixelated rather than soft and smoothed, corresponding with my IP choice.

Originally, I used substance painted for a few things, such as the crown and the hair, and these I did in 256×256 to fit with the actual texture size of skylanders originally. However, I soon discovered that having a higher resolution conveys the detail better in the end as there are more pixels for the fall-off to flow to.

I held off of adding normal and bump maps to this model, as back in skylanders age of texturing, this technology wasn’t readily available, and let alone could perform on devices, so I chose to keep the colours and textures flat for this reason.

Animation!

Considering Grub refused to work with mixamo, it meant that I had to create my own animation for Grub. Originally I had planned to do a jumping wave, but I had to compromise due to my IK’s making things difficult. As a result, I went with a basic energetic jump. I ended up fully rendering this and having it uploaded with a few sounds. The final result is about 4 seconds long.

With the animation being complete, this is the final step of pipeline for Grub! It was a fun project to work on, and gave me the ability to tackle modelling a character head-on, as in previous projects I was always more of a supportive role when it came to character development, so it felt satisfying to make everything on my own in such a short amount of time!

Hair!

By far, one of the most difficult parts of Grub to model was its hair, mainly due to it colliding with parts of the model and having to rest on top, but in the modelling process, not the rigging process. Even then, I was struggling on the type of method I would use to create this hair, at first I wanted to sculpt it, but it didn’t end up going well, as it ended up being incredibly flat and too hi-poly.

To resolve this problem, I was introduced to a different method, revolving around using modifiers. In this specific example, I’d use curves to outline the shape of my hair strands, then use a modifier to create a mesh around it, so I can reshape it and scale it, it looked like this:

Using this method was much easier, as I could still follow the drawing I had made of Grub’s hair, whilst also being able to go around and create a lot of depth with my models hair, it also looks incredibly smooth as well, which is satisfying. However, this was also an incredibly hi-poly process, and would need to be decimated down the line to keep a similar type of shape.

Decimating did much to my model in terms of reducing poly count, and also stylisitically. I feel the way it looks now is more likely to the game I have chosen to base my design off of for this project, as it still has very low poly aspects to it, and a lot of the detail is in the texturing. On the side though, it is nice to have the model look similar stylistically at points.

Retopology!

One problem that has remained uncontested throughout this project for me, there are way too many polys on my model of Grub. I had previously noted in earlier weeks of this blog, that my topology was quite poor throughout the project, and as a result, I was left with an incredibly unoptimized character, around 170,000-180,000 verts, which was way too high for just a character. So, I had to fix this urgently.

Most of this was done by making use of blender’s ALT select, which selects a whole line of connected edges. I made extensive use of this to reduce polys and edge count, whilst also trying to keep as much detail as possible. For some cases such as the gauntlets and sleeves, I had to merge those manually, as them being separate missed out on detail and caused gaps. I also managed to fix my modifiers for the crown, whilst being able to remove and work with the poly count, so overall it looks much better.

Originally, I was introduced to an addon called Retopoflow from a classmate, however I struggled to use it for this project, and was more than happy to reduce my polycount by just shedding edges that I wouldn’t’ve needed at all for the models detail. On top of this, any detail I do want to rectify, I can just do so in normal mapping when I texture my model. If I had managed my time better with this project, I would’ve tried to make retopoflow work, but considering my problems were easily fixed, it wasn’t ultimately needed.

UV’s! (Part 2)

WIth my models being retopologised, I now needed to re-uv my models, remark seams, and make sure that my UV’s would be bearable to use when it comes to working with the model in substance painter. Luckily this process isn’t too daunting to me now that I had retopologised my model, and now that I made sure I knew how to use ALT select in the most effective fashion.

For now, this is the update I have for my work during the holidays, and I will discuss about rigging, texturing and animating during week 6! A bit of a crunch for the project, but I believe I can do those in a timely fashion if I manage to keep my head down.