Pirate Captain! Yar!
polycounter lvl 18
Hi. I'm an artists for the HL2 Mod, Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II. For our next public beta, we implementing a few new classes, one of which is the Pirate Captain. I thought it would be fun to post the work in progress here, to track its progress from modelling to texturing, and, eventually, seeing him in-game. I'll keep updating this, and I hope you all find this interesting.
The original model mesh was done by Orl in Maya, which was based on a concept art by HengisHammer. After it was passed to me, I got him into 3ds max and optimized him enough to get the model to around the budget of 4500 triangles.
I then UV'd him and took him into Mudbox for high res detailing work.
Now I'm going to generate the normal and occlusion maps and start painting him. Stay tuned for more!
The original model mesh was done by Orl in Maya, which was based on a concept art by HengisHammer. After it was passed to me, I got him into 3ds max and optimized him enough to get the model to around the budget of 4500 triangles.
I then UV'd him and took him into Mudbox for high res detailing work.
Now I'm going to generate the normal and occlusion maps and start painting him. Stay tuned for more!
Replies
I like im, but hey, the cloth on the knees looks a bit off to me, you might want to shiver his timbers or whatever before you call the normalsmap done..
i agree about the folds in the pants, they lack some weight, or tension. tucked into the boot they should create some baggy overlap. aside from that everything looks great, he desperately needs an eye patch and some curls.
Great work as always, I can't wait to start animating him!
I will work on the pants some more. I was kind of going for a baggy draped down kind of look, but it makes sense that there would be some vertical folds too.
I have also made a static occlusion map that is baked into the color texture. I find it very useful in giving a model a softer shadowed look that is difficult to achieve by hand painting alone. I know from experience that it will need some editing as this will be a deforming character. Where there are shadows in one area, if the character deforms in a certain way, the shadowed area will be lit. Inbetween the legs is a good example of this.
These are all edited screencaps inside of the 3ds max viewport-
can you explain your process in a bit more detail please? it would really help
I do this by carefully building the high poly base mesh from the already uv'd low poly mesh. I made sure that none of the tools I use will destroy the UV's. I mostly use the "Connect" feature to add edges, and I try to avoid Chamfering and extruding because they usually ends up changing the UV's. If I move something around, I use the "Preserve UVs" checkbox to make sure there is no distortion. It's kind of a pain in the ass to work this way, but it's not so bad once you get used to it, and the results are worth it.
Unlike with raytrace, the low and high poly meshes do not have to be in the same place in your scene when you bake them.
For added details such as rivets, buttons, ect., I don't worry about putting them in the UV Match. I just use Raytrace for those. When the two maps are compined into photoshop, I 80% of the area usually ends up being raytraced. UV Match is just for fixing up complex geometery.