Hey Hazardous, to get a closed hole, I always mirrored and welded in the geometry rollout. It'll cut it perfectly, and sort the weird edge you'd normally get, and have the exact geo on the opposite side.
Super massive thanks to you and all the peeps documenting their stuff during this course!
Great breakdowns, PC should make it mandatory for P&P threads lol.
even after writing my own breakdowns i completely agree. not just because it helps others, but it's amazing how much more you learn just by doing some follow up writing.
great just a little thought - you could use Curve Tubes brush in Zbrush to create those pony tails very fsst :poly142: Anywho, good old school way's good too :thumbup:
Scythe: Thanks for this man! Yeah!!! thats the plan pretty much a curved plane, with a few other pieces each to be individually controlled like the iris and pupil etc.
Mask_Salesman: Haha thanks man, yeah I didnt do any work to the limbs beyond transposing them into shape :P Purely an exercise, and I didnt want to spend the time yet to pushing everything right through to as far as I could.
Shrew81: Thanks man Ill have to try that!!
Intervain: I seriously gave this a shot, how on earth do you control the number of segments or polygon density etc - I'm such a n00b!!
Part 6: High Poly
So I finally got the high polygon model for Miku done!
Special thanks to Hai 'haikai' Phan and Herman openaneworld Ng for helping me out with a lot of super fine crits and tweaks for Miku!
In terms of a how did I reach this point, I think this is probably the least sorcerous part of creating any next generation character these days. Everyone seems to know how to make high poly sculpts!!!
Firstly, I broke down all the important elements of Miku (its usually possible to do this via material skin, hair, metal, cloth etc etc )
Skin.
Hair.
Eyes.
Dress.
Panties ( + cute little bow which no one can see, but it makes me feel better knowing that its there )
Stockings.
Hair Bows.
Hair Accessory.
Wrist Accessory.
From that point, it basically becomes a task of systematically running through and deciding what would the fastest way of creating each piece.
I already had a base body which means I had the skin covered, the hair I basically used z-spheres and dynamesh to create all the hair thats in close proximity to her head. It was purely a case of creating spheres or cylinders and stretching those out using the move tool and enabling dynamesh to create a nice pleasing overall shape.
To get the grooves in the hair and then polish them to the final smooth shape I basically use the claybuildup for building the form, then the polish brush cranked up really high to really flatten out one side of the form, its a slow process of re
For the ponytails here, I built these purely for aesthetics. I wont be using these ones in the low poly but I will be using a similar approach to building them ( I will break this down in its own post once I get to creating the low poly hair part )
For things like the dress, I used GoZ to send back my base body mesh and then duplicated a section of the torso and poly modeled out a new piece.
For her panties because of the topology of my base mesh, I actually decided to paint a mask on my high poly, and extract those straight out of my base.Be aware that the downside to doing this is that youll generally end up with a high polygon piece of mesh without any subdivs!
For the bows and the rest of her accessories I used simple primitives in max and built those out by hand before sending them through.
An interesting point here, zbrush + dynamesh creates some super unpredictable file sizes im still yet to work out why this actually is. It can fluctuate drastically to way beyond the normal already massive fluctuation! Just be aware that your file sizes while normally might be several hundred mb for a character can (depending on how much you use dynamesh and what scale youre working at) blow up to gb's in size.
While this isnt really a big deal when youre doing personal stuff, I think when youre working at a company and using version control (thats storing all your revisions and saves) If each save is over a GB, it can quickly add up, and disregarding this is probably being a dick to your company! As far as the entire aesthetics go, this again was a super challenging task for me, everything is so refined in anime figurines. When forms were lacking harsh and obvious definition it became deceptively difficult for someone like me to even comprehend. This was another absolutely humbling moment.
From the shapes and lines of her legs, arms, neck, back, and feet and how elegant and simple they all are to the thicknesses of limbs. Everything took many many revisions to get closer to where they should be. Then even more so to get them to where they are at right now. (Thanks Hai & Herman!)
The entire head was a challenge in and of itself. The large and rounded cranium is a common trait, and how softly and smoothly the forms transition over the face was definitely mind-blowing. (refer to my head reference pic in my last post) Not pushing big defined forms around was simply unexplored and alien teritory for me.
Matcaps in zbrush were again my worst enemy here. Lots of them work really well for gritty detailed models, but can give a really ugly and complete false feedback when dealing with more rounded delicate forms. For a lot of the time I was using the default skinshade matcap and Ralph Stumpfs light sculpy as the falloff and transitions from a light to dark value is much more subtle.
Once I had kind of massaged everything into place, one thing still eluded me: that youthful / 'barely developed' teenager essence, which is captured so well in this figurine.
It meant I had to go back and refine more forms, reduce the curves on her thighs, knees and calf muscles even more, then make the breasts smaller, and make her waist much thinner.
The alarming thing here was actually how quickly I sculpted everything in the same manner as I had been making girls since forever: the legs were curvier, the hips curvier, boobs kind of bigger and inflated etc
Even though I was looking at reference of Miku the whole time, my natural tendencies still made their way into the sculpt and it took someone else to go ' hey man wtf is going on here!' before I realized what I was doing!!!
Finally regarding polypainting - I'm a big advocate for this, I almost always do it especially in my face, to just give myself confirmation that what im doing, will come together once all the pieces are there. Some people can get that without this step, but for me I need to see that its going in the right direction in front of me, not just in my mind. I really dont do anything special here when I do this.
I use the standard brush, set to anywhere from about a 10 up to about 60 RGB intensity. I dont use color spray just straight paintbrush, similar to a basic soft brush in PS. Anything that I cant quite capture from straight painting in zbrush, I'll zapplink it to photoshop and get right in to the pixel level and sort it out there. Always crank up the polygons in the eyes so you have enough density to capture a nice polypaint there!
Anyone wondering about what im doing to the presentation renders, basically I double my document size, and use a standard BPR, no fancy tweaks there, once in photoshop however, I do a few quick things which I will elaborate on later in the presentation section.
There's actually more I want to write in here about things like the face and eyes and breaking those down etc, but I think Im going to leave those until I actually get to the low because it will make more sense when I can produce pics saying THIS is why I made this like that etc etc.
This is so informative, thank you Haz I don't suppose you have any older (curvier) versions you could show alongside the slimmed one?
I really like the new eyes, having the eyeballs (even if they are just planes) separate gives a much nicer feeling of depth than just the old painted on ones.
I wanted to drop this here just as a sidenote for something I mentioned previously about flicking between matcaps when your sculpting in zbrush. You can see how sometimes depending on the matcap you can really get false feedback for how deep, how defined certain forms are, I find it particularly annoying regarding cavities etc.
Also because of all the colors, the gif quality is pretty low, so theres a PSD here for anyone thats interested: http://dropcanvas.com/mceuo
Me personally I tend to flick through probably twice as many matcaps as I've put here when im sculpting anything, usually changing every 5 or so minutes.
Hey Haz! Just want to mention that sometimes the best way to not get tricked by matcaps is by not using matcaps at all ;P
Since you're gonna build lowpoly after this, does it mean you're done with the high?
Sculptaur: Haha yeah, I know what you mean, It is kinda weird Tigerfeet: Here are some of the adjustments I made
Part 7: Retopo!
I use a combination of 3dcoat and the original mesh pieces that i constructed in 3dsmax to retopo Miku, which is a fairly straightforward process. Some pieces like the bows etc, I would build in 3dsmax very quickly and rough, pipe them into zbrush for sculpting, then export the 2'nd subdiv back into max and quickly delete and collapse some rings for my final low poly piece.
For anything else, 3dcoat is a good piece of kit, and pretty no mess / no fuss which is why I like it. I won't go into how to use 3dcoat though, plenty of tuts already out there regarding that.
The biggest thing that comes into play here is your intended final poly budget. I am aiming for a fairly smooth / kinda toon shaded model, with really smooth hair & skirt movement and finaly enough poly's in the face and eyes for a few morph targets so I could setup some expressions to bring out Miku's personality in my finals.
In the end I didn't want any glaringly obvious poly's visible, especially not in her face and hair. So I pretty much straight off the bat set myself a target of 20,000 Tri's.
I've typically always worked on projects that had a similar way of splitting up the budget: roughly 1/3 for the head and 2/3rds for everything else.
For Miku I wanted half of my budget for head and hair, that gave me 10k tris for head and hair... (holy moly heh)
The face and hair pieces I've built here, are still subject to morph target & motion testing and further poly reduction for the hair.
Something I did want to mention at this point because I've been asked about this a fair few times in the past, by no means am I at a point where things are now 'hands off' or 'locked in'. Once I've baked everything from my high, I will go in for further tweaks and adjustments, essentially, the model is in a constant state of improovement right until the very last moment. This approach can be problematic working in games dev though, because your next customer may already be skinng, or animating.
For personal work, I think its a good thing to always attempt to push your personal pieces beyond the technical boundaries and limitations of a development pipeline. Do things you wouldnt normally do, explore new tools, methodologies and help grow your artistic sense of discovery, all for the express purpose of putting the best image out there you possibly can.
Something else worth mentioning here, every studio I've worked at or every job I've freelanced for, so far has had character TD's that like not only different topology for things, but different base poses for things. I've built everything from completely stiff bipedal T poses, to biped characters posed like they are riding a motorcycle or Dogs and Dragons splayed out like theyve been run over etc . I've come to the conclusion that 'correct topology' greatly depends on whoevers your next customer in line in the pipeline, how they like to work with things, and of course what kind of project you'll be working on.
So for any beginners that might be reading, its great practice to learn what good topology and why you would build something with good topology HOWEVER - Be flexible, because you never know who likes what, and theres a large possibility that whatever method your used to, will not be used at your job.
Theres a massive amount of topology knowledge here in the polycount wiki. Go check it out!
This last shot is just a quick one showing some flat color's using xoliul 2.0. I do this just to apply some base values to my model, and because I just felt like playing with some really quick basic toon style stuff.
Completely agree with dustinbrown. Quality stuff though. But maybe its my ....unfondness of manga that makes me not quite agree the lack of nostrils. That is really freaking me out...
aww haz this is looking awesome, been really wrapped up in personal stuff the last few weeks so I'm digging through everything here now.....information overload..... hehehe...I have been staring at the matcap gif for too long
Great stuff, thanks for making such helpful posts! You really captured the shapes and picked up on your own personal habits and symbols, which is awesome. It sucks getting into the trap of repeating yourself over and over. Can't wait to see how it turns out, I'm inspired~
Hey Guys thanks for the nice words, glad its inspiring and helpful! It's definitely encouraging!
Dustin: Haha man, glad your finding some useful bits and pieces here, despiting hating the style!
El Scorcho: Haha I didnt make any of them man, I picked them all up either through buying them or via friends
nyx702: What is this sorcery you speak of?!
JGcount: Haha! I'm acutely aware of how much this direction is not suited to many peoples tastes - but I make no apologies for my choice. I love this stuff!
Part 8: UVW & Baking Miku!
I used max's default UVW tools to unwrap miku, pretty simple workflow of applying planar and cylindrical maps and the relax function gets me pretty much all of the way there with unwrapping. I remember this step used to take me SOOOOOO long, but it was literally a couple of hours for Miku and she was all ready to go.
I started unwrapping Miku in the same way I tackle all of my personal work: I aim to get Miku to a similar texel resolution from head to toe:
And them end up giving the face and the eyes just that extra bit more resolution in the final uvw, I probably should have shrunk the neck area and enlarged the face more now that I look back at it HAHA - Will adjust that I think so take note - errors on display here!!!!!
When I'm packing my UVW - I always try to keep my islands relatively verticle or horizontal. I also try to place materials relatively close together, and group things like accessories and extra bits in close poximity to one another. I tend to favour cleanliness and easy to interpret UVW layouts over rotating every uvw island and packing everything into a tightly packed jigsaw puzzle.
I do this mainly because:
1) It's easier to edit your textures especially if you still do all your painting and editing in Photoshop!
2) Its more self explanatory to anyone who may need to edit this character later on (perhaps your working on a variant of a character that someone else built for example)
In my career so far, I've had to work with outsourcers a lot, and editing psd's and uvw's that are all random / messy and all over the place is an enormous time sink. 2 NPC characters that look relatively similar (especially humans / humanoids), should have similar UVW layouts, so they are easy to edit enmasse. My point is just try to create a nice clean workspace as opposed to some gnarly mess that you never want to see again when you're done with it. Trust me, the next guy in-line will appreciate it, and you will appreciate it if and when you ever need to edit it again.
I used xnormal to bake my normal maps and my AO maps. I approach both things seperately as opposed to baking them all simultaneously.
Firstly,I take a shot at baking the entire character all at once. Without splitting or exploding anything at all. Just export the high as is, and the low and let it go.
Depending on the character, this can end up looking like dogs balls, but I do this because I want see what I can get away with, before going in there and spending more time splitting pieces off.
For Miku, I ended up breaking her into a couple of pieces, the underskirt and hair needed to be handled seperately just to keep things clean, everything else baked out nice and clean
tip: When your playing with your baking settings and fixing up obvious render errors like scale, or erroneous backface hits, fixing problematic triangulation in your low etc you want to iterate as fast as possible, so bake out 512's or even 256's with no AA as opposed to rendering out gigantic 4096's every time, do that just until you get all the major things sorted! Save some time!
I also only bake my normals first, for really no other reason other than I use it as a prooving ground to tweak all my settings. I then compile them into one PSD and clean them right up, painting out and editing dodgy looking normals, especially wavy junk on straight straps etc.
After thats complete I'll work on my AO - I used to be a fan of heavy AO, but not so much anymore... So my AO's for Miku will be fairly light and soft as opposed to super defining shadows and crevices.
I always render out AO using a Half dome in Xnormal like so:
I find it gives a much nicer overall AO - I just create a sphere, invert its normals, cut the top half off and then export it, and be sure to import it into the high poly section of meshes when you bake
And after cleaning up and editing my resulting bakes, I have something like this ( the AO is at 30% Strength ) I'll regulate this per material once I start getting into the texture stage!
The ponytails and a few other little bits and pieces are still missing, but dont worry I'll be adding those in as the texture start to come together.
Note: Im actually going to do some slight proportion editing to the legs, especially the calf muscle, and the face the whole eye area. Ill get to that and show the differences once I get through the texture stage!
Next Up Textures!!! Awwww yeah home straight now!!!
Looking great! It's awesome of you to post up all the process like this, I'm learning a lot. I had a few questions though.
I've never heard of using a half sphere or anything like that to affect baking AO maps - would you mind going into the logic behind this, why/how it works?
I really struggle getting all my UV chunks straight and neat like yours, and I usually end up with a lot of distortion when I try to use cylindrical unwraps, and the relax techniques I'm used to skew things into less-neat shapes. How do you go about relaxing these chunks?
I've only had moderate success cleaning up normals in photoshop, and have definitely no luck getting rid of 'wavy junk on straight straps' by hand-editing the normals. Do you think you could show some before and after images on normal maps you've edited, or go into your technique a little more?
Ah sorry to ask so much, you're giving so much good information already. Really thankful for you typing this up.
The half-sphere bounces the light around for a more even distribution and less obvious direction in the resulting map. that's my understanding anyway. (I just found out about this technique a few weeks ago and was very impressed with the results)
Question Haz-man: if you made the low in 3Dcoat, is there any particular reason you didn't do the uv's there as well? just a control thing? I'm still debating picking it up for those two functions but if there's a particular reason not to UV there it might save me some coins.
@Scudz, I personally use 3dcoat for both retopo and uving. It has some very nice uv tools, so I often use 3dcoat to get started uving. But it's not that great for fine tweaking, so I usually finish my uving in maya. I recommend getting it, as it's also great for 3d painting.
good stuff haz! looking really nice, awaiting the final textured version
I second that comment from dirigible about 3Dcoat, strongest 3 things it does are 3d painting/retopo/UV imo. I also finish my uv in maya though but 3dcoat has quite a few good algorithms to layout UVs for you to get started
Looking really great! I like the way you do your UVs. I have a question actually, do you ever straighten the edges of your UVs?
Everyone at my work straightens all the UVs of the objects into box shapes for things like arms, legs, clothing etc. You can pack then more tightly and get more resoloution out of it, and you can draw things like clothing seams very straight, though I heard its a very old school method, and you get lots of distortion when painting.
Do you just prefer having relaxed UVs or is because you don't have to downscale the textures with this character? [hope that makes sense!]
Looking forward to seeing the texturing, its making me rethink my processes, very inspiring~
hey Hazardous, I just wanted to say that this has been a big help! I don't know if I missed it or what but how did you find that baking your AO with a half sphere makes it better?
Great stuff Haz, thanks for sharing! I agree with how you pack the UVs, makes life so much more simple! I want to try out your AO technique, sounds useful, but I'm not sure where in the 'high definition meshes' I should plug in the half dome. I mean, should it be right under 'file' or somewhere else?
"Before starting an Ambient Occlusion render, you will first have to create a floor for light to bounce off of. A large plane works most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't work at the right angles. If this happens, I create a Sphere and delete half of it to make a bowl. If your mesh is placed too close to the bottom, your ambient occlusion map will be very dark, so I line up the top of my model with the rim of the bowl. Sometimes I render out both of these maps and combine them together. The occlusion floor should always be loaded with your High Poly Mesh"
Thanks for the positive words everyone, super stoked!!!
Shiniku * Hamtoilet: Scudz and SA_22 are both providing you with some help on your question about the AO - they have it spot on.
Regarding UVW islands, is really a case of deciding whats going to give you the best result in the end. With organic shapes and pieces, usually a nice relax or 2 or 3 will cover you for most things, but for more rigid shapes, like cylinders etc I will tend to unwrap these things perfectly straight, and edit the wavy parts out by hand like this:
Remember no matter what method you use, a low poly cylinder shape with a normal map will never ever look good from *all* angles, but generally this will cover you for most angles - better than the wavy one.
Sometimes relaxing an organic shape... like a hand for example and really mess it up making the fingers splay out, in those cases, move in to a more localized relax, just do a finger at a time etc. Keep experimenting with things, dont be afraid to make mistakes!
Scudz: Yeah man tbh i just havent tried using it! I really should get off my lazy ass and give it a try!!
Future Fiction: I do sometimes, depending on what Im working on. It can make some things easier no doubt about it, especially for working on an mmo parts based system and whatnot for texture packing or breaking up one sheet into areas via a coordinates via a shader so that from point x to point y = torso and so on etc.
Part 9: Texturing Miku!
So this is generally the part where most of the visual side of the character really comes to life.
Given that Miku is quite different stylistically to anything else Ive ever done, luckily for me this part of the process is a bit simpler than normal.
Firstly here are my textures all at 1024 for the purposes of clarity:
And what they look like applied to Miku:
My main goal was to create a really bright, painterly look similar to what one might find in an anime, or in a hand painted jap rpg, with just a hint of the normal map only coming into play when in motion, creating a nice kind of illustrative shadow over the forms ( noticeable on the skirt especially ).
I also wanted to make her hair pop much harder than everything else, as really - thats by far and away on every rendition of this character one might find, her most distinguishing feature.
The tricky thing to balance was to not take the painterly look all the way through so that its an obvious style decision like one might find in wow, or allods online - but find some balance between having a soft painterly feel without defining ALL lights and shadows making it conflict heavily with any real time lighting scenario that I might subject Miku too coming up.
In the coming couple of days - and for Miku's final presentation I will be experimenting with morph targets, comb maps, and of course posing her - so some textures and of course the model itself, is STILL subject to change, pretty much like Ive been saying all along, its not finished until the very absolute last moment!!!
A couple of general things I wanted to point out:
AO and cavity maps are one of those things that really add a lot to make materials pop - use them! Depending on your final style you can have them cranked super hard for some nice deep defined cracks or super subtle like I have used them.
Painting your diffuse. This is something I wanted to go into a bit more depth with because its always an interesting thing to talk about. Even in a pipeline that requires photo sourced textures, I have always found that you will achieve a better aesthetic when you paint a certain degree of that lighting information into your diffuse.
It doesnt have to be much, but just a subtle indication of form can be plenty: Note how I've just subtly indicated those front planes of my chun li face texture here ( kind of a triangle of light )
Its not overpowering so theres no obvious lighting painted right into the face, but just enough so that its not a total flat skin relying on the shader and normal map to provide EVERYTHING. I always prefer to play in that zone, even when faced with a very photo sourced freelance job or game - give it a shot you might like the subtle differences it can make.
Regarding Miku's Hair Specifically - This is where a majority of the effort went. As I mentioned above I wanted this to really stand out - So I want to draw attention to the various evolutions of the hair as Ive gone through the stages to help reinforce something that can be intimidating to many artists.
Firstly here are the pics:
And how it finally ended up with a meshsmooth on it ( 8000 tris for each ponytail meshsmoothed heh heh )
The important point to make is, dont be afraid if in the beginning things arent looking like you want them to be. Just keeping working on it and improving it at each chance you get, push it more toward how you imagined it to be in the beginning, if you tackle it gradually, youll be able to look back at the evolutions and see progress. Its a good trick and helps boost your drive to the finish line!!
The opposite is also true, if you give up, and get pissed off that its not like you want it - and leave it there without pushing through the pain, you'll only end up frustrated with your work and left looking it thinking 'man I can do so much better than this' so learn to love the pain it means youre learning something.
Movement in Hair.
Hair is one of those things that can almost be a personality or a character in and of itself. Wayyyyyy too often we see boring helmet style hairstyle or short straight cuts and bobs. Im guilty of this look at my folio haha) So I wanted to be sure to break out of that and create something long and flowing that conveys a sense of movement and volume first and foremost.
The trigger for that was I remembered the main character in Trusty Bell, and how she had some ribbons that flowed out the back in a really nice movement as you controlled her, but even in a rest posed was gravity defiant and still exuding that same sense of movement. I really wanted to capture that same sensation, so that was my major inspiration.
So why didnt I sculpt it like that in the first place!?
The answer is because I already knew in my mind that I wouldnt be using a heavily defined normal map for the ponytails, so a quicker rough indication would be fine. I would rather spend that time in my final hairpiece where it counts.
Regarding the construction of the ponytails, I started with the fairly straight low poly ponytail, that was constructed from a cylinder that I poly modeled into roughly the volume you see in the high poly sculpt, and extrudrd some edges at the end for the hair tips.
To get the twisting look, I began soft selecting areas of vertices and rotating them. It was quite a long process, but I kept doing this until the hair had some nice movement in it and felt playful and was what I wanted.
One I had my final twisted core shape I added 2 extra ribbons which I modelled out by hand, to help further accentuate the movement:
[FONT="] This kind of constant evolution is not always easy in a production scenario, but for personal work, I always try to make a point of constantly evolving right until the final monent - putting your absolute best foot forward means not restricting yourself by anything at all.
Im still not finished with the textures, I'll keep working on them right up until I take my final presentation shots. Ill talk a little more about the spec map and its role at that time. Need to lighten up the little cowlick of hair on top of her head and the little tufts at the back of neck, and add a few more strands of wispy hair around the face to dress that area up a little more etc.
Next step is posing / and presentation
Ill go into a bit more about her face and entire body movement specifically in an effort to better portray more of her personality. [/FONT]
All this thread has been a great learning experience and i really look forward to the final presentation.
but as a miku addict i can't help but point out 2 things... first the hair should be a little more greenish than the light blue you have right now aaaaand she needs striped panties even tho the actual supercell figure you're modeling her after doesn't have them : / ... (NSFW just google miku shimapan and you'll know)
The important point to make is, dont be afraid if in the beginning things arent looking like you want them to be. Just keeping working on it and improving it at each chance you get, push it more toward how you imagined it to be in the beginning, if you tackle it gradually, youll be able to look back at the evolutions and see progress. Its a good trick and helps boost your drive to the finish line!!
The opposite is also true, if you give up, and get pissed off that its not like you want it - and leave it there without pushing through the pain, you'll only end up frustrated with your work and left looking it thinking 'man I can do so much better than this' so learn to love the pain it means youre learning something.
Thanks for this man. It's something I'm just coming to realize through my own work. If you make something, and you hate it, don't stop, work on it until you don't hate it anymore. Worked for me every time now
''The important point to make is, don’t be afraid if in the beginning things aren’t looking like you want them to be. Just keeping working on it and improving it at each chance you get, push it more toward how you imagined it to be in the beginning, if you tackle it gradually, you’ll be able to look back at the evolutions and see progress. It’s a good trick and helps boost your drive to the finish line!!
The opposite is also true, if you give up, and get pissed off that it’s not like you want it - and leave it there without pushing through the pain, you'll only end up frustrated with your work and left looking it thinking 'man I can do so much better than this' so learn to love the pain it means you’re learning something.''
Thats so true, thanks alot for that! and cant wait to see it finished! looks awesome!!
As awesome posts go this post is pretty much at the top looking down it's nose at all the other posts.
How did you go about uv'ing the hair? right at the beginning when it was still simple shapes or after it was modeled into place? I made some similar flowing locks a while back for a contract and while the results got the job done, seeing Miku here is leaving me kind of embarrassed...
So I tried using the half sphere AO bake dealio on a 4 legged creature and the bake had tons of holes in it. Toggling the half sphere off made them go away so I know it was that. Increasing the scale made them less. To make them completely go away I had to increase the scale 1000x which made the effects null.
I was wondering if you had experienced anything like this? Maybe the half-sphere is more geared for bipeds than quadrupeds?
You, sir, are my hero. I can definitely see those hair flowing like Reimi's in SO4 (physic based), It would be a lovely pain to animate them by hand.
Great gradient on the hair, they definitely stand ou the most, and they help putting the attention on her eyes too. Maybe they attract TOO much attention though, cauz I keep looking at them but not at her dress or her legs
Anyway, blasting job so far, loving the breakdown. Manly tears of awesome has been shed
Ahh thanks so much for the tips on UVing, I really want to improve!
The hair looks amazing, love it! Also curious about how it was UVd too.
Was wondering if you've seen this model? Might be inspirational!
Replies
Super massive thanks to you and all the peeps documenting their stuff during this course!
even after writing my own breakdowns i completely agree. not just because it helps others, but it's amazing how much more you learn just by doing some follow up writing.
Scythe: Thanks for this man! Yeah!!! thats the plan pretty much a curved plane, with a few other pieces each to be individually controlled like the iris and pupil etc.
Mask_Salesman: Haha thanks man, yeah I didnt do any work to the limbs beyond transposing them into shape :P Purely an exercise, and I didnt want to spend the time yet to pushing everything right through to as far as I could.
Shrew81: Thanks man Ill have to try that!!
Intervain: I seriously gave this a shot, how on earth do you control the number of segments or polygon density etc - I'm such a n00b!!
Part 6: High Poly
So I finally got the high polygon model for Miku done!
Special thanks to Hai 'haikai' Phan and Herman openaneworld Ng for helping me out with a lot of super fine crits and tweaks for Miku!
In terms of a how did I reach this point, I think this is probably the least sorcerous part of creating any next generation character these days. Everyone seems to know how to make high poly sculpts!!!
Firstly, I broke down all the important elements of Miku (its usually possible to do this via material skin, hair, metal, cloth etc etc )
Skin.
Hair.
Eyes.
Dress.
Panties ( + cute little bow which no one can see, but it makes me feel better knowing that its there )
Stockings.
Hair Bows.
Hair Accessory.
Wrist Accessory.
From that point, it basically becomes a task of systematically running through and deciding what would the fastest way of creating each piece.
I already had a base body which means I had the skin covered, the hair I basically used z-spheres and dynamesh to create all the hair thats in close proximity to her head. It was purely a case of creating spheres or cylinders and stretching those out using the move tool and enabling dynamesh to create a nice pleasing overall shape.
To get the grooves in the hair and then polish them to the final smooth shape I basically use the claybuildup for building the form, then the polish brush cranked up really high to really flatten out one side of the form, its a slow process of re
For the ponytails here, I built these purely for aesthetics. I wont be using these ones in the low poly but I will be using a similar approach to building them ( I will break this down in its own post once I get to creating the low poly hair part )
For things like the dress, I used GoZ to send back my base body mesh and then duplicated a section of the torso and poly modeled out a new piece.
For her panties because of the topology of my base mesh, I actually decided to paint a mask on my high poly, and extract those straight out of my base.Be aware that the downside to doing this is that youll generally end up with a high polygon piece of mesh without any subdivs!
For the bows and the rest of her accessories I used simple primitives in max and built those out by hand before sending them through.
An interesting point here, zbrush + dynamesh creates some super unpredictable file sizes im still yet to work out why this actually is. It can fluctuate drastically to way beyond the normal already massive fluctuation! Just be aware that your file sizes while normally might be several hundred mb for a character can (depending on how much you use dynamesh and what scale youre working at) blow up to gb's in size.
While this isnt really a big deal when youre doing personal stuff, I think when youre working at a company and using version control (thats storing all your revisions and saves) If each save is over a GB, it can quickly add up, and disregarding this is probably being a dick to your company!
As far as the entire aesthetics go, this again was a super challenging task for me, everything is so refined in anime figurines. When forms were lacking harsh and obvious definition it became deceptively difficult for someone like me to even comprehend. This was another absolutely humbling moment.
From the shapes and lines of her legs, arms, neck, back, and feet and how elegant and simple they all are to the thicknesses of limbs. Everything took many many revisions to get closer to where they should be. Then even more so to get them to where they are at right now. (Thanks Hai & Herman!)
The entire head was a challenge in and of itself. The large and rounded cranium is a common trait, and how softly and smoothly the forms transition over the face was definitely mind-blowing. (refer to my head reference pic in my last post) Not pushing big defined forms around was simply unexplored and alien teritory for me.
Matcaps in zbrush were again my worst enemy here. Lots of them work really well for gritty detailed models, but can give a really ugly and complete false feedback when dealing with more rounded delicate forms. For a lot of the time I was using the default skinshade matcap and Ralph Stumpfs light sculpy as the falloff and transitions from a light to dark value is much more subtle.
Once I had kind of massaged everything into place, one thing still eluded me: that youthful / 'barely developed' teenager essence, which is captured so well in this figurine.
It meant I had to go back and refine more forms, reduce the curves on her thighs, knees and calf muscles even more, then make the breasts smaller, and make her waist much thinner.
The alarming thing here was actually how quickly I sculpted everything in the same manner as I had been making girls since forever: the legs were curvier, the hips curvier, boobs kind of bigger and inflated etc
Even though I was looking at reference of Miku the whole time, my natural tendencies still made their way into the sculpt and it took someone else to go ' hey man wtf is going on here!' before I realized what I was doing!!!
Finally regarding polypainting - I'm a big advocate for this, I almost always do it especially in my face, to just give myself confirmation that what im doing, will come together once all the pieces are there. Some people can get that without this step, but for me I need to see that its going in the right direction in front of me, not just in my mind. I really dont do anything special here when I do this.
I use the standard brush, set to anywhere from about a 10 up to about 60 RGB intensity. I dont use color spray just straight paintbrush, similar to a basic soft brush in PS. Anything that I cant quite capture from straight painting in zbrush, I'll zapplink it to photoshop and get right in to the pixel level and sort it out there. Always crank up the polygons in the eyes so you have enough density to capture a nice polypaint there!
Anyone wondering about what im doing to the presentation renders, basically I double my document size, and use a standard BPR, no fancy tweaks there, once in photoshop however, I do a few quick things which I will elaborate on later in the presentation section.
There's actually more I want to write in here about things like the face and eyes and breaking those down etc, but I think Im going to leave those until I actually get to the low because it will make more sense when I can produce pics saying THIS is why I made this like that etc etc.
Okay, on to the next step - Retopo and UV Map!
Only thing I would say is the clothing seems a bit blobby compared to the extremely sharp lines of the hair.
Keep it coming though!
I really like the new eyes, having the eyeballs (even if they are just planes) separate gives a much nicer feeling of depth than just the old painted on ones.
I wanted to drop this here just as a sidenote for something I mentioned previously about flicking between matcaps when your sculpting in zbrush. You can see how sometimes depending on the matcap you can really get false feedback for how deep, how defined certain forms are, I find it particularly annoying regarding cavities etc.
Also because of all the colors, the gif quality is pretty low, so theres a PSD here for anyone thats interested: http://dropcanvas.com/mceuo
Me personally I tend to flick through probably twice as many matcaps as I've put here when im sculpting anything, usually changing every 5 or so minutes.
I hope its useful for someone
Hey Haz! Just want to mention that sometimes the best way to not get tricked by matcaps is by not using matcaps at all ;P
Since you're gonna build lowpoly after this, does it mean you're done with the high?
Sculptaur: Haha yeah, I know what you mean, It is kinda weird
Tigerfeet: Here are some of the adjustments I made
Part 7: Retopo!
I use a combination of 3dcoat and the original mesh pieces that i constructed in 3dsmax to retopo Miku, which is a fairly straightforward process. Some pieces like the bows etc, I would build in 3dsmax very quickly and rough, pipe them into zbrush for sculpting, then export the 2'nd subdiv back into max and quickly delete and collapse some rings for my final low poly piece.
For anything else, 3dcoat is a good piece of kit, and pretty no mess / no fuss which is why I like it. I won't go into how to use 3dcoat though, plenty of tuts already out there regarding that.
The biggest thing that comes into play here is your intended final poly budget. I am aiming for a fairly smooth / kinda toon shaded model, with really smooth hair & skirt movement and finaly enough poly's in the face and eyes for a few morph targets so I could setup some expressions to bring out Miku's personality in my finals.
In the end I didn't want any glaringly obvious poly's visible, especially not in her face and hair. So I pretty much straight off the bat set myself a target of 20,000 Tri's.
I've typically always worked on projects that had a similar way of splitting up the budget: roughly 1/3 for the head and 2/3rds for everything else.
For Miku I wanted half of my budget for head and hair, that gave me 10k tris for head and hair... (holy moly heh)
The face and hair pieces I've built here, are still subject to morph target & motion testing and further poly reduction for the hair.
Something I did want to mention at this point because I've been asked about this a fair few times in the past, by no means am I at a point where things are now 'hands off' or 'locked in'. Once I've baked everything from my high, I will go in for further tweaks and adjustments, essentially, the model is in a constant state of improovement right until the very last moment. This approach can be problematic working in games dev though, because your next customer may already be skinng, or animating.
For personal work, I think its a good thing to always attempt to push your personal pieces beyond the technical boundaries and limitations of a development pipeline. Do things you wouldnt normally do, explore new tools, methodologies and help grow your artistic sense of discovery, all for the express purpose of putting the best image out there you possibly can.
Something else worth mentioning here, every studio I've worked at or every job I've freelanced for, so far has had character TD's that like not only different topology for things, but different base poses for things. I've built everything from completely stiff bipedal T poses, to biped characters posed like they are riding a motorcycle or Dogs and Dragons splayed out like theyve been run over etc . I've come to the conclusion that 'correct topology' greatly depends on whoevers your next customer in line in the pipeline, how they like to work with things, and of course what kind of project you'll be working on.
So for any beginners that might be reading, its great practice to learn what good topology and why you would build something with good topology HOWEVER - Be flexible, because you never know who likes what, and theres a large possibility that whatever method your used to, will not be used at your job.
Theres a massive amount of topology knowledge here in the polycount wiki. Go check it out!
This last shot is just a quick one showing some flat color's using xoliul 2.0. I do this just to apply some base values to my model, and because I just felt like playing with some really quick basic toon style stuff.
Next up UVW.. so exciting!
I am going to make a Zbrush script JUST FOR YOU BUDDY!
Dustin: Haha man, glad your finding some useful bits and pieces here, despiting hating the style!
El Scorcho: Haha I didnt make any of them man, I picked them all up either through buying them or via friends
nyx702: What is this sorcery you speak of?!
JGcount: Haha! I'm acutely aware of how much this direction is not suited to many peoples tastes - but I make no apologies for my choice. I love this stuff!
Part 8: UVW & Baking Miku!
I used max's default UVW tools to unwrap miku, pretty simple workflow of applying planar and cylindrical maps and the relax function gets me pretty much all of the way there with unwrapping. I remember this step used to take me SOOOOOO long, but it was literally a couple of hours for Miku and she was all ready to go.
I started unwrapping Miku in the same way I tackle all of my personal work: I aim to get Miku to a similar texel resolution from head to toe:
And them end up giving the face and the eyes just that extra bit more resolution in the final uvw, I probably should have shrunk the neck area and enlarged the face more now that I look back at it HAHA - Will adjust that I think so take note - errors on display here!!!!!
When I'm packing my UVW - I always try to keep my islands relatively verticle or horizontal. I also try to place materials relatively close together, and group things like accessories and extra bits in close poximity to one another. I tend to favour cleanliness and easy to interpret UVW layouts over rotating every uvw island and packing everything into a tightly packed jigsaw puzzle.
I do this mainly because:
1) It's easier to edit your textures especially if you still do all your painting and editing in Photoshop!
2) Its more self explanatory to anyone who may need to edit this character later on (perhaps your working on a variant of a character that someone else built for example)
In my career so far, I've had to work with outsourcers a lot, and editing psd's and uvw's that are all random / messy and all over the place is an enormous time sink. 2 NPC characters that look relatively similar (especially humans / humanoids), should have similar UVW layouts, so they are easy to edit enmasse. My point is just try to create a nice clean workspace as opposed to some gnarly mess that you never want to see again when you're done with it. Trust me, the next guy in-line will appreciate it, and you will appreciate it if and when you ever need to edit it again.
I used xnormal to bake my normal maps and my AO maps. I approach both things seperately as opposed to baking them all simultaneously.
Firstly,I take a shot at baking the entire character all at once. Without splitting or exploding anything at all. Just export the high as is, and the low and let it go.
Depending on the character, this can end up looking like dogs balls, but I do this because I want see what I can get away with, before going in there and spending more time splitting pieces off.
For Miku, I ended up breaking her into a couple of pieces, the underskirt and hair needed to be handled seperately just to keep things clean, everything else baked out nice and clean
tip: When your playing with your baking settings and fixing up obvious render errors like scale, or erroneous backface hits, fixing problematic triangulation in your low etc you want to iterate as fast as possible, so bake out 512's or even 256's with no AA as opposed to rendering out gigantic 4096's every time, do that just until you get all the major things sorted! Save some time!
I also only bake my normals first, for really no other reason other than I use it as a prooving ground to tweak all my settings. I then compile them into one PSD and clean them right up, painting out and editing dodgy looking normals, especially wavy junk on straight straps etc.
After thats complete I'll work on my AO - I used to be a fan of heavy AO, but not so much anymore... So my AO's for Miku will be fairly light and soft as opposed to super defining shadows and crevices.
I always render out AO using a Half dome in Xnormal like so:
I find it gives a much nicer overall AO - I just create a sphere, invert its normals, cut the top half off and then export it, and be sure to import it into the high poly section of meshes when you bake
And after cleaning up and editing my resulting bakes, I have something like this ( the AO is at 30% Strength ) I'll regulate this per material once I start getting into the texture stage!
The ponytails and a few other little bits and pieces are still missing, but dont worry I'll be adding those in as the texture start to come together.
Note: Im actually going to do some slight proportion editing to the legs, especially the calf muscle, and the face the whole eye area. Ill get to that and show the differences once I get through the texture stage!
Next Up Textures!!! Awwww yeah home straight now!!!
I've never heard of using a half sphere or anything like that to affect baking AO maps - would you mind going into the logic behind this, why/how it works?
I really struggle getting all my UV chunks straight and neat like yours, and I usually end up with a lot of distortion when I try to use cylindrical unwraps, and the relax techniques I'm used to skew things into less-neat shapes. How do you go about relaxing these chunks?
I've only had moderate success cleaning up normals in photoshop, and have definitely no luck getting rid of 'wavy junk on straight straps' by hand-editing the normals. Do you think you could show some before and after images on normal maps you've edited, or go into your technique a little more?
Ah sorry to ask so much, you're giving so much good information already. Really thankful for you typing this up.
Question Haz-man: if you made the low in 3Dcoat, is there any particular reason you didn't do the uv's there as well? just a control thing? I'm still debating picking it up for those two functions but if there's a particular reason not to UV there it might save me some coins.
I second that comment from dirigible about 3Dcoat, strongest 3 things it does are 3d painting/retopo/UV imo. I also finish my uv in maya though but 3dcoat has quite a few good algorithms to layout UVs for you to get started
Everyone at my work straightens all the UVs of the objects into box shapes for things like arms, legs, clothing etc. You can pack then more tightly and get more resoloution out of it, and you can draw things like clothing seams very straight, though I heard its a very old school method, and you get lots of distortion when painting.
Do you just prefer having relaxed UVs or is because you don't have to downscale the textures with this character? [hope that makes sense!]
Looking forward to seeing the texturing, its making me rethink my processes, very inspiring~
Everything you said about your struggles with 2D mirrors my struggles exactly. I'm talented with 3D so I run and hide from 2D when i can.
I will be doing 30 minutes of gesture drawing starting today from here on out. Promise!
^_^
thx for posting progress!
Thank you so much for these insightful posts!
edit: for people asking about the xnormal bowl thingy check out this link http://www.donaldphan.com/tutorials/xnormal/xnormal_occ.html
"Before starting an Ambient Occlusion render, you will first have to create a floor for light to bounce off of. A large plane works most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't work at the right angles. If this happens, I create a Sphere and delete half of it to make a bowl. If your mesh is placed too close to the bottom, your ambient occlusion map will be very dark, so I line up the top of my model with the rim of the bowl. Sometimes I render out both of these maps and combine them together. The occlusion floor should always be loaded with your High Poly Mesh"
Shiniku * Hamtoilet: Scudz and SA_22 are both providing you with some help on your question about the AO - they have it spot on.
Regarding UVW islands, is really a case of deciding whats going to give you the best result in the end. With organic shapes and pieces, usually a nice relax or 2 or 3 will cover you for most things, but for more rigid shapes, like cylinders etc I will tend to unwrap these things perfectly straight, and edit the wavy parts out by hand like this:
Remember no matter what method you use, a low poly cylinder shape with a normal map will never ever look good from *all* angles, but generally this will cover you for most angles - better than the wavy one.
Sometimes relaxing an organic shape... like a hand for example and really mess it up making the fingers splay out, in those cases, move in to a more localized relax, just do a finger at a time etc. Keep experimenting with things, dont be afraid to make mistakes!
Scudz: Yeah man tbh i just havent tried using it! I really should get off my lazy ass and give it a try!!
Future Fiction: I do sometimes, depending on what Im working on. It can make some things easier no doubt about it, especially for working on an mmo parts based system and whatnot for texture packing or breaking up one sheet into areas via a coordinates via a shader so that from point x to point y = torso and so on etc.
Part 9: Texturing Miku!
So this is generally the part where most of the visual side of the character really comes to life.
Given that Miku is quite different stylistically to anything else Ive ever done, luckily for me this part of the process is a bit simpler than normal.
Firstly here are my textures all at 1024 for the purposes of clarity:
And what they look like applied to Miku:
My main goal was to create a really bright, painterly look similar to what one might find in an anime, or in a hand painted jap rpg, with just a hint of the normal map only coming into play when in motion, creating a nice kind of illustrative shadow over the forms ( noticeable on the skirt especially ).
I also wanted to make her hair pop much harder than everything else, as really - thats by far and away on every rendition of this character one might find, her most distinguishing feature.
The tricky thing to balance was to not take the painterly look all the way through so that its an obvious style decision like one might find in wow, or allods online - but find some balance between having a soft painterly feel without defining ALL lights and shadows making it conflict heavily with any real time lighting scenario that I might subject Miku too coming up.
In the coming couple of days - and for Miku's final presentation I will be experimenting with morph targets, comb maps, and of course posing her - so some textures and of course the model itself, is STILL subject to change, pretty much like Ive been saying all along, its not finished until the very absolute last moment!!!
A couple of general things I wanted to point out:
AO and cavity maps are one of those things that really add a lot to make materials pop - use them! Depending on your final style you can have them cranked super hard for some nice deep defined cracks or super subtle like I have used them.
Painting your diffuse. This is something I wanted to go into a bit more depth with because its always an interesting thing to talk about. Even in a pipeline that requires photo sourced textures, I have always found that you will achieve a better aesthetic when you paint a certain degree of that lighting information into your diffuse.
It doesnt have to be much, but just a subtle indication of form can be plenty: Note how I've just subtly indicated those front planes of my chun li face texture here ( kind of a triangle of light )
Its not overpowering so theres no obvious lighting painted right into the face, but just enough so that its not a total flat skin relying on the shader and normal map to provide EVERYTHING. I always prefer to play in that zone, even when faced with a very photo sourced freelance job or game - give it a shot you might like the subtle differences it can make.
Regarding Miku's Hair Specifically - This is where a majority of the effort went. As I mentioned above I wanted this to really stand out - So I want to draw attention to the various evolutions of the hair as Ive gone through the stages to help reinforce something that can be intimidating to many artists.
Firstly here are the pics:
And how it finally ended up with a meshsmooth on it ( 8000 tris for each ponytail meshsmoothed heh heh )
The important point to make is, dont be afraid if in the beginning things arent looking like you want them to be. Just keeping working on it and improving it at each chance you get, push it more toward how you imagined it to be in the beginning, if you tackle it gradually, youll be able to look back at the evolutions and see progress. Its a good trick and helps boost your drive to the finish line!!
The opposite is also true, if you give up, and get pissed off that its not like you want it - and leave it there without pushing through the pain, you'll only end up frustrated with your work and left looking it thinking 'man I can do so much better than this' so learn to love the pain it means youre learning something.
Movement in Hair.
Hair is one of those things that can almost be a personality or a character in and of itself. Wayyyyyy too often we see boring helmet style hairstyle or short straight cuts and bobs. Im guilty of this look at my folio haha) So I wanted to be sure to break out of that and create something long and flowing that conveys a sense of movement and volume first and foremost.
The trigger for that was I remembered the main character in Trusty Bell, and how she had some ribbons that flowed out the back in a really nice movement as you controlled her, but even in a rest posed was gravity defiant and still exuding that same sense of movement. I really wanted to capture that same sensation, so that was my major inspiration.
So why didnt I sculpt it like that in the first place!?
The answer is because I already knew in my mind that I wouldnt be using a heavily defined normal map for the ponytails, so a quicker rough indication would be fine. I would rather spend that time in my final hairpiece where it counts.
Regarding the construction of the ponytails, I started with the fairly straight low poly ponytail, that was constructed from a cylinder that I poly modeled into roughly the volume you see in the high poly sculpt, and extrudrd some edges at the end for the hair tips.
To get the twisting look, I began soft selecting areas of vertices and rotating them. It was quite a long process, but I kept doing this until the hair had some nice movement in it and felt playful and was what I wanted.
One I had my final twisted core shape I added 2 extra ribbons which I modelled out by hand, to help further accentuate the movement:
[FONT="]
This kind of constant evolution is not always easy in a production scenario, but for personal work, I always try to make a point of constantly evolving right until the final monent - putting your absolute best foot forward means not restricting yourself by anything at all.
Im still not finished with the textures, I'll keep working on them right up until I take my final presentation shots. Ill talk a little more about the spec map and its role at that time. Need to lighten up the little cowlick of hair on top of her head and the little tufts at the back of neck, and add a few more strands of wispy hair around the face to dress that area up a little more etc.
Next step is posing / and presentation
Ill go into a bit more about her face and entire body movement specifically in an effort to better portray more of her personality. [/FONT]
All this thread has been a great learning experience and i really look forward to the final presentation.
but as a miku addict i can't help but point out 2 things... first the hair should be a little more greenish than the light blue you have right now aaaaand she needs striped panties even tho the actual supercell figure you're modeling her after doesn't have them : / ... (NSFW just google miku shimapan and you'll know)
Thanks for this man. It's something I'm just coming to realize through my own work. If you make something, and you hate it, don't stop, work on it until you don't hate it anymore. Worked for me every time now
Thats so true, thanks alot for that! and cant wait to see it finished! looks awesome!!
How did you go about uv'ing the hair? right at the beginning when it was still simple shapes or after it was modeled into place? I made some similar flowing locks a while back for a contract and while the results got the job done, seeing Miku here is leaving me kind of embarrassed...
So I tried using the half sphere AO bake dealio on a 4 legged creature and the bake had tons of holes in it. Toggling the half sphere off made them go away so I know it was that. Increasing the scale made them less. To make them completely go away I had to increase the scale 1000x which made the effects null.
I was wondering if you had experienced anything like this? Maybe the half-sphere is more geared for bipeds than quadrupeds?
Great gradient on the hair, they definitely stand ou the most, and they help putting the attention on her eyes too. Maybe they attract TOO much attention though, cauz I keep looking at them but not at her dress or her legs
Anyway, blasting job so far, loving the breakdown. Manly tears of awesome has been shed
The hair looks amazing, love it! Also curious about how it was UVd too.
Was wondering if you've seen this model? Might be inspirational!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAdFGWVlk84
http://i1114.photobucket.com/albums/k526/Manckx/tda-append-hatsune-miku-033.jpg
http://futako-yumi.deviantart.com/art/Vocaloid-TDA-Miku-Append-Reference-287190179?offset=20
I love the skintones, would be cool to use a toon-style shader that picks out the shape of the nose in the 3/4 view.