Heads up

Well I won't lie, I've been stuffing my face with turkey and playing chrono trigger on the DS. Thinking little about work, but hell, it's christmas right.

Well today I got back to it, trying to ease my way back in. So here's a screenie on the head for the target that I left unfinished a while back, it's coming together nicely, should be animation friendly too, which is what we want.

Infinito

Finally finished the Ninja, he has eyes and eyelids too. I didn't give him pupils since the origional drawings didn't have any. makes them look more evil.

The eylids are a little shaky, I used nurbs but we don't need to play around with them too much so should be ok. Try and do better on the next two which are gonna involve some facial animation.

the target is already underway so he shouldn't take as long since I won't need to dick about in zBrush for ages.

I posted details over at the team blog but this is the final level of detail. 40k polys and it runs fine. Anymore and we are gonna be breaking out the fire extiguishers on our hard drives.

I'm going to sneak in as much detail as I can on low poly in zBrush export it back to maya and smooth that bitch out to get the same result as above.

Ok well personal notes on the process. Might as well get this out of the way now. Overall this has been a bittersweet experience for me. I think it's an improvement on character models I've done before and I worked a lot faster and picked up some cool tricks. However knowing that if I figured out the retopology and zBrush a little better I could make something even better leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Hmm perhaps that's last nights curry.

In any case I'm pretty happy with myself, I think I've upped my game and I'll step it up more going into the next 2 character models. As for these new enemies I'm not looking forward to the facial modelling and the clothes but I might as well meet these enemies head on. Doing this over the christmas break means we are in a good position in term 2 as well so the pressure isn't too much for my fragile sanity.

I hope the rest of the guys feel the same way about the model or I'm going to look a bit silly.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Brush...

Here is an update just to show my progress today with zBrush. Top image is my starting point and the lower image shows the jawline and chest which are the only changes I made that I kept. I'm fairly pleased as it's my first session in zBrush.

It's hard. I've been trying to learn and do at the same time, a tutorial in one window, zBrush in another and por-I mean music in the last one.

EDIT: Was on the phone to Sam while sorting this and I tried to import it back into Maya and it's definately to many polys to work with let alone animate. I'm pretty pissed off because going back and looking at the low poly model after working with this one makes me feel like shit. I guess I'll have to get over it though, we don't have the power to run such high poly models and I'd rather we had a film that worked than one that doesn't but looks pretty.

After consideration my course of action is going to be as follows:

-Search for a way to compress the high poly model

-Failing that take the low poly model into zBrush again and make changes as best I can, keeping it between 10-40,000 polys.

-Try and recreate the shape of the pecks and jawline again...

-Take that bitch back to maya and finally give him some eyes and that will be that. Someone can rig him.

-Start all of dat again with the target model.

Ironic peace to y'all while I go and gun some people down on Modern Warfare 2.

Dreamy Days

Being at the ZBrush phase with the Ninja I've retreated to thoughts of the other character I have to model. Mainly due to a fear of having to learn something new but also because I want to make a little start on this dude so when I finish the Ninja in ZBrush it's basically a matter of bringing this dude straight in to the same program.

I had hoped to have tomorrow off to play Dragonage: Origins all day but since amazon.co.uk would rather play around with their weiners than dispatch my game I guess I'll be starting the modelling on the target.

Peace.

Update

Cheeky update to show how things are progressing. Been making loads of subtle tweaks over the last two days, most of which are hard to see but they were bugging me when I zoomed in close on maya. So I'm going to show where I stand and give out some criticl analysis.

-Pretty happy with the legs, I like the angles, gives it a bit of style and it looks like my drawing. Won't likely tweak that much more.

-Torso is looking pretty good as well, it gets a bit messy when it hooks up with the shoulder blade but with any luck I can pick up the slack in zBrush.

-I'm not happy with the arms yet, they are the right shape but they don't carry the same style of the legs so I need to work some more on that.

-Now the head, this has been the most annoying part. Having some trouble with the eyes but I'll get there eventually. I have given him a jutting out lip but he isn't going to be speaking so I didn't spend long on this. I decided to leave him without a nose as well since...well it looks kinda funny without it.

Basically I need to finish these bits, add in the belt/sash and the boots, these are so tight to the skin in my drawing though so I might try a test of texturing them straight on to the body. After all of that I guess I can finally try and learn some zBrush and do a basic clean up, and try to put in some definition that's too hard to do in maya.

Oh! And the hands, I need to sort those bastards out...

Ah being a perfectionist is a bitter curse.

Progress Report

Here are some screenies of the Ninja model so far. It's taking a while but it's getting there. Loads of little technical problems have kept coming up but I've managed to fight past most of them. The biggest problem I'm having at the moment is getting some angles on the muscles to give it some style.

I installed Zbrush to see if I could do it in there but one look at the interface and you best believe I closed that window. Probably have a chat with Ferhan on Wednesday about that. I don't want to commit hours to moving vertices if there is a quicker and more effective way to get some definition in there.

I guess I'll try and mold that head until then. KEEP BUILDING AND MOVIN DEM VERTICES!