My Rig and Tool Demo Movie

The Link will take you to my final movie that i will be submitting alongside my report.

Final Tool

This is the final tool UI

It only allows one window open at a time, and doesn't let you scale the window.

The features are:

Create or remove a point, orient or parent offset between objects

Create, group and orient a control shape of various Nurb Curve shapes

Change the colour of selected nurb curve shapes.

Hopefully this will vastly speed up any future rigging i perform and allow me to quickly and easily change nurb colour without going through the sub menus of the object.

Revised Tool

The tool was overly complex and the colour slider was proving difficult for changing control shapes, so rather than that i have opted to make it a single column UI to take up less screen space and to have only a limited number of colours available through buttons.

Pseudo Code for Tool

For the tool i want to keep it quite simple due to time constraints and coding skill. The idea for my tool is a control shape generator, with a choice of different objects, and the ability to change the colour of the object.

The slider may not work and i may have to make more buttons with a few given colours like red , green blue and yellow.

So for this im wanting to use a Grid Layout

Create the window

Create the Layout

Add the Buttons

Add the Colour Selector

Add the Close Option

The buttons will work like this

Get Joint Name

Take the name stub

Create the selected shape

Parent it to the joint

Zero out the translations and rotation

Unparent

The colour change will work like this

Unparent the display override from the layer if it is

set the display over ride on

set the colour value

Day 9 - Daemon Extraction

Daemon Extraction -  The first time i have done one of these in ages. This one was only 10 minuites, more of an exploration of pose and idea.

Finished Facial Rig

My Finished Facial Rig and added UI

I feel that this was a major step forward in my Rigging abilities, it is a suitable facial rig for games engines as it has no blend shape reliance, and is easy to use. 

The control circles in the boxes are locked into the boundaries and relate to joints spread across the face. The top 6 are eyebrow controls, middle four are cheeks and nose, and the bottom section is the mouth. If i had more time i would add Text labels to the sections to make it more clear and also move eye and jaw controls to the UI to make it more streamlined.

An example of the facial rig in action.

Final Body Rig

The Final Body Rig is complete.

The Left and Right side are colour coordinated to allow animators to easily identify each side in complex animations. The Spline spine rig is implemented, the Custom attributes have been added to the hand controllers, which have in turn been constrained to the wrist controller to keep them together.

The 3IK foot joint works well and allows a variety of movements and rotations. The Rig is clear, simple and works well and i think it definitely meets the requirements of the brief for making a rig.

In Progress UI

This image show a WIP UI that i am putting on my models face. The rectangles will have Nurb Circles bound inside them and they will be linked with set driven keys to the facial joints.

It has been really eye opening creating the UI as it is a lot closer to the rigging that i have already done than i thought it would be. The way that it is all simply bound attributes and curves is a revelation as before i thought that even a UI like this would require atleast some coding.

Facial Rigging Tutorial

This is a tutorial for facial rigging using joints and making a UI for it. Hopefully i can get this done on my model, but if not it will still give me a greater knowledge of where to go next.

The Rig So Far

This is the model i have been working on rigging. It is a civilian model ripped from D.M.C (Devil May Cry) Its topology is sufficient to rig to a good standard and it consists of multiple sub meshes allowing the skinning to work well.

The model also has a mouth bag to facilitate facial rigging and the watch on the wrist will be an interesting "Accesory" to skin without any distortion. So far i have added and oriented the skeleton, set up an IK foot control, Added set driven keys for the fingers and hands, and added the IK spline spine.
The control shapes have been added for all areas except from the face and head and i am currently working on rigging and assigning joints to the face.

Final Turntables and Rig Video

Or for Higher Quality visit Vimeo at 

https://vimeo.com/84354610

Final Evaluation of the Module

Final Evaluation

I feel that what i have produced for this module meets the requirements of the brief, the character somewhat represents the celtic influences, but certainly appears brutish and antagonistic. The design is quite boring and i think that i should defiantly have spent more time on the design stage to ensure a more interesting and stronger character. Despite the design ending up somewhat lack lustre i think that what i managed to do with it technically is a big improvement from my previous 3D work. The sculpt is something that i am proud of and the high and low poly models fit the shape and topology requirements well. For a next step i feel i need to further increase my sculpting skill to allow me to make more complicated designs more quickly and more efficiently.

The textures on the model are good, but limited. My lack of experience in the area definitely shows with the limited variety and poor execution of the specular map. However i think that the maps do a sufficient job in showing the detail required. Whether they are up to current gen console levels... i dont think so, but its an improvement over my previous work. If i were to go back and re map the model i would give slightly more room to the top of the shoulder pads, as if you get close enough to the face to see the extra detail there, the shoulders stand out as being low res.

I feel the final presentation of the model is adequate to the brief, and the rig demonstration shows that the rig is fully useable and quite robust.

Evaluation of Posing and Rendering.

Posing and Rendering

The final poses were added into a marmoset toolbag scene. This is useful because it allows for a high level of polish in presentation but still runs in real time like a game engine, allowing for an accurate demonstration of the quality of the model and textures as they would be seen in game.

A simple light set up was used, bright enough to apply shine to the straps and paint, but not so bright that the model appeared shiny or plastic. The turn tables were recording using Screenflow since Marmoset Toolbag 2 no longer has built in video recording. I think this has given me the opportunity for a very high quality and well presented turn table, and i feel that i have achieved that. In future i would look more into the lighting of the presented character. The pose of the final meshes is also adequate, as it shows a suitable range of movement in the mesh to show it is fully capable of a walk or run animation without distortion.

 Test Pose

Close Up of Face

High Poly in Marmoset

In a more washed out Light Set Up

Low Poly Model In Marmoset

 Low Poly With Topology

Evaluation of rigging

Rigging

Rather than just adding a simple rig i wanted to try and create a more advanced rig for the model, one that could be used to animate it for a game, rather than just pose it.

I tried to keep the joint count relatively low, and i also didn't use any blend shapes so that a wider range of engines could be used. The main points in building the rig were

-Add skeleton

-Fix LRA

- Add Control Shapes and Joint constraints.

- Add IK handles to the arms and legs/feet

- Parent controls to affect the relative joints and other controls

- Weight paint the skin.

An important part of the rig is trying to maintain the shape of the armour, and i feel i was very successful in this. By looking at videos on digital tutors and youtube i noticed that additional joints could be used to "anchor" the armour polygons to the correct location and stop distortion.

The eyes and mouth also worked well because when adding the meshed together i made certain to maintain the separations in the mesh. 

The hands have set driven keys in for the index finger bend and the rest of the fingers/thumb, this sped up the process but still gave me all of the freedom i needed with the pose i used.

The skin painting was moderately successful, on the whole it worked well, but underneath the arm the leather strap still distorts quite a lot. I feel that this is more of a failure in my choice not to make them a separate object than that of my weight painting though, as that area moves a significant amount and it doesn't have enough edge loops. As i used the same rig on the low poly model, it probably has too many joints for use in a mobile game, but i did not have time to make a separate rig for it.

The Rig Applied to the High Poly Model

Posed High Poly Model

Rig applied to Low Poly Model

Evaluation of Texturing Proccess

Texturing my model was a relatively easy process as i had most of the detail for the final maps on my sculpt. I started by taking the retopologized objects into maya and UV mapping them, with a combination of the built in UV unwrapping, and the program Headus UV Layout. This stream lined my process a lot and made unwrapping the models fairly painless. The only parts i had difficulty were with the hands, but iteration between the programs stopped me having overlapping UV's.

I then re exported the unwrapped objects back into topogun and baked out Normal, Colour and Cavity maps at 2K each for every part of the model. Then i combined the maps in photoshop to give me a single texture for the whole model. The cavity map was applied as a multiply layer onto the colour map to reduce texture space whilst simultaneously adding depth to the model. The normal map was scaled down to 1K and then i made a specularity map for each model. I did this by making the colour map black and white and then using the dodge and burn tool on areas i think should be shinier or matte. The normal maps were also tidied up on areas that didnt bake well, especially the leather around the shoes, which were full of errors

To make the model more professional i wanted to have Ambient occlusion baked onto the maps, rather than taken care of in Marmoset Toolbag or in the game engine. This both speeds up rendering and makes it look better on a low powered machine such as a mobile platform that could not render AO in real time.

From the maps that i have produced my texturing skills have increased dramatically over the last semester. However i feel there is still a long way to go before i am at a professional level. I need to research more into different types of maps, and how i could use them in my model. Also if i were to do it again i would have perhaps lowered the resolution of the normal and specularity maps to allow me to add more types of map. I would also look into more advanced ways of producing my specularity map other than just the cheap and easy "Make it black and white" method.

High Poly Maps

Low Poly Maps

Evaluation of Retopologizing.

Retopologizing

Having made my sculpted model, i exported all of the parts from ZBrush into Topogun to begin the remeshing process. I tried to keep the polycount low then add more as i could, focussing more on the silhouette rather than detail. This allowed me to build up the model quickly and efficiently. The areas i had trouble with were the hands and the neck, because i had to merge a high poly area such as the face into a lower density section of mesh. 

 The facial topology should be sufficient to allow expressions and distortion in the future, and the body has sufficient topology for free movement without excessive distortion. I also added a mouthbag to the model in maya aswell allowing me to open and close the models mouth.

This is the finished high poly model in maya, the silhouette of the model is the same as the high poly sculpt, so it will look similar when normal mapped and textured.

This is the finished low poly model with the normal map applied,

I feel that my retopologized models are suitable for the hand in, they are within the poly count, have sufficient topology to be animated and the objects are still separate allowing for accurate distortion of the body without bending the metal. To improve upon the model i could add the torso and legs together to remove any risk of the body poking through the trousers or vice versa. I could also have made the chest straps have topology on the high poly rather than just a normal map, to make them stand out from the body more.

Evaluation of Sculpting.

Sculpting

This pipeline is something i have done before in a second year project, so i have had experience using zbrush before, but the project opened my eyes to many new techniques learnt from digital tutors and youtube tutorials, such as facial sculpting, building features from bone structure, and creating skin textures. 

I started the head with a ball and built up the bone structure of a skull. Then i layered the large muscle groups on the face over it, and finally added skin. i feel like this gave the face a realistic look and expression, and is definitely something that i will take forward into other projects. The face is also slightly asymmetrical, this is to make the face more realistic, but is not asymmetrical enough to complicate the remeshing process. 

After the head was done i modelled the body and projected the head onto the neck, making it into one solid mesh. The armour plates were something i learnt from a zbrush tutorial in sculpting beasts, and consisted of me masking an area of the mesh, extruding it out and using the hard polish and plane brushes to shape it. The straps and belt were done in a similar way.

The skin was textured using the demacian standard tool, various alpha maps, and patience. The pores around the head and face were made bigger to imply a rough shaven face, and the tattoo was added on the back using an alpha stamp. At this point i was trying to include as much detail as possible to reduce the amount of work i would have to do in photoshop later.

The skin colour was built up using multiple layers and alphas, starting by coating the whole body in a deep red then adding brighter skin tones on top , giving the illusion of depth.

Over all i feel the sculpting part of this module was executed very well. I produced a good quality model of exaggerated human anatomy with convincing skin texturing and good poly painting. If i were to do this again i would change the way i made the armour plates, perhaps making them in maya to reinforce the hard edges. It didnt matter too much in this model as the armour wasnt meant to be perfect, but if it had been an example of hard surface sculpting this method would have been messy and unprofessional.

Evaluation Of The Concepting Stage.

Concepting

When i started designing my character i began by looking at references of celtic armour, tattoos and people, as well as barbarians from various fantasy universes such as Conan and Diablo. Taking influence from these i knew i needed to make him big, and broad, and thanks to the fact it was not specified if the game was based on reality i could exaggerate the proportions of the body to emphasise the size. The legs and arms were made substantially thicker than a normal human to show his strength, and the chest was made humongous to give him a bulky and block appearance. The face was also given a squareish shape and smaller size to give a less intelligent appearance and reinforce the warrior archetype.

I tried to incorporate a celtic influences into the clothing, the armour is simple beaten metal, with embossed celtic markings, the trousers are a type of fabric frequently shown in paintings of traditional celt warriors. The armour fits the style but the celtic symbols are slightly ham fisted and an over obvious way of me incorporating the celts into the model. The trousers are suitable but pretty boring to look at.

Over all with the design of the character i am happy that i spent the time to experiment with tattoo and armour placement but, i should have spent more time experimenting with clothes and types of armour.

The design itself i feel is somewhat lack luster and boring, and if i were to re do it i would spend more time at this stage to ensure my character is interesting and portrays my chosen image correctly.

Models in Marmoset

The models and final textures added.

Here is a model showing the topology of the model, with a floor added to make it seem more proffesional.

 An early stage of the pose, not as hunched as i ended up making him and his shoulder is more distorted than it should be on his left arm.

 Close up of the face , keeping detail in the map allows you to see the paint dripping down his face and the stubble on his beard.

 These two show the way the specularity map reacts to different lights

 These are the low poly model, given more time i would change the specularity map a bit to make it more shiny, but with the low res of the map it seems to either be over powering or not quite strong enough.

Rigging the Models

When rigging the character i tried to keep in mind that it was designed as a game character, as such i used no blend shapes, and a simple face rig.

The Pipeline i used for this is 

-Add skeleton

-Fix LRA

- Add Control Shapes and Joint constraints.

- Add IK handles to the arms and legs/feet

- Parent controls to affect the relative joints and other controls

- Weight paint the skin.

An important part of the rig is trying to maintain the shape of the armour, and i feel i was very successful in this. By looking at videos on digital tutors and youtube i noticed that additional joints could be used to "anchor" the armour polygons to the correct location and stop distortion.

The eyes and mouth also worked well because when adding the meshed together i made certain to maintain the separations in the mesh. 

The hands have set driven keys in for the index finger bend and the rest of the fingers/thumb, this sped up the process but still gave me all of the freedom i needed with the pose i used.

The skin painting was moderately successful, on the whole it worked well, but underneath the arm the leather strap still distorts quite a lot. I feel that this is more of a failure in my choice not to make them a separate object than that of my weight painting though, as that area moves a significant amount and it doesn't have enough edge loops.

High Poly model posed in maya viewport.

The same rig was taken and added to the low poly model, this was done to save time, though i appreciate that on a platform that requires such a low poly count and texture limit my rig could be too elaborate.

The facial controls do not work on this rig as the eyes and mouth are not moveable.

Re Doing the body UV

 After Examining the model more closely i decided that the body didnt have enough detail in it and looked grainy and pixelated, especially in comparison to the legs, which were given too much texture space.

Because of this i re arranged my UV maps and baked out the colour maps again to give myself more detail on the important parts of the model, and took away excess detail from the face and belt.