Developing My Asset Library
Developing reusable assets is really useful with 3D modelling, so I decided to create some brushes to start building my own ibrary.
I created braid/rope brushes by using cylinders and twisting them together. Then I made this brush a curve brush, making it really easy to draw on my ropes, it is a bit awkward to edit and move this but still much quicker than my tests in previous posts since I have a couple ropes in my design. I also made a teeth brush as well.
Then I created some alpha brushes for fur patterns, some worked better than others, but this would help me layer on texture that I could refine into more precise clumps.
Then I used the brushes along with Zbrush’s to practice the type of fur that I wanted to recreate, I think it looked pretty good!
Finally I created two types of Stitch brushes by creating alphas, since I was including a lot of cloth and leather in my character.
Armour/Props
With my main model done, I still had to create the armour, clothing and props to go along with him. To make these I used a combination of Poly modelling in Blender and masking/extracting in Zbrush, since I planned ahead for this with my topology, it was pretty easy to do.
UV Mapping
With all of the meshes done I could start UV Mapping. This is something we learnt last year, but again I wanted to build on this a bit. In class we were taught about the UDIM workflow, the process of assigning multiple tiled maps to one mesh to get more resolution. This particular workflow doesn’t work well for games, but does for things like VFX and since we were using this model for a still render I wanted to try it out.
I also got a better understanding of matching up the rotation of the tiles so that when you apply textures it will help them flow together better.
Planning ahead from my retopo stage worked out as I was able to easily unwrap the hand like a glove. I found I didn’t have too much issue unwrapping except for the face which had major stretching due to the muzzle. I found a way to counteract this by adding seams at the centre of the face, since I wasn’t planning to use a straight on shot of my character.
I took this stage to separate some elements of my mesh out and delete areas that wouldn’t be seen, like the thighs which gave me extra space on my maps.
I took this stage to separate some elements of my mesh out and delete areas that wouldn’t be seen, like the thighs which gave me extra space on my maps. There is still some stretching in areas, but nothing that is unworkable. When it came to organising my maps I tried to think about my final pose and dedicate more resolution to elements that could be close to the camera, and I group similar elements to each other in the map while also making sure there was a good amount of space between each UV island.
I created a different map for my props, and organised them in a similar way.
