Nabooru of the Gerudo

Tigerfeet

I'm aiming for current to next gen specs for this character. Full normal map, specular, alpha, etc. It's the most ambitious project I've done yet. The goal is to get her done before PAX prime so I can bring her with in my portfolio.

My reference sheet:


My progress so far, after one evening of sculpting. I know it still needs a lot of work, any critiques would be amazingly helpful. Thank you for looking.

Steve Schulze

I'm really liking that concept design of the right. It'd be cool if you could bring some more elements from that into your model.

Right now your anatomy has a lot of problems. You need to grab yourself some good anatomical references. It's generally not that far off, but things you need to take a look at include: The shape of the rib cage and hips, the height of the knees, the shape of the brows, the position of the mouth and nose in relation to the jaw line.

Tigerfeet

Thank you Jackablade. Working on tackling this a little bit at a time. I think I just started diving into the whole model and got overwhelmed.

First order of business, make her not look like a sea hag. Right now she's reminding me of the bust of nefertiti, and I can't decide if I want that or not. I think her eyes might be too high as well.

Tigerfeet

I think I fixed her face. And someone showed me the Dam_Standard brush and I think we might have to go elope or something. Currently working on taming those ridiculous pants.

Tigerfeet

Man I love those google art hangouts. Got quite a bit done this weekend, and thanks everybody who answered my noob questions

Tigerfeet

Finally! Finished with the high poly. Thanks so much to Lee for the advice on her stance and teaching me how to use Transpose Master.



Now on to retopo. Never done this before, picked up a trial of 3D Coat and I'm going to give that a whirl.

Jowens

hahaha that face is awesome

Tigerfeet

- Jowens, Thank you

I was able to knock out my retop this weekend. I might still go back in and see if I can pare 200+ tris, I think there's some room in the stomach for some welding.



And the interactive is here: http://p3d.in/xbxJU

Right though, I could really use some advice. I did a couple preliminary bakes in XNormal just to see how things would go down and the result was depressingly weird.



I think I've got two separate issues. The whole thing looks metallic (AO is no better) and I have no idea what could cause that or how to fix it.

The second issue is that it's not reading the model right, and I think that has to do with how my high poly is set up. When I sculpted her I used a lot of subtools and when I exported her out I just exported everything as-is. Meaning her sculpted legs on the high-poly are still there inside her pants. I think that's what XNormal is reading.

Now, I think there's a way to combine all the high-poly detail of all the subtools into one high-poly mesh. Is this called projecting? Am I just high? What would you folks recommend? I've got my high-poly mess in ZBrush, I've got my original base mesh, and then I've got my nice beautiful clean retopologized mesh. I'm going to do some digging, but if someone could point me in the right direction I'd be very grateful.

MrHobo

1. Bring your low poly into zbrush and compare it with your high poly. I'm thinking either your low is too small or too big.

2. Turn on Back face culling in maya (under the shading menu in your viewport). make sure none of the normal are flipped on your low.

3. Look under display in zbrush make sure double sided isnt clicked and make sure you're normals aren't inverted on your high poly.

Im pretty sure it's not the legs being read under the pants. Surface detail is all thats read when you bake from high to low.

Alemja

The problem is fairly common in xnormal, you have to mess the ray distance to get it right and even then it's not always perfect. The best solution for xnormal I found is to make a external cage (obj) and all you have to do is take the low poly and push the verts outward (some areas require more tweaking) I'm not sure what the maya equivilent of the max push modifier is unfortunately. Another thing you could keep in mind is that you don't have to get everything perfect in 1 bake since sometimes you tweak things that fix one area but mess up others, you can make a couple of different bakes and piece then together.

Tigerfeet

Thank you both VERY much! I've got a lot of things to try. When I retopo'd it I used 3D coat and it seemed like the retop mesh was hovering just on the inside of the high poly, so if it's anything it might be too small. One of the tutorials I ran through mentioned a z-bias, but I thought it was just referring to viewport tricks but now I'm not so sure. If none of your other suggestions help Hobo and Alemja, then I'll go back and see about adjusting the size.

Thanks again

gilesruscoe

Hey Alexis, have you tried baking using the ray distance calculator in xnormal?



1, go into tools tab
2, select ray distance calc
3select your mesh in the popup window and press go. After it reads the mesh files it will start calculating the rays and it will show you how many seconds it's been calculating for at the bottom of the window. Wait about 20seconds and press stop and then hit " copy results".

What this does is it calculates the best ray distance to use on your mesh to give you minimal bake errors. Of course the results depend on how complex your mesh is and some areas will require a cage or blocker files. For something like this i would use blocker files instead of a cage. Blockers are simply geometry you export out from max/maya which block the rays cast by the baker. So if you were getting artifacts from the arm baking onto the torso, you could put a poly plane between the two parts to block the rays from hitting. You can load up blockers into xnormal by right clicking your lowpoly mesh and going to "browse blocker file". It's kinda tricky to explain blockers hopefully you can understand from this picture though of where i've placed planes to prevent errors.

MrNinjutsu

^ best tip I have read in a long while. Thanks for this!

I think you could knock off a few hundred tris if you go back to it.

Tigerfeet

Wow that's awesome Giles, thank you. What you've shown and explains actually makes perfect sense. I'm afraid I dont' know what a cage is though, does that have to do with a bowl I've seen people put their characters in to get some nice bouncing from the bottoms and sides?

Tigerfeet

Woo! Quick update before Guild Wars 2 eats my everything...

Finally got a decent bake! You were right MrHobo, my low poly was WAY smaller than my high. Took some doing to re-size them though because 3D Coat decided it wouldn't load anything high poly for me anymore, continued hangs at 99 percent import So into Maya I went and managed to sort everything out.

One thing I learned, when you're baking you need to have all the edge normals softened on the low poly. It's probably a really noob mistake, but hey, now I know. Also Giles, thanks again for the tip on the blockers. I made extensive use and they helped a whole lot. Here's my raw AO, I haven't done any cleanup yet, lots of little things that need fixed on this and the Normal.