DarthAztek

So I've posted up the main subtool of Benjamin's sculpt. There are a few things for me to tackle right off the bat.

The torso is a little over 5M points in ZBrush. That's 20% of the overall model weight, which is not bad, but could still be better. I also need to separate the shoes as a separate mesh. They themselves need to be completely re-done. I wasn't happy with how lumpy it all felt. That said I have a few possible approaches to reworking the sculpt, but before that, let me go over the shopping list of what needs to be done overall:

• Ditch Polypaint and textures—This sucks, but the main focus is on the sculpt, it won't be too hard to re-do the skin texturing afterwards, plus I need to have a "clean" base sculpt when the time comes to re-extract the clothing and accessories.
• Separate shoes from body—As I mentioned earlier, it would be best to have the shoes as a separate subtool. They need better detail than what is currently there. There will be some back-and-forth between ZBrush and Maya to get the look just right, especially for the shoestrings and holes. Plus I'll want to create a special subtool for the shoelaces that will wrap around the shoe's mesh, but that will be later.
• Fix anatomy—Nothing major, but I do want to soften some of the musculature, since he's to be more of a cartoonish character, and I need to adjust the hip positioning. I may want to re-do the nails a bit, but it's not a must-have.

Now to make this as successful as possible, the overall mesh weight needs to be trimmed down before the shoes are removed. Right now it's a dynamesh and that's going to be a bit tricky. For the uninformed, think of Dynamesh as working with wet sand. You can get a lot of nice detail with it, but you can't really adjust things in a uniform manner. That said, I have two options:

1. Decimation Master
Pro: Fast way to reduce overall poly count to the mesh
Con: Does not reflow topology and may lose some sculpture fidelity, will create jagged edges when separating the shoes that will have to get cleaned up in Maya afterwards.

2. Retopology Tool/Reproject
Pro: Retopology tool will allow me to fully control the edgeflow of the sculpture and make for an easy-to-rig low-res mesh and reproject textures. It will also allow me to make sure I can create a clean "break" from the shoes, and give me a new base mesh to recreate them.
Con: VERY time-consuming, and may not give me good reflow of shoe topology, meaning I may start those from scratch.

I am likely going to go with option #2. Yeah, it's going to be a huge time sink, but given that control of a mesh's edgeflow is going to be critical in extracting other meshes and rigging, the more work I can do upfront will make the rest of the process go more smoothly.

Here we go!

Okay, sabbatical is over. It turned out to be two months instead of just one, but I think my body and mind needed it, given that I've had to deal with a great number of physical and mental malaise that hit me towards the middle and end of this month. Nothing bad, but I think my body made it clear that I was nowhere near ready to jump back into the fray.

So I mentioned in the past that I got my hands on some resources to help me refresh my skills and memories, as well as shore up some particular weaknesses in my skill set. I also mentioned that I needed to revisit past projects and really push the design and sculpts closer to what I wanted for the character. I think I found that I can combine the two with my sculpt of Benjamin. So let's take a look at the issues with it (or at least, for those with untrained eyes, I know fellow modelers can easily pick out where everything went sideways on me):

• Single-mesh: I was originally instructed that all game character assets had to be single-mesh. This is to keep meshes from being too 'heavy,' or too dense of a mesh. By and large, this is true, but to a certain extent. Character customization is common in games these days, and depending on the level of customization (either what I call 'paper doll' swap of items, clothing and colors, or 'polymorphic' changes, where you can alter facial structures and general physiology) parts of the character must be modeled separately to allow for that. The problem with Benjamin in this particular respect is twofold. First,  I combined all the separate subtools in ZBrush before doing the retopology. Obviously this made it extremely difficult where there was any overlap, cavity, or depression in the geometry. I did not learn until much later that A) It is entirely possible to remesh with individual subtools active and B) Low-res meshes esported to Maya can—and have been—separate pieces of geometry, especially where hair and cloth are concerned. Second, I rushed texturing the belt, shoes, and apron in order to make my deadlines, and my extrusions were unnecessarily thick for the clothing, especially where the apron is concerned. I also made the mistake of extruding the bracers before the shirt, which caused some problems when reprojecting the meshes after retopologizing.

• Textures, hair, and cloth: This is going to be interesting. The "pudding pile" hair is not what I wanted for Benjamin, and no thanks to my instructor at the time, I was unable to fully explore or work out a better-looking solution. Now that I know what my options are, this will be the very last thing I do for the sculpt. I also want to completely re-do the splatters on him so that there's a mix of stained-in and visible drops/globs of paint. The texture of the apron was too 'heavy,' for lack of a better term. I really wanted it to have a duck canvas-like feel to it, and it just doesn't quite do it for me. Plus, the bow on the back was just...bad. I'll be the first to admit that. Again, knowing what I do now, I can go back and do a better job of both, and better prep it for being an NCloth in Maya, as well as making it a separate mesh. I also learned that I'll have to make the greaves/bracers separate meshes so I can assign them separate metal materials for a much more reflective metal than what I have there. If I can fix all of these things, I can make his brush accessory as it will most likely use both the hair and metal techniques on the model.

• Rigging: I cheated it for class purposes and time constraints by using a default skeleton and just posing the joints directly. I didn't build out a controls system or attempt any facial expression poses either. This obviously will come towards the end of the project, but knowing that I will want a full rig just for this particular character will help me to learn how to scale back rigs for demonstration purposes and not worry about my overall workflow. I say this because I know that I'll have to be very aware of my bindings and weightings when I bring the mesh into Maya from ZBrush, and I will most likely be doing it in separate pieces of geometry (body, apron, hair/eyebrows, eyes, graves, and bracers).

Well, there are my marching orders. Time to get back into the fray of things. Wish me luck!

Figured it was about time I opened an account. I'll be using this as a place to post up my artwork as I begin my post-graduation portfolio work. My goal is to hone my ZBrush and Maya skills and beef up my portfolio to be worthy enough of a job consideration with a video game company as a character artist.

"But your work looks good!"

It does—and I'm not being egotistic, I can assure you—but there is still a LOT more for me to learn before I feel confident enough to be a contender, if you'll pardon the boxing parlance.

Some goals:

• Learn efficient ZBrush to Maya workflow and learn best-practice techniques for each
• Discover different hair/fur creation techniques, and get to know the pros and cons of each.
• Strengthen my rigging skills so that I can post my creations after sculpting.
• Improve my texturing and lighting skills in Maya so I can take better renders of my creations.

So here's hoping my efforts pay off!