Finished cottage and finished module!

Today I finished my last piece of this work being the cottage. I'm actually really happy with how it came out. The The whole thing looks pretty nice in my opinion but there are a few things I would change if I did it again. The normal maps I found a little bit buggy and couldn't find a way to fix them but in the end they came out okay once they had a diffuse on too along with a bit of tweaking. The roof tiling was surprisingly easy and worked first time. The incandescence maps were easy to make yet I don't think I made them brilliantly but then that's something I can learn in the future. Overall I'm very happy with this piece of work and think that this whole module has taught me a lot and will guide me into much of what I will be researching this summer in my own time.  

Final Render #1

Final Render #2

Marmoset alien heads

These are my 3 marmoset renders of the low polygon alien head. I'm really happy with how it came out and am looking forward to moving forward with more ZBrush work in the future.

Front Perspective

Back Perspective

Side

Completely finished face

Today I finished all work to do with the alien head paint over. This involved baking all the details and colour values from the high poly head (in the millions of polygons) to the low poly head in Maya (6,000 polygons). Despite the massive polygon difference, their isn't too much difference when you look at the 2 heads. They both look great and I'm really happy with my work. I created a number of maps for the head but most were done through just using the low and high poly meshes, only the specular required me to paint it myself. The UV'ing of the low poly head was quite difficult but with the help of my friend and lecturer this went quite smoothly and ended up giving me a good result.

Overall I really enjoyed this part of the module. It went smoothly, the work I created looks good and it didn't even take that long. I learnt how to do several basic painting techniques in ZBrush which will be very useful in future. I also learnt about how to bake out of ZBrush onto a low poly version of the model. It also helped me a little with imagination (don't laugh, it's true!) as it got me thinking about using a wider spread of things for textures. On this alien head alone I used jellyfish, burnt flesh, rotten flesh, several types of bone, gecko eyes, lizard scales and raw meat pictures to create his final image. This was a great exercise.

Next I plan to get some nice Marmoset renders of the low poly head before moving onto completing the cottage assignment before my final hand in on the 28th of April.

The Low Poly Head In Maya

Ambient Occlusion Map

Cavity Map

Diffuse Map

 Normal Map

Specular Map

Finished face paint

I finished the paint over of my head today. I'm really happy with how it came out and found that Zbrush is actually a lot of fun whilst having a lot of functionality. I ended up adding some new ideas to my paint over but kept to the original plan for the most part. I added a lot of burnt skin to him as it just ended up working really well. Below are some of the textures I used for Spotlight painting. Next I need to UV map the head and get it onto a low poly version eventually.

Front

Perspective

Side

Lizard Skin

I used this along with another non-gradient version for the base skin colour and texture of the head. It is a simple image with a gradient on the colour layer style. 

Bone

This was my first bone texture for the teeth and neck bone. This is simply an image with a multiply layer and duplicated it all using the overlay style.

Bone2

This was my second bone texture, used for the aliens crown. I used a colour overlay and my previous version in combination with a new image to create this.

Gums

This is literally a slab of meat I used for the gums. I then edited it in Zbrush.

Jellyfish 

This is a beached jellyfish which I used for the warty areas on the side of the aliens head. I added a red colour overlay, used levels to get rid of some highlights and added detail with the brush tool.

Rotting Flesh

This is an an image of a plastic bag that was heated up a lot. I used a multiply layer, colour layer and overlay to make this.