jhothesis

[jhothesis]

Setting up a Marmoset scene for rendering. I might still do beauty shots in Arnold, but I think this will ultimately save me time with being able to iterate more quickly on the scene. This will be esp. helpful when rendering out the final videos.

[jhothesis]

I was able to figure out the clothing issue! When I initially made his robes I was working with higher poly models in marvelous and then decreasing their particle distance before exporting. My mistake was trying to simulate with that low particle distance. I fixed it by morphing the clothes while high poly, then pausing the sim and reducing the polys for export.

[jhothesis]

Got Ged's new pose in and trying to adjust the clothes to fit. For some reason they are parachuting on his body and leaving huge gaps between layers. Pressure is at zero, adjusting additional thickness not working.

[jhothesis]

First pass at the environment and the two characters together. I spent most time on the stone, fiddling with UVs, and lighting the scene to look like a stage. They look a little like miniatures, which is interesting. The background painting is "Emperor Minghuang’s Journey to Shu", a painting by Li Zhaodao during the Tang Dynasty. I edited the colors to look cooler as this scene is set in snowy mountains.

Thoughts:

The spotlight might be too harsh, esp on Serret, or I might need to iterate on her clothes to include more interest from afar.

I want the colors in the lighting to be more dramatic, but I dont know if that will blast away the color in my texture work.

I still need to add the stone of Terrenon in the center, hence the hole.

I also need to ask Elijah about the textures getting a little glitchy with the consecutive circles on the platform.

[jhothesis]

Ged and Serret tiling normals!

I was having some issues with Serret's dress textures. they were linked to images in the wrong place and I'm having some resolution and texture bleed issues.

[jhothesis]

Ged hair done.

[jhothesis]

Iterated on Ged's eyes. I wanted the same magic glow that Serret has. I also put some scar tissue in his eye and elongated his pupil in the direction of his scars.

Tried to do some extra sculpting on Ged's scars but the mesh started getting weird lines, I think it has something to do with both the resolution and the SSS

I also iterated on the wrinkles in Ged's hat:

Brows are also in. Next is to do the rest of the hair/lashes and apply tiling normals for Ged and Serret's clothes.

Lastly, I iterated on his clothing color, I felt like the plain silver wasn't having the impact I wanted. I still have to add silver decorations to the belt and buttons to the collar.

[jhothesis]

For some reason polys split off into their own UVs/their vertices separated. Spent some time merging vertices and stitching edges back together. No idea why this happened.

[jhothesis]

Ged face update: eyes are in. I'm not sure how I feel about the scars. I think the skin around them might need some redness or hyperpigmentation...

I also am debating on whether to put some emission in the eyes like Serret. they are both magic, but I dont want Ged to look evil. I might change the eye emission to a couple of lines in the iris instead of a circle around the iris. I might do a paintover over break.

[jhothesis]

First pass Ged's clothes.

Things I need to work on:

grime/fading pass on hems of robe

wrinkle/shape work on belt, hat, boots

set up an arnold shader with tiling cloth normals

[jhothesis]

first pass on texturing for Ged's face. I need to tone down the specular I think, esp. on the scars. The subsurface on the eyes is irking me a little, but I think it might be fixed once I put some eyeballs in there. The normals might be backward too... its hard to know with pores. So far I'm excited! I'm proud of how far I've come with my rendering skills in arnold. This didn't take long to put together the shader and render settings.

[jhothesis]

Boots and hat modeled and posed! Next is to texture everything. Body will be on one sheet and clothes another.

[jhothesis]

Ged face high poly. This is a second pass, the first pass Mark Nelson said that the inner part of the scars looked too uniform and that he wanted more bulging on the outside. Also a disconnect between the two lip pieces, as if they healed unevenly.

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Morph target worked! I made sure to export the model with no polygroups from zbrush, rig it in mixamo, and put both the apose and posed models in the same maya scene before exporting for marvelous. It worked fabulously! No issues at all. Huge difference in terms of tedious reworking of the fabric with Serret's dress.

[jhothesis]

Posing Ged! I took his model into mixamo to get a rig and put Serret in the scene so I could get the interaction I want. I'm really excited seeing this!

[jhothesis]

Update on Ged's clothing. I've just finished my third and final try for modeling his robe. I had a bunch of references images from Tang paintings, and the men's robes are deceivingly simple.

This is one of my main reference images. The thing that gave me the most trouble were seams and attachment points. I initially thought that middle line was a pleat, and my first try at the clothing incorporated that:

I then got some good references videos of garment recreation from Sean that showed the line to be a seam, not a pleat. Side note: one of the challenges for the thesis is being able to find resources in English. None of the youtube videos that Sean gave me showed up when I tried to search for Tang Dynasty outfit recreation videos.

My second attempt was better, and I had a cut opening on the side where the robe is buttoned closed on the body. I also discovered it was very hard to use a belt to hold fabric together, there is a lot of clipping with the meshes when I tried to do this. My solution was a internal line with elastic:

Below is my third and final try. I had to redo the body proportions, so I decided to redo the robe from scratch because I wasn't super happy with how the robe was looking, even though it was correct. As seen in the reference image, even though there is only one side open for buttoning, both sides around the chest and neck have cloth pulling, I assume from the buttons on one side and maybe a knot on the other that is under the robe. This is too complicated for Marvelous, I try to work with as little layers as possible, and absolutely no weight bearing knots. My solution was to make the whole robe, and then duplicate a panel in the shape of the front piece and sew it back onto the robe. this made a little crease in the sides of the neck and check that looked more like the reference image. Here is the final:

And the UVs/pattern:

[jhothesis]

trying to adjust Ged's body proportions. I tried to match the concept and realized I made his limbs way too long.

This is the edited proportions. I was going for a more lanky body type, I think with the 8 heads height I can thin out his limbs and make him lankier from there.

Book quotes:

"..A thriving weed, a tall, quick boy" "Light and lithe and strong" "Lank and harsh"

I then unwrapped him. I'm using the auto unwrapping method that Mark showed me in Maya. The head/neck are the largest on the sheet, the hands the second largest, and the rest of the body is the smallest because it wont be showing. I initially chose to use the ZBrush default models for the good topology, but as I unwrapped both ged and serret there were a lot of spirals that I had to work around when unwrapping. I do like the face topo though. My main issues were with the hands, feet, and crotch/upper leg. I fixed the feet UV issue for this model by chopping off the toes so I can model boots.