Modelling

I have looked briefly into the animation, and have even gotten her into the editor to test if the animations work. At the moment, I'm a little burned out from the technical work, so I took a break and Modelled these today.

Monster WIP 01

Modelling Other things

First Chair

 

To be modeled next: 

New Monster Reference

Cecilia Complete

Finished Zbrush Sculpt with poly paint:

Applied to Low-poly Model:

Admittedly there's still a bit of fiddling around with the texture left, but this is the bare minimum of her, I will come back to her texture once I've sorted out the monster's model.

I used these pictures to help me poly paint in Zbrush. Most are random images from google, but the eyes and hands are taken from me. I tweaked all photographs to suite skin tone, and colourised one.

Cecilia WIP 06- Success!

 I had solved my UV problems, as it was the case of the UVs being too close to the edge, so I quickly re adjusted them, re-imported the base meshes and behold, I have my normals back to normal! Now to quickly get back on track of my work, hopefully I will be able to finish this by tomorrow. :D I have learned a lot today, and hopefully I will be able to exercise my knowledge more for the monster model.

Cecilia WIP 05- Creating Normals... is HELL

I had little to no trouble with Zbrush until today when I finally decided I'd like to extract the normals (I was planning to paint it afterwards), but the sub-tool, which supposedly splits your model into several objects really backfired at this point. I tried several methods to merge whilst keeping all the sub-divisions I created (1 to 6) in order to create my normals. After a painful 4 hours of just looking everywhere for the right solution I found out that a plugin called Multi Map Exporter was already about to help you export several objects in one map, it even helps export the mesh for you. 

Then another two problems cropped up, one that's seemingly more annoying than the other- is that there are two obvious lines striking through my normals, I checked the normals of these objects individually and to my dismay it happens no matter what, it's as if that area on the mesh (or on the map) is forever doomed to have those lines, when there is nothing obviously wrong with my UVs.

Second problem: the left part of my bow apparently has no UVs.... and therefore the normal map exporter skips it. Just take a look and compare the two, you'll see there's clearly UVs missing...

 Of course it's not the end of the world, and if it comes to it, I'll just have to deal with the fact that there are normals missing (and I'll have to do something about it in Photoshop). My only worry now is that poly painting in Zbrush will give me something similar...

Strikeout in dress mesh pretty obvious

Strikeout through the right side of the body (our right)

Cecilia WIP 04

I decided to retapologise the ears, by simply shaping single-face polys over easy reference found on google.

Cecilia's UV map

Just to recap the design of Cecilia, there were a few things I had to change. Mainly the bow on the back.

This is the character sheet I also submitted to Blitz.

Finally got her into Zbrush after hours of tweaking and uv unwrapping. So far she is in the second sub-devision. This came about slowly as I tried to re-learn Zbrush's UI and little tricks like 'SubTool', 'Auto Polygroup' and even simply rendering it was trouble. Pain for beauty...

 Work in progress: and then a Chair....... yeah, it will look better soon.

In the middle of modelling items

Camera Improvement, Scaleforming & Post Processing

3RD PERSON ACTION CAMERA
In the end- with great results- I decided to opt for the second thread I had found about setting up orbital cameras in UDK. It is very good and provides exactly what I needed without taking away any code I may have the opportunity to use in future (aka extending from classes UTpawn and UTPlayerControllers). At the same time the jagged rotations of the character are solved by a user who replied on the same thread:

• UDK action game- 3rd person camera (which extends from the UT classes)
• Reply to thread above: Smooth directional rotations when navigating character

 FIRST STEPS IN SCALEFORM

Other Scaleform links:

• Autodesk/UDK Scaleform Documentation

• 'Getting Started with Scaleform & UDK' thread<<<< THIS HAS EVERYTHING.

Scaleform & UDK: A Simple Menu by VoxHouseStudios 

From the link provided I learned how to make a very basic menu with a play button. So far when I play the UDK executable, it will only load my game when I type in the console 'open HorrorMaze01', it has also been set to load 'dm-deck' (which is the default DeathMatch map) in kismet. I'm trying to figure out how it can be set to load my map by default, but this will be for another evening. For later reference, I also found from VoxHouseStudio that there is a pretty useful video about post-proecessing anti-aliasing for the udk game.

UDK Anti-alias (Post Process chain How-to Guide)

Motion Capture 02

Prepared some animations in MotionBuilder, waiting to find out how to characterise my actual character in Maya 2012 with its built-in 'Characterization' tool. 

Here's a compilation of the animations I might use: