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 Cube

So this is my final render of the finished cube. Since last time I have updated the diffuse a lot along with adding some details to the normal map and creating a unique specular map. I enjoyed the little project a lot and learnt quite a bit about both baking normal maps and specular maps along with becoming more and more confident in my texturing abilities. 

Spellbook

This week we made a low polygon book. My book was 284 triangles. The idea of this was to see how to make textures for low detail models. It was made from a box with 3 segments on each side whilst the clasp was made from a cube which I extruded repeatedly. Unwrapping the model was very difficult due to the leather overlapping and joining into the page section. I ended up using a mixture of tools to unwrap it including splitting edges, manually moving vertices and the unfold option. 

Making the texture proved quite difficult. The leather was a combination of 3 types of leather which I then painted over. The writing and runes were done using bevel and emboss, outer shadow and colour overlay on some occasions. The pages were just images that I changed the levels, hue and saturation on. The clasp was a few different iron photos overlaying each other. 

This is my final book. I'm very happy with how it turned out but would like to try engraving things into the leather next time. All in all I spent around 30 minutes on modelling, an hour and a half on unwrapping and 4 and a half hours on the texture itself.