The Order 1866 Character Surface Detailing

funkybunch

Hi polycount,

I've been looking at some of the
Ready at Dawn presentation files for The Order 1866 (The Character Art and Shot Lighting Pipelines  - p. 56ff.)
and I came across the detailing part for the characters. However, I don't really understand how they did the surface details:



They modelled the meshes in Maya and used a height map to displace details in ZBrush. But how did they control the displacement location and direction for that using such simple UVs?




I hope you can help me understand the process. Thanks!

Sunray

I'm not sure but i think they made a tileable piece and duplicated it and sculpted that piece something like this.

http://rodrigopixel.com.br/images/3d/knight/chainmail_breakdown.jpg

Obscura

Those "such simple uvs" are just the uvs of the baking planes. Basically they get tiling textures. That they can just tile on the mesh. I guess...

funkybunch

Thank you for your replies.
Sunray, those base meshes were created in Maya. What I was wondering about was the final details that you can see in the last picture - the tiny ridges that were displaced in ZBrush and go in different directions.
Obscura, ok so if those UVs are just for the lowres meshes, then how did they control the displacements for the highres meshes? It doesn't all just go in one or a random direction, but is precisely designed to follow a pattern.The green strokes show the direction, the red strokes mark the same elements and the blue arrows point to the spot where the displacement is obviously identical. Did they unwrap parts of the highres mesh and duplicate them it in order to create the final forms? Because then I could use one height map without worrying about the final pattern flow, the UVs would take care of that.

pior

The slide is confusing. The "simple UVs" you are talking about are related to the lowpoly tiling strips used as decals on the final ingame models. This probably has no relationship with the way detailing was done on the highpoly sculpts (using displacement, the direction of which is controlled by the UVs of each element of the highpoly source).

In other words, they carefully planned their highpoly step by cleverly assigning UVs to basemeshes the way it has pretty much always been done before digital sculpting in Zbrush became a thing - and thus keeping sculpting to a minimum while keeping the whole detailing non-destructive and easily editable (by punching in UV tiling values and angles).

funkybunch

Alright, that totally makes sense now. I thought that they somehow used these UVs to control the height maps. Somehow I got stuck with that.

Thank you, pior.