MDDN 343, Project 1B, Texturing and presentation

Texturing for my character was quite hard because I wanted to make the character look somewhat realistic.
Having 2 different parts of my character made it also hard to texture and to make it look fluid from one part to another was going to be a challenge.

In the end I found these two image to use as my textures

This is a skin texture which I found. I got a image of a squid and got several people in the lap and asked them how would they describe the texture of the squid and the best thing which came up would be that it looked like a skin texture. So that is what I have gone with

This texture is for the shell of my character. It is some wall plaster. I edited the colour of this image in photoshop and gave it a red overlying map so that it could be the colour that I wanted.

Because my character is all one model I had to combine these two image into my UV map and save that as a image as a colour map for my character. This is also where I managed to add some shading to my character.

Something which I also wanted was to have the texture of the wall plaster as a bumb map for my character. But I was already using my normal map as a bumb map, and you can only have one for the character. So what I ended up doing was overlaying the texture over my normal map and making them into one map. This ended up working and it turned out how I wanted my character to look like.

The parts in this map which dont have the texture on it are where the head of my character would be so that it woulnt have the bump on it. 

To put my character in context I put him in a scene which I made. The scene is how I would picture what the bottom of the ocean would look like if all the water were to dry up.

Here is also the turntable which I will be showing in the presentation


turntable 1 from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mapping

Adding my normal map onto my character turned out a little more difficult that I expected.

Here is my original normal map which I extracted from my Mudbox file

At first I was 100% if this is what a normal map should look like so i thought that this was fine.
When bringing it into Maya though a couple things went wrong. Here is a image of how it turned out in Maya

As you can see the stuff on the back came out properly.
But for some reason the tentacles screwed up a little bit and some gaps were created. I thought this is weird because I never touched those tentacles in Mudbox.

To get around this I did a lot of google searching and found out that I might of needed to edit my UV map in Photoshop.
After editing my Normal Map this is the outcome

As you can see its quite different from my original normal map. But it did help a little bit. Here is an image with this new normal map added to it.

This came out a lot better. To edit the map I had to mark the places around the head and the tentacle and match them to the surrounding parts of the normal map.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mudbox modeling

Bringing my Maya file into Mudbox worked out quite well.
Nothing seemed to be have changed in the model and it looks perfectly fine

After playing around with the brushed, stencils and other stuff which mudbox has to offer. I decided to make my characters back look more like a shell and give it hard rock defenitions, aswell as make its legs look like they have joints instead of it all being one thing. I also lifted some of the skin around the eye to make it look more like a socket and smoothed around the tentacles to make it look more natural.

I really like how this turned out. My only worry is if it will transfer into maya properly or not.
The way which I plan on doing that is the same way in which I were to do if I was using maya, by using a normal map

MDDN 352. Project 2. Concepts

For project 2 of this course we are to re imagine a children's book and turn it into a ipad app.

I am going to be working on the book 'Mr Whistler' which is amount a man who whistles a lot who loses his train ticket.

I have chosen to mainly use the touch screen, gyroscope, GPS and microphone for my book.

Here is what I am hoping to be able to complete in the assignment.
I have chosen to use 4 pages from the book, which 2 pages being 1 scene.
Each scene has at least 3 interactions which the user can do to go through the book.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mudbox

While I was modeling my high polly character I came across the program MudBox which is another autodesk software designed specifically for high detail modeling.

Doing a bit of research into the program I found out that you can make some really good looking models in this program.
Here are some examples which I found that I really like

From what I saw come out of mudbox I thought I would put my character in and see if I can do the detail of my character in there

MDDN 343, Project 1B, UV mapping

To get a good texture onto my character we have to UV map it. This is the first time I have properly used UV mapping to add a texture to my character so it was quite a challenge but something which I was really glad I learnt about.

Here is my original UV map for my character

Seeing this I have no idea what part is what. It doesnt look at all like my character. So what I ended up doing was cutting my character up into pieces. I cut this Legs, head, tentacles eyes and tentacles so that they are all separate parts in the UV. Once they were well separate I put the view to a Y axis view and also cut a line through each of the pieces and unfolded them so that it gave a nice birds eyes view of my character.

This is how it turned out

This gives a way better view of my character and I am really glad at the way in which it turned out

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Invisible model

While working with my model I realized that I had a ridiculousness high polly count for my object even though I had only slightly edited my low polly model

It turns out that somehow there was an invisible model in my scene. I have no idea where it came from because it wasn't hidden or anything. While deleting stuff from my outliner I found a lot of things that shouldn't of been there. And while deleting things another random model which looked like my original one which i handed in for 1A started to form over mine. This managed to fix my problem but it was something which really got me confused at why I had such a huge polly count.