Character Modelling Part 7: Texturing in Mudbox

In this blog post, I will talk about texturing my model in more detail using another Autodesk program called Mudbox to work with Maya. These two programs work together and can be updated their current scenes from both programs.

Texturing in Mudbox

When wanting to add more interesting textures, there are numerous ways to do this. In this instance, I have imported my character model from Maya into Mudbox, both are Autodesk programs. The GIF below shows the process of how to send a model from Maya to Mudbox.

To send something from Maya, first you need to select the necessary elements on the model you wish to send across to Mudbox. Then go to File>Send to Mudbox>Send as New Scene. This'll send the model to Mudbox and once opened, a green box in the bottom right corner of the screen will say "Connected to Maya" and next to it is a "Update" button. These steps are highlighted above.

Before I started to do anything to my model, I first had to select the faces on my model and subdivide the polygons in order to work with any tool in Mudbox. This is shown below too.

To subdivide polygons in Mudbox, first select all the faces (if the model has seperate objects like armour, helmet, boots, gloves etc.). Once it is selected, it turns yellow. To subdivide, press shift+D on your keyboard and it'll subdivide. I have subdivided mine twice as it helps to add detail smoother.

Adding a Bump Map

I decided that I wanted to add a bump map to my model, to add the slight detail metal would have. To do this, I selected the paint brush in "Paint Tools" shelf on the bottom and clicked on the model. Whenever you are about to paint on a model, a pop up screen asks what you want the output channel to be. For this, I wanted to add a bump map. Below is the process of the painting on Mudbox.

I first selected the Paint Brush, went to click the model and up came a option box to create a new paint layer. I selected Bump Map on Channel and selected OK. Once I had a paint layer, it appears in the layers channel on the top right of the screen under the Paint tab.
A choice of adding stencils to any paint or sculpt tool is available. I am now going to show what my actual model has in detail on the armour.

This is what I have been placing as a Bump Map onto my model. I used a stencil to add the details from the brush onto the armour using a low strength and a very large brush. The stencil I used is shown below.

When using a stencil of any shape, it places it directly over as a square. You can move the stencil around, rotate it, or scale it to help when making a stamping effect on the model instead of leaving it on one chunk area. The stencil will ALWAYS follow the editor camera. To move, scale or rotate the stencil, hold down S and use the corresponding mouse buttons (middle click to move, first click to rotate, and second click to scale).

Character Modelling Part 6: Controllers and Locators

In this blog post, I will talk about adding in controls on my model and I will also talk about the locators on my knees and elbows to explain why they are necessary.

Controlling the character

Whenever an IK chain is added to a arm or a leg, moving it becomes a problem because it'll move up, down, left, or right but the axis point will change. Adding in a control will help to keep everything in place and constrain the IK to the controller. Below is a GIF of the different controls I have made for my character.

As you can see on my model, I have added controls on my hands, fingers, feet, neck, hip, and a master controller. The hand controllers helps to move the hand around with ease. The feet controllers are almost the same as my hand controllers but both have attributes for my reverse footlocks to move the toe and heel. The neck and hip controllers simply move the model left or right. You'll notice a small circle next to the hands; this is the finger controller which I'll now explain.

Finger Controllers

When rigging fingers on the hands, I found it is a good idea to have the controller for the fingers on a separate controller. I added in attributes for the finger controller to move all the fingers on that hand when shifting the value up or down on each corresponding finger. Below is a GIF showing the index finger moving up and down.

The attributes I made for these fingers to move up and down are maximum 5 and minimum -5. I had placed four joints in the finger, corresponding with where they should bend at. I had to also weight each finger so that when a finger moved up and down, it would not move the tip on the next finger along, but move the knuckle part like a real hand should.

Locators

In order to make sure that when an arm or a leg bends it stays in proportion, a locator is needed to tell the middle joint to follow that part. Below are the locators on my model highlighted and why they are necessary.

When adding locators to an arm and leg, it helps them to keep the elbow or knee joints focus on that area so that they don't flip over themselves when moving the arm in or out, and the leg up or down.

Character Modelling Part 5: Rigging and Weighting

Once I was happy that my model was UV textured, I then went onto placing a rig onto it, bind the mesh and rig together and all the objects to deform nicely. Below are GIFs and screengrabs of the rigging and weighting processes I had done for my model.

Rigging

This GIF above shows the joints placed in line with the model as well as a reverse footlock for the legs and an IK chain for both hands. The root bone is essentially the start of the rig, and usually should be placed at the hip or centre of the body. The next parts I added in was the bone for the chest, then the neck, and head. The joints for the arms started from the chest joint because that was centre for them both. I had added three joints for the arm: the shoulder, the elbow, and the hand. I added an IK chain from the shoulder to the hand and by doing this enabled me to move the arm around. For the leg, I made a reverse footlock from a tutorial given by my tutor to make a foot roll, toe lift and leg pivot. Once I had rigged everything for the character, I then bound it together by going to skin>smooth bind in the animation tabs. I first had to select the mesh then the rig from the root bone to bind together. Below is weighting explained.

Weighting

An issue with binding together a mesh with a rig is the weighting. Whatever ligament you'll move in Maya, the weighting on that part will affect other parts of the character; parts that should not even move at all. Below is a GIF animation of what happens when my character has not been weighted properly.

You'll notice that when I moved the left arm, the left side of the mask was following the hand joint when it should never. To sort this out, the paint weight tool in Maya helps to paint where the weighting should be and removing areas that were affected before. Below is what the weighting looks like in Maya.

This GIF shows what my character is supposed to look like when the weighting is sorted out on each bone. When a bone is selected, the white area shows where it is weighted to and the black is where there is no weighting. By having the weighting sorted on this model, the arms will no longer make the face melt when they move. You'll also notice that the hand on this part of my model has a controller attached to it; this helps the IK move only towards that point and becomes mandatory for animating.

Character Modelling Part 4: UV texture

In this blog post, I will be explaining how I began to UV texture my model, making sure that when it came to placing textures onto my model, it wouldn't warp anything. Below I will explain how I did the UV texturing and show the stages in screengrabs and GIFs. To help me place my UV map, I had the assistance from a UV checker found on google. Below is what it was.

This checker helps to show where the seams on the UV map will merge and, where necessary, sort out where it warps.

Beginning to place the UVs

As you'll notice, the UV checker was spread across my character's face badly and when adding any textures on, it would look horrible and would possibly confuse Mudbox when it came to adding in any detail (bumps, incandescence, alphas etc.). This is what it looked like in the UV Texture Editor.

When loading any textures onto a part of a model, Maya will automatically place anything where it thinks it'll work best. Normally sorting out textures in Maya wouldn't be a problem but in this case, the problem would be that when adding any details to the texture, it will look horrible and therefore would need to be mapped better.
To sort this out, I would need to place the UVs from the visor and helmet onto the UV editor. Below is a JPEG of the UV texture when sorted and a GIF of the helmet and visor after the textures are sorted.

The helmet and visor in the GIF above show that I have placed the UV textures in the right area and that the seam would appear on the back of the helmet, an area which would not be seen mostly when coming to animate. The JPEG above shows what they look like when placed on the UV editor in more detail. Below is a GIF of where I added the UV checker onto the armour and boots.

As you'll probably notice on the boots, the UV is stretched. Originally I intended to just place a gold texture onto them and not add any detail but in doing so would make the model look boring.

In this GIF, I had sorted out the UV only on one boot instead of both because the boots were the exact same model and it was quicker to only delete one boot, UV texture the remaining one and duplicate it to then place onto the leg without a boot. Also this shows the armour from the front and also the arms are now UV textured too.

This GIF shows my entire character with all UVs added on in place to make sure that they would all fit when it came to putting them into Mudbox and making any extra details.

Character Modelling Part 3: Making the model

In this blog journal, I am going to talk about my model in stages, showing print screens from Maya as I modelled it. I will explain the changes I made during the modelling stage and why I made them.

Beginning the model

This GIF shows how my model began in Maya. I had placed two image planes behind and on the right of the of the model to start modelling. What I had also done was I started off with a shape that had one face deleted and used edit>duplicate special and clicking on the □ to bring up the extra options. To then make sure that whatever I modelled on one side would mirror, I then changed the scaling option on the x axis to -1 and clicked duplicate; I had a shape that would model exactly the same thing as my first object in a mirror. This was my first attempt at making my model to which I soon discovered an easier method to modelling.

I decided to start over on my model because I had difficulty when trying to make the neck of the character. I knew before that the armour is non-deforming and that the neck deforms in order for my character to look around. I then decided to make the armour and arms as one object. I discovered that there were problems with doing this as shown below.

When I put shoulder pads on my character, I had tried to model them as exact to the turnarounds when I had found that it was going to confuse the mesh when UVing the textures. Also when I deleted the first shoulder pad, it was hard to close up the hole as you can see in the GIF above. I then decided to delete that and moved onto making the legs.

As you may notice, I had added the colour to parts of the arm to experiment how I can place multiple colours on one object. How to do this was I selected the faces I wanted to be textured and after creating the textures in the Hypershade tab, I then placed the textures on by using the middle mouse button and dragging the texture onto the areas selected.

Glitches and Changes

During my modelling process, I had come across a severe glitch and also more modelling problems. Below is a GIF of the glitch I encountered.

The problem I encountered is shown in the GIF above. As I made more changes to my model and reversed the normals on my flipped object (that's normals>reverse), about 98% of the model became invisible and only at least a couple of faces were showing. I had learnt before that if anything goes wrong on Maya that usually shouldn't, I had to go to edit>delete all by type>non deforming history. Even after trying this method, nothing changed. I then went online to read about this glitch in some help forums and they claimed it was something to do with the texturing, yet no textures were added to this. Below is where the problem was fixed and how.

I added the black texture to the legs to get rid of the error and changed the renderer to Viewport 2.0. This fixed my model's problem and I was able to then continue modelling my character.

Finishing the modelling stage

In this GIF, it shows the last parts I modelled onto the character. You will notice that the visor design changes three times. This was down to when I was trying to figure out how to make the model simple instead of making a model with faces that consisted of three vertices, which would confuse Maya or Mudbox when it came to UV and texturing. Once I was happy, it was then onto UVing my model and texturing it.

Character Modelling Part 2: Character turn around and mesh topology.

Once my designs were finished, I had to make a character turn around to determine what I am modelling. The turn around showed front, side and back views. Once I had made the turn around, I then went onto making the mesh topology which would act as a vital necessity for this character modelling. Below are the steps explained in more detail.




Character Turnaround

A character turnaround is a drawing of the character in a T pose to determine where the elements of the character are. As seen in theses GIFs, I had drawn out my turnarounds to determine what I was going to model. The steps I took to do this was I drew several lines to help draw the outline of a male human; this helped to get the proportions right. I then added on parts to the model like helmet, armour, thigh pads, boots, gauntlets, gloves, shoulder pads, diamond on the chest plate, and a holster for a sword. The next GIF shows the changes made and also the mesh topology. Below is an explanation of what it is.

Mesh topology

When creating anything in a 3D environment with a turnaround, a good technique to use for getting the right amount of polygons is to draw out the mesh topology. This helps determine where the faces, edges and vertices are going to be placed when modelling around a character when placed as an image plane on the front and side views. Sometime the animators may draw either the top or back view, depending on which has more of a significance to the model.

Changes to my model

As I explained in part 1, due to the complications to some of the model I had to remove the parts that I found were going to complicate the model's movements and also parts that were confusing for me to model, like the gilded design on the boots and gauntlets. Fortunately these changes made little difference to the whole design of my character.

Character Modelling Part 1: Designing a character

In this first blog post about my character modelling, I will be talking about the ideas that lead to me making my 3D model.

Character Design

When given my brief for my 3D modelling project, it stated that the character I had to model was to be strictly humanoid. This made it easy for me to design my character as in my spare time I had been drawing character designs from my imagination. I had previously drawn a knight character inspired by Lord of the Rings and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which had a helmet shaped like a falcon or an eagle (the image is shown below).

After searching through my sketches, I then decided to use this particular knight (in which I named Falcon Knight) as it had both deforming (arms, neck, legs, hands) and non-deforming properties (chest armour, helmet, boots, gauntlets, shoulder pads). I then began making a turn around of this design to get an idea of how it would work.














The first design made it quite complicated to try and translate to a 3D environment because the helmet design lacked a visor for the front to lift off (shown in the turnaround).

The next part of this was to do a technique called photo bashing. Below is a short summary of what photo bashing is and also the design process.

Photo bashing

Photo bashing is a technique that most concept artists use when designing characters, backgrounds, environments, buildings etc. It is very simple to us as long as you know what you want to design. First find images that you want (I wanted a knight and a falcon's head), place them in separate layers in photoshop (or any program that has layers) in order of what you want the design to look like, erase any image that is placed over the first image (I had to erase all of the background around the falcon's head and the inside of its beak to reveal the facial area), and draw over the images on a new layer.
On the left is my first photo bash as an animated GIF to show the process of what I did.

Falcon Knight 1: Crusader design
For my character design process, this was the first to try and make the Falcon Knight from a different way. I had imagined that if he was made in another sense, the knight would be wearing a falcon's head as his helmet. When it came to choosing, I did not choose this because I discovered a flaw: falcon's heads are NEVER the size of a human head and would not make any sense as to why he would be wearing a bird's head as a helmet!
The other reason I chose not to use this design was because it felt like it was looking like a crusader knight, which I was not intending at all.

Falcon Knight 2: Elven Warrior

For my 2nd concept, I had inspiration from both Lord of the Rings and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, both of which had elves in. As you can see on the left, the photo bash process of this one included a new helmet design that looked like my Falcon Knight's very first design. I researched different types of medieval helmets as I recognised one of them had a beak at the end. This was known as the Bascinet helmet. The armour was used in LOTR for the elven army, and the gauntlet and boots are part of another elven armour but instead from Skyrim. Both armours had a nice golden colour to them as well as ease of mobility, something I wanted the Falcon Knight to have. Though this next design was better than the last, I felt that it was too detailed for me to model as I had a short amount of time to model, rig, weight and texture.









Falcon Knight 3: Simpler design and mobility

My third and final design I photo bashed was started with thinking of a simpler design to use for my Falcon Knight and also a pose that'll show the mobility he can have with the armour. I first looked up poses on Google to try and figure out what I would like my Knight to do in this photo bash. As you can see in the photo bash GIF on the left, I had found one that interested me the most to use. I then re-used the bascinet helmet as I felt it resembled the Falcon Knight the most and used a bastard sword for the sword design. I put less detail on the armour, shoulder pads and gauntlets so that I could model this easily, but as for the boots, I decided to keep some of the elements from the 2nd design as I felt they worked the best.

Falcon Knight 4: Final Pose 

As I had to think more about my timing with this project, I chose to make one final design of the Falcon Knight that I felt would work best in the time I had to model, rig, weight and texture this character. As I had began modelling, I had added in less elements that I designed to begin with as they would be complicated when it came to moving the model around; I realised that the thigh pads constricted the movement of the legs and so I had to remove them. The gauntlet designs originally had one normal glove to hold the sword and another with falcon-like talons for a second weapon. I had struggled modelling the hands on my character, and decided to keep both gauntlets as simple as possible. I redesigned the helmet too as it was difficult for me to make the visor like above in the GIF. You can see where I made the changes from the GIF above to the Dynamic Pose on the left.

3D Modeling: Deforming and non-deforming objects

In a 3D environment anything can be modelled from a humanoid to a building. However, there are two types of modelling that are put into two categories: Deforming and non-deforming. Below are examples and explanations of what the two categories are in more depth.

Deforming

Objects in a 3D environment that move freely without rigidness or stiffness (unless exaggerated) are what's called deforming objects. These type of objects included are humanoids, animals and some organic life.

As you can see on the left, all of these rigs have something in common: limbs. Each model has limbs that can move quite realistically which also affect the mesh once it is bound to it. Objects that deform would also need to be weighted, which stops unnecessary movement in areas that should not be affected (e.g. a character model that has not been weighted has been bound to a rig. The arm moves and so does part of the body where it isn't supposed to.)

Non-deforming

When an object that does not bend but may still have a rig attached to it exists in a 3D environment, it is a non-deforming object, meaning it doesn't bend or stretch at all. Some examples of non-deforming objects include vehicles, armour on a human/humanoid character, and even some objects that act like an arm. Below are a couple of examples of what non-deforming objects look like in the 3D environment.

The dumper truck and the character model may not have obvious things in common like a deforming object would but what they do have in similarity is that they have non-deforming properties. The dumper truck has a rig to keep the skeletal structure of it in place and also an arm for the lifting of the box whereas the armour doesn't have its own rig but what it does do is not bend and stretch when moved because it is strictly weighted to the corresponding body piece (e.g. the arm has a wrist pad that doesn't bend when the hand is moved).

3D Modeling: Specific Job roles

Character Modeler

The role of a Character Modeler lies with making 3D characters for either game or movie animations within the industry. These developments are started from the designs relayed from the character design team who made the characters based on the description from the scripts, story script and director. Below is a link to a job summary of a Character Modeling Artist at Pixar Canada.

http://www.creativeheads.net/job/9774/character-modeling-artist-in-vancouver 

Character Technical Director

The role of a Character Technical Director is to design the character's rigs, test and maintain them. They are responsible for keeping a tight schedule on everything within the departments including modeling, rigging, weighting, controlling, and animating. Below is a description of a Character Technical Director at DreamWorks Animation.

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/6877623

Character Rigger

The role of a Character Rigger is to create a skeleton for a character to move or rotate. Once they create this skeleton, they are then responsible for weighting, applying skins, and creating facial shapes. These should all be completed before the animation process can start as it'll help the
animators. Below is a link to a job description of a Character Rigger. 

http://getinmedia.com/careers/character-rigger