Week4-6, Midterms done!

Looks like its been a while since I posted an update but here are my projects now as we all move into week 7!

I have been following some Houdini tutorials trying to get a better grasp of the program and even though I cant get anything to look good I do see the appeal.  These rocks and corresponding fiber crystals are all dynamically modeled which could be a helpful tool to use in the future combined with procedural scattering, uv'ing and decimating.

For the Midterm we are building an procedural envrionment.  I still dont know how to render well in Houdini but generating this mountain and scattered trees, clouds and rocks wasn't as hard as I expected.  I think if I learn a few more terrain tools in Houdini I won't need to use World Machine any more.

Game Creation 2 is coming along, though I had a major setback mid week 5 as I couldn't get Unreal to display 3 materials on the terrain mesh without crashing :(  Tried everything I could think of and in the end I got some help from our instructor and it's all fixed now yay!!! (as it always is in Unreal it just needed one button or drop down menu changed and it all worked fine)  The base environment is done so the next few stages will be adding foliage, rocks, and buildings.  Then after that I hope we will cover some more lighting and post processes to make it all look pretty! I know I've had a few classes in how to light well in Unreal but it's still a difficult process I want as much practice as I can get!

 I also played around in Speedtree (which marks the 3rd new program we have had to learn this term :p)  It's a really nice piece of software and gives great results really fast!  Once I have LOD'd these trees and grasses I will be able to scatter them all over my environment.

As always learning some pretty cool new tricks in Zbrush this term with Paul.  I am still holding back on the final for just a tiny bit longer till he covers Sculptris Pro next week then it's all engines go in a race to get my final done.  This week though we experimented with the Zmodeler brush to do some Maya like modeling.  It's pretty good even if the interface and controls can be a little confusing but I am definitely going to use this more regularly now that I know how powerful it is!

 We have covered facial blendshapes IK spines and IK FK arm and leg switches in Rigging now.  That pretty much marks the extent of the stuff I was already kind of familiar with after last term, next week we will be covering cloth and costume rigging! I am really excited for that!
 

Character for Games has been taking up the lion's share of my time these days but I am really enjoying the results!  I have pretty much finished the costume sculpting barring a few little tweaks here and there and the face is really coming along too, thanks to a lot of help from my classmates and instructor!  I am trying out carded hair for the first time too which is really fun but very time consuming! I spend the entire day yesterday just placing cards for my characters hair! and I still think its going to take another hundred or so to really flesh out the style properly!

I built the cards using Xgen, which is very straightforward in terms of actually generating hair but a real pain apparently for moving files around different computers.  I tried to take my Xgen files to Gnomon to render out the hair cards on 3 occasions before I managed to get it to properly load in the Xgen files :(

This is how the hair looks atm just previewing the AO pass on the cards to help with placing them.  Once I am happy with the layout I will take the model into Marmoset or Unreal and see how the cards look with their whole material working.  Then I can set up a back and forth while I add new hair cards to fix up the final look.

So wow all in all I am still just about surviving this term. It's been really tough so far and there are still 5 weeks to go but I can see the faint glow of the light at the end of the term 10 tunnel! good luck everyone

Week 2-3

Well these last few weeks have been pretty tough! I'm making plenty of progress but the workload is getting tougher and tougher.

Rigging is progressing well.  We have moved onto corrective blendshapes to fix some of the skinning issues.  Next up is facial rigging and face blendshapes :D It's pretty fun to be bringing this character to life after not working on it for so long.

 

 Houdini is still really tough, I am following online tutorials to try to understand it better but there is just no time this term to chase down information so its pretty frustrating :(

We missed a week of Advanced Digital Sculpting which gave me time to catch up with character but I think my Cyber Jaguar is progressing well we will see in time when I start working on more finalised parts.

In Game Creation 2 we have started blocking in the environment for the final.  I am going ahead with creating the port town of Bitteryarrow for my story.  I started with a sculpted block in using Unreal and then using World Machine I was able to run some erodes and noise maps to make the environment look more realistic.  I also built a simple script for use in Maya that should help with modeling objects in place.  Essentially it lets you model in XY space and then update your set dressed instances even if you are adding new geometry.  I want to add Bitteryarrow castle, the port town and maybe some boats moving around the harbor.

For VFX we created a rainy scene using a bunch of particles, some animated textures for godrays and a simple blueprint for lightning.  You can check out all the effects animated in my Term 10 Google Drive folder.

Character for Games is progressing just not quite as much as I wanted.  I spent a long time in Marvelous designer trying to block in all the folds.  I guess I can finally move into Zbrush and start fixing the forms and sculpting better folds.  I just wish there were more hours in the week :p