New mountain topology

Fixed a few issues here and there, and redone the mountain topology, so it can be used for up close climbing shots.

Import of mountain

Imported mountain and stones to Max. Only normal maps and a blinn shader, not too pretty. These will need either displacements or a higher resolution mesh to look right, especially up close.

Alston skin test

Think i've managed to get Alston looking rather pale and british with this shader setup. Next is the cap, hat and cloth shader setups but right now i'm sick of shaders.

Two blocked shots with camera so far

Still having a few doubts about the camera in this shot, but i suppose it will have to do (i know, he lost his clothes somewhere along the animation)




The mustache is behaving rather oddly, but i think i'll call this blocked for now.

Mountain

Painted the mountain a bit

Matcap white:


















Fastshader:

blocking

Just about done, will be rendering environment from this camera most likely.

Saturday morphing

Thought i'd try out this fancy skin morph modifier to make Alston's hands deform better. As i suspected it had some issues, but after a bit of fiddling and workarounds, i figured it out. Done the thumb for now, not the best result, but its getting there.

Mountain update

Still a good ways to go. Having some trouble deciding on form and style.




















Other things done:

- Sculpted Alston's hands so they will be more interesting to look at up close.

Cap improvements

After making new buttons for alstons cap, I discovered that the Zbrush mesh for was somehow corrupted. Came up with a decent workaround:

- Import the cap that was skinned in max (in other cases export to max, import there, check the mesh/UV's, then reexport to Zbrush)
- Append this as a subtool to the old high poly sculpt, and subdivide to appropriate level.
- Make sure they line up perfectly, and are both at the lowest subdiv level.
- Have the new (MAX) Mesh selected, and the old one visible. Hit Project all in the subtool menu.
- Go up one s-div level on both tools and repeat up to the topmost one. (This isnt supposed to be necessary, but i find that it helps a lot with accuracy.
- Review your new mesh details.
- To get polypainting over turn on just RGB in the draw palette, and project all at the higest level. (make sure colorize is on.)

In any case, here is the picture of the finished cap in zbrush:




















Now, have a look at the next problem, this time inside max:














It would seem like my UV's are stretched (thought they where pretty nice really)
Next on the do list: Fix UV's, and make a specular map to get the shader set up for the cap.

Edit: Hmm, cant see to much crap on these. This might be trouble.

Operation make good mountain

So i tried a (Very) quick sculpt on the mountain, trying to get it to fit with the style of the others. Not quite happy, but i guess its something.

Update!

Right, so during Easter i sort of took some time off. Went about testing some zbrush alpha's and methods for applying them, since the sculpt for the dragon body kinda sucked. Redid the entire thing a couple or 9 times, and figured out that i needed a displacement map to portray it properly. After a lot of testing and cursing and searching tutorials i found some by Jason Welsh on Veoh that was actually damned good. You need zbrushworkflows/tutorials thats the guy to go to. In addition did some animation which follows below.





(I also studied some methods for modeling topology in Zbrush using only the main lines of the body as keyloops, and then use this as controlmesh for further subdivisions. This minimises poles and makes for easy control of mesh changes. Results where pretty damned interesting, but HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THIS MOVIE ;)

Alston somewhat exported

It would appear i have managed to unwrap the main mesh, and export the maps for the body. I also tried out a shader setup. Final gather does not seem to agree with my normal maps however, creating a few odd artifacts. If now the skinning and skin morph still behaves this character might actually get finished.

Dragon shader test

Did a quick setup of a MR Fast Skin shader. Quite a bit to go on the normalmap as it appears quite lumpy in MAX. The Colourmap needs some more work, and rendering a better specular map is very much needed.

Alston update

Did this some time ago, and some of it is already exported. A few troubles concerning exports makes it easier to just post Zbrush screenshots.