Character modeling and texturing Making of

Basemesh Boxmodeling Imageplane to get right proportions Quads ~7000 tris Trying not to get to much into topology at this stage

Zbrush basesculpt Blocking out propotions using claytubes Looking at reference matrial of bodybuilders and anatomy books

Re-topologizing Before re-topologizing i did a quick rig with the setup machine to see where i would have problems, but the only real problem was that i needed to add some loops around the knees and elbows. I used Nex, other alternatives would be maya live, zbrush or topogun.

Re-topologizing In zbrush i imported the new mesh and subdivided it to the same level as the basesculpt, then added it as a subtool and projected the detail on to the new mesh

Re-topologizing In zbrush i imported the new mesh and subdivided it to the same level as the basesculpt, then added it as a subtool and projected the detail on to the new mesh

Re-topologizing In zbrush i imported the new mesh and subdivided it to the same level as the basesculpt, then added it as a subtool and projected the detail on to the new mesh

Rigging I´ve rigged using the setup machine because its so fast and gives me good control and ability to change proportions if needed. I painted quick skin weights just to be able to figure out a pose for the charachter I´ve also used transpose in zbrush to make minor changes, but unless you have already decided a pose it´s faster to test with a rigged character

Trying out different poses on the rigged charachter

Sculpting Looking at reference material, pictures, video and anatomy books I mostly use clay tubes brush, and the standard with small alpha

Sculpting I often use alphas to create finer details Custom tileable alphas are easy to make just create a square sized document and paint.To offset use the tilde key (but in swedish keybords you use ö, that took me a while to figure out ).then use grab doc in the alpha palette. If you use other alphas created from photos you might want to tweak midvalue, radial falloff and play around with the alpha adjustment curve, all in the alpha palette The standard brush with dragrect is a good way to apply the aplha details to the mesh, and also for texturing

Decimation master I used decimation master(zbrush) a lot in the beginning, it does a great job of keeping detail att lower polycounts and this alowed me to start lighting and shading in maya without extracting displacement and setting all that up. I could also start texturing with polypainting and a temporary automatic uvset(auv tiles) and the renders where fast.

Lightning/shading tests

Lightning/shading/texturing I used a couple of area lights with decay I also changed the gamma to in render globals>quality>framebuffer to work linear. This gave me problems with normal map generated in zbrush so I did them as open exr:s in Xnormal instead. The displacement was generated in zbrush as 32bit tif floating and converted to metal rays.map format (set up in maya with alpha gain 2.2 and alpha offset -1.1). I also used the mental ray subdivision aproximation editor (and turned feature displacement off for the mesh.I used a script by Scott Spencers(can be downloaded from zbrushcentral.com) to convert the subdivision approximations from CCMesh to subdivision surface to get correct displacement. Skin shading was done with misss_fast_skin Textures where created in zbrush and photoshop via zapplink

Hair For the hair i used shave and a haircut for maya I had to render it out with separate lightning with spotlights and with the shavebuffer, but if you have a proper workstation i would try the mentalray hair prims. The cast shadows from the hair i faked in fusion by blurring a copy of the hair, make it black and multiply it under the real hair.

Hardsurface models Everything started from primitives To get nice edges, I mostly use the smooth preview(3) and if i want harder edges i add loops, use the crease tool or bevel If it´s more simple shapes or you need to keep your polycount down in the scene, i use mia_roundcorners