Seal Courier

Xajai

Hey guys! I thought id just share this lil guy i have been working on for some hours. It was a really old concept that i thought id rework now that i have a better understanding of zbrush.

I can animate and rig, but honestly I haven't done it in years and i would be more comfortable having someoene else do it! anyone interested?

heboltz3

A seal!! This could be fun. I wouldn't mind having a whack at the animation and rigging

I'd love to chat about it if you'd wanna team up!

Spudnik

To be honest, I think you can spice it up a bit more. Where's the creative twist on the concept? So far it' 'just' a seal carrying items? How does it fly? What's the appeal?

Also, on the anatomy side of things, the lower jaw seems very flimsy and it seems to be too long with the rear flippers not being big/expressive enough.

But again, the big question is always: what makes this more than just an animal carrying something? So far, the most successful courier have brought in some kind of a twist to the concept (Llama with picknick basket, booze peddling red panda, gnome carrying a pig, half-dog half-treat shagbark etc)

Xajai

Of course, im always up for collabs, send me a msg!

Xajai

Spudnik wrote: »

To be honest, I think you can spice it up a bit more. Where's the creative twist on the concept? So far it' 'just' a seal carrying items? How does it fly? What's the appeal?

Also, on the anatomy side of things, the lower jaw seems very flimsy and it seems to be too long with the rear flippers not being big/expressive enough.

But again, the big question is always: what makes this more than just an animal carrying something? So far, the most successful courier have brought in some kind of a twist to the concept (Llama with picknick basket, booze peddling red panda, gnome carrying a pig, half-dog half-treat shagbark etc)

Of course! and i agree, im still working on it. It's been just some hours since i started it and im still exploring options and ideas. He would fly by swimming in the air, which i think would look rather cool, even cooler if paired with some nice trail particles.

However, even though i see the point in your comment, i still think couriers shouldnt be incredibly complicated, el gato (in his walking form) and some other couriers that are just animals carrying stuff are some of my favourite ones because they are simple.

Xajai

So after retopo, and doing most changes, i came to this model of the seal, ignore the obvious baking errors on the back flippers, but what really bothers me is that big seam on the middle! the way i worked was by retopolo in zbrush (i know theres other tools, just wanted to use zbrush to get familiar with the process), but only did half of it, then exported the tool, and used xnormal to get the details, imported to maya, duplicated, merged verts and all that jazz... but the normals keep showing this big seam... anyone knows how to work arround this without having to go into photoshop and painting in the base normal color on the seams? thanks!!!

t1mu

try to flip green channel of normal map. select green channel and ctrl + i

Xajai

Crazy! that didn't fix the problem, but it looks better now.
I think ill just try to retopo the whole seal in another package and see, it might take less time than trying to figure this out. thanks anyways

bounchfx

Did you bake to only half the mesh?

Try this: Take your half retopo'd mesh, duplicate it, mirror it. Grab the UV's and move them over exactly by 1, outside of the default UV space. Now combine your meshes and weld your verts. For something organic like this, make it all one smoothing group. Bake your normals, apply them.

Xajai

I just tried doing that... xnormal freaked out on me haha. something about the obj being out of bounds? idk, do u know where i can read more about moving the UV's +1? ive seen a lot of ppl do it and i have no idea how it affects anything.

Konras

For baking normals you can just move your mirrored UVs outside of the UV area it doesn't need to be +1 exact, what is most important is that original part need to be inside UV rectangle and don't overlap with mirrored part.

However what I see in your images I think you baked normals on mirrored mesh with vertices in the middle not connected, and later after bake you have connected them?
Truth is if you bake using only one half or mirrored and not connected half you cant later connect them. If you bake using mirrored and connected half you need to have them later also connected. Every change in low poly smoothing affects normals.

bounchfx

what Konras said! Yeah I said exactly 1 because I use the outside half for my mirrored UV's instead of a temp mesh that was just for the bake. Just a habit, nothing particularly important.

Xajai

Konras wrote: »

For baking normals you can just move your mirrored UVs outside of the UV area it doesn't need to be +1 exact, what is most important is that original part need to be inside UV rectangle and don't overlap with mirrored part.

However what I see in your images I think you baked normals on mirrored mesh with vertices in the middle not connected, and later after bake you have connected them?
Truth is if you bake using only one half or mirrored and not connected half you cant later connect them. If you bake using mirrored and connected half you need to have them later also connected. Every change in low poly smoothing affects normals.

I see! yeah thats exactly what i did, right now its too late to give it another go, but ill def try it tomorrow morning and post the results, i have a better idea of what to do now and how to troubleshoot it, thanks guys!