Moewen character
polycounter lvl 2
Hey guys!
Im currently working on a character i drew based on a film i made with some friends. The film is called "In the cave of Möwen" and its a chinese Kung Fu film.
I decided to make a literal interpretation of Möwen, which in german means seagull and created a bird-man with a hawks head (liked it better than a gulls) in Kung Fu clothes.
As far as i have to do a small animation with a full rigged character and my old char didnt work out so well i decided to bring mowen all along from hipoly to lopoly animation.
I modeled the char in zBrush and am currently trying on all the maps. I also want to add some more props in Maya and try ddo2 for texturing.
As far as im now i started with the baking of the maps in xNormal today and brought the lopoly to maya.
Process pics below
The hipoly is bout 12mio and the lopoly is now 23k but will be further reduced. Im really eager where this will be going in the end
Every comment or critis is very welcome!
Im currently working on a character i drew based on a film i made with some friends. The film is called "In the cave of Möwen" and its a chinese Kung Fu film.
I decided to make a literal interpretation of Möwen, which in german means seagull and created a bird-man with a hawks head (liked it better than a gulls) in Kung Fu clothes.
As far as i have to do a small animation with a full rigged character and my old char didnt work out so well i decided to bring mowen all along from hipoly to lopoly animation.
I modeled the char in zBrush and am currently trying on all the maps. I also want to add some more props in Maya and try ddo2 for texturing.
As far as im now i started with the baking of the maps in xNormal today and brought the lopoly to maya.
Process pics below
The hipoly is bout 12mio and the lopoly is now 23k but will be further reduced. Im really eager where this will be going in the end
Every comment or critis is very welcome!
Replies
the topo to 20k tris. Also fixed some issues with the UVs and set up the
char in maya to view the maps so far.
I'm pretty satisfied how the normal map turned out... on my first
character there were far worse problems... i start to understand
xNormal better and tried also a lot with AO and Cavity maps for the
diffuse.
Next ill model the feathers in maya and texture them.
Then spec map, transparency map and materials in Quixel
in mental ray... the transp-map is 100% b&w and still on 100% transparency
mental ray renders the map in a dark black...
does somebody know how i can solve this??? in maya with the 2.0 hardware
render everything looks pretty good but i would like to render everything
in mental ray afterwards... Anybody ever encountered that problem?
Internet brought me as far as at least having any transparency in mental
ray but i cant get rid of that black...
also got the materials done and spec & glossmap
now just more tweaking everything before i can go over to rigging!
quite happy with the result! learned alot about baking and maps this time!
On there is now:
Normal, Diffuse, Specular, Gloss, Reflective, Transparency Map
Also DDO is really a great tutorial to alter textures in a great way.
The object space tangents oriented miscoloration or dust/weariness is
really awesome. Pity its just free till 8th september as far as i saw?
Anyway heres the result!
my tutorial is quite huge and good but still 90% of the controls
have like no effect to the skeleton right now... and the worst
about the tutorial is it tells you what to do but never what things
youre doing actually are supposed to do... god that rig will be still
a lot of work until things start to actually move when i move them...
anybody recommending a good maya rigging tutorial? which could help
me understand things better? my main problem is that despite constrains
and fun my skeleton is not affected by the controls... also all the
parenting is still quite a mystery to me... i tried some parenting
ikHandles around to see when they actually move with the skeleton...
also stuff as the global control just affect half of the skeleton and so
on... god there was a lot of cursing stress and anger the last two days
my humble non working rig so far
now most of the stuff works! just some finetuning and then weightpaints ugh...
not able to go through all this again in the next few weeks :P
especially when youve never done it before and then theyres weights
everywhere u dont want them ahhhhh
also i pushed him down to 16k tris yay
tomorrow im gonna start animating!
also i blocked him out in traditional today for the fun of it and to distract myself
final rig:
and the rough sculpt
the fps on the gif are somehow much slower as in preview...well
i knew that there was some problem in my rig but i couldnt find it... so it made me so mad today i decided to break everything down. i deleted the skin and tried a different approach. so i reworked the skeleton so there are no more problems now and the rig is actually mcuh better now yay.
then i imported a later model (the one with the 24k tris) and started to skin the base model without clothes, feathers etc. surprisingly the weightpainting was like super easy... its much better to control a basemesh. then i wrapped all the clothes around it, skinned it and copied the skin weights...
everything works im rly happy right now
just sometimes the skin flashes through the clothes but i can live with that. better than badass deformations spikes and what the heck strange looking
and i can also close and open the file now without it being a complete mess :poly142:
tomorrow, animating... this time with fun instead of frustration!
Hers the vid
i would greatly appreciate if you guys could have a look at what i did
and help me with refining the movements because right now i feel
like blind from wathcing it :P
anybody got some feedback for me? would really appreciate it and bring this project to an end
https://vimeo.com/106983843