Entry 11: NPC Modelling Part 1

In this entry, I'll be talking about the current work that I have produced for my NPC mum and dad's base meshes.

To start with, I needed to create a base mesh that I could work from in terms of detailed modelling, e.g. being able to change it to look like either of the parents concepts, and for considerations of animation so that it can be easily animated later on.

I followed a YouTube series of tutorials on creating a base mesh by Lee Jackson, which I had used in the past to create character base meshes. He spends roughly 5-6 videos creating most of the characters body, so at first I followed the tutorial by eye. This is how the 1st attempt turned out:

Base mesh first attempt progress. 

As you can see, my first result has come out a little thin in places, and some of the body's proportions looked off. I felt unhappy with this model, and attempted to create new ones based off the work from the tutorial and my own eye. However, these didn't turn out too well, as I couldn't quite grasp how to properly move the verts and polygons into place.

The 2nd attempts by eye didn't work very well. 

Base mesh reference. 

 So instead I went back to my first mode, and this time round made good use of the image reference that Jackson provides when he created his own model. Below shows you a general progression of how this stage went.

Base Mesh progression.

I was a lot happier with this results, as using the reference images to tweak my original model made the proportions and shapes fit together better. I also made use of a 3D human muscle figure to try and make the proportions work a little more. Note the Mudbox mesh was also used as a reference point.

3D Anatomy Model reference. 

Mudbox mesh reference. 

This added a little to the model but not a major amount. After this, I decided to create some of the static objects that the NPC's wear/hold when exploring the household, as seen in my original concept work.

NPC concept art reference. 

Most of these assets were pretty simple to model, such as the torch, rolling pin and mug. The bear slipper was a little more difficult, in terms of working out the shape and the topology, but once found what I wanted it got a lot easier to model.

Static assets: A mug, a torch, polar bear slippers, and a rolling pin. 

The most difficult one so far has been the cat slippers, in terms of working out how to place the topology correctly for the cats face. I tried a few different shapes, but just found myself deleting and trying again a fair few times. The progression of the slippers can be seen below.

Cat slipper progression. 

I've decided that I'' either paint the majority of the detail on or possibly mudbox it onto the surface, depending on which method I feel would wold work best. In the meantime, i'm pretty happy with how the work has progressed so far for the NPC characters.

The next blog entry will cover work recently done for creating the NPC's heads and feet.

Entry 10: Brief Update on the Puppet Master

Due to other coursework deadlines in the new year, and pushing to get work done for this module, I haven't updating recently as of later. However, with one module now finished, I will be bale to update more regularly to this blog.

This entry briefly covers the beginning of unwrapping work that I did for my Puppet Master character.

So with the 3D work finished, I began the unwrapping process.

I applied a UV Checker texture to every piece of the Puppet Master, and began to sort out each piece's unwrap.

Not the texture looks wrapped due to no unwrapping done at this stage.

 This hasn't been difficult so far, and anything that I've come across that could be problematic has been resolved by looking at unwraps that I did for my work from the Journeyman project. Below shows a few examples of unwraps that I have done so far.

Example unwrap for the PM's head. 

Example unwrap for the PM's body.

The next few entries will be covering 3D work produced for the NPC characters.

Entry 9: Puppet Master Modelling Part 2

So, carrying on from the last entry:

4: The Body

For the body I started by applying a turbosmooth modifier so that I could ascertain how it would look with higher topology. Then, to make sure that this change was visible whilst the lower poly was edited, I turned on the the iterations mode, which you can tell by the orange wire mesh over the original white mesh in the image below.

Using the above method I went on to edit the topology of the lower poly mesh, creating smoother topology flow and sorting out any issues such as overlapping vertices or smoothing errors. I added in parts to the mesh such as the coats collar as you say in the previous image to better match up with the turnaround drawings.

The arms were also reattached to the boy to make animation easier for the animators despite my original thoughts on having them de-attached. Additionally animation considerations for topology were added in such as the knee joints to allow for smooth bending motions.

I eventually ended up with this lower poly mesh as you can see below. Also provided is the high poly version.

With this done all I had to do was clean up any n-gons, further topology issues and design problems. What I mean by this, for example, with the Puppet Masters hood, was for when the head would eventually be placed, you partially be able to see inside the coat, which would ruin the structure of the character to any person playing the game. This was solved by simply extruding some polygons down into the coat.

With these last few issues fixed, I green lighted the body and added it to the finalised pieces of the model.

5: The Head

I found that the head was one of the more trickier parts of the Puppet Master to model, as trying to get the topology correct with the face I had designed was challenging.

I began by taking the original blockout head and turbosmoothing in order to gain a little more topology to play around with. I would then half the face in order to work only on one side, and mirror it further on in the process.

My first few attempts involved using the cut tool in line mode to create the shapes for the mouths and eyes. Once done, I would then extrude them inwards to create hole shapes, and would then attempt to clean up the topology afterwards.

I wasn't particular happy with the first few attempts, as the topology made the head's surface look a little bumpy and uneven.

Eventually though after a few more attempts I got a toplogy flow that worked relatively well for the design. And since I find out there were no plans to give the character talking animations, I settled on the toplogy flow as shown below.

I mirrored the head, stitched the verts down the centre together, and greenlighted the head for the progress model. I also made a few extursions from the neck down to create part of the shirt the PM wears underneath his coat, in so sticking with the concept and hiding the empty shell within his coat.

6: The clothe straps

The last part of the modelling I had to deal with was the straps that go across the Puppet Masters buttons and on his shoulders.

These were fairly simple to do. I started by taking a thin box shape, adding roughly five edge loops, then turbosmoothing it. I followed this up by applying a bend modifier, bending it in the right direction, and messing around with verts to match it up to the body as closely as possible.

The final pieces ended up like this:

I then greenlighted them and added them to the progress model.

At this stage the model was finished! With everything modelled, I went on to do final checks with the x-view mode, looking for things like overlapping edges, any last topology issues and doing checks before fbx export such as resetting x-forms and scaling the character to the correct size. I also optimised some of the pieces as the poly count was a little high, so I removed lines and verts to ease this up a little.

Here below you can see the final model with colours that better match up to the concept art.

With this done for now, I'm not required to do any immediate further work according to my team leads until after the Christmas break. With this in mind I will deal with other work deadlines I have and then come back to produce new work for this project in the new year.

Entry 8: Puppet Master Modelling Part 1

Since at the time of my last entry most of my deadlines had been hit, I was allowed to focus on other module deadlines, which is why its been a while since I lasted posted on the blog.

However, I have since completed the low poly modelling stage for the Puppet Master. This first post of two will show how I created his parts and the procedures that were followed to create him.

1: The Hat

So, carrying on from where we left off with the blockout model I created:

I decided to focus on the the simpler clothes of this character in order to get them out of the way first. I started off with the hat, which originally looked like this:

As you can see it was pretty basic at this point. The first step was to cut it in half, and extrude the polys upwards in the inner part of the hat. The inner ones are highlighted in the image below.

It took a little time, mainly in order to make sure the inner verts lined up with the outer ones closely. Once this was done, I mirrored the hat piece, attached the pieces together, and welded the verts so that the model would bow be complete, as you saw in the first image.

From here I want on to turbosmooth the hat in order to get a better shape for it. I liked the smoother shape it had acquired, however I felt that it it was too high poly with 1,120 polys and 2,240 tris.

I therefore went on to reduce the amount of polys the hat had, making 3 different versions: the original high poly, a medium poly, and a low poly hat. You can see the low and the high poly compared below:

The shape is lost slightly in the low poly, but not by a huge amount. I was much happier with the new 432 poly and 864 tri counts. To create the lower I removed a lot of the polygons I created for the inside part, as this wouldn't be seen by the player, and many of the loops on the outer layer.

Happy with the hat, I added it to the original blockout and applied a green material to it, to remind me that this piece was finished for now and that I could now move on to the next part. So in a way it acted as a progress bar of sorts, loading more of the green until the model was finished.

2: The buttons and bells

With this done the next parts I focused on where the yet to be created buttons found on the puppet Masters coat, and the bell attached to his head protrusion.

I began with the main buttons for his coat. I wanted to create ones with a slight spherical feel to them, instead of the flat ones that I used in my concept and turnaround.

The first step was to create a capsule from the extended shape selection and delete everything except the top spherical part.

Then went on to add in extra lines and using the extrusion tool both inwards and outwards in order to create the shapes I wanted.

The bottom section was capped, with lines and verts added in that joined up in the middle, and extruded this circle upwards to create the space for the clip that would attach the button to the coat.

For the clip, I originally attempted to create via extruding it and shaping it from the button itself. However, whenever I got close to completing it, an error would always occur which messed up the topology and could not be fixed:

So instead I created the clip piece separately and attached it to the button instead, which finished off this piece.

For the buttons on the coats arms, I simply created a cylinder, gave it a short height, added a few lines and chamfered them to get a circular effect.

Finally, for the tail bell I wasn't quite sure how to proceed at first. I wanted to created a proper bell, for example like one a cat would have, instead of my basic design within the concept. I had reference images of these kinds of bells whilst modelling the part in order to make it easier.

Progression of the tail bell. 

I started off with a sphere, and chopped it in half, making a small extrusion at the top for connecting it to the head protrusion.

However I quickly found this wasn't effective for what I was designing. So i made another sphere, chopped off the top, and extrude inwards. This made more sense, however I then had to move the verts around to make it match the shape of the outer layer.

I created a copy from the finished piece attached it, and stitched the two pieces together to  complete the bell shape. I decided not to create the ball piece that goes inside, as the puppet master, instead leaving it as a hollow bell to add to the air of mystery the character has.

With the bell complete, I added all the pieces to it, further adding to the finished green pieces on the models.

3: The Arms and Hands

Since I was planning to do the straps that are on the puppet masters torso and shoulders till later when the model was more developed, I went on to model the his arms and hands.

I started with the arms, which I previously left attached due to not knowing if they would work well topology wise when attached to the bodies.

The arm piece was relatively straightforward to do. I added topolgy to the elbow to make it more visible and to allow it to stretch and bend for animation purposes. I then capped the open space, extruded it inwards, and added geometry to make it spherical

I did this due to the fact the possibility of the puppet master's hands popping off was discussed in order to follow and control his puppet characters.

At this stage it was finished, however it wasn't highlighted green as of yet due to the fact I was considering attaching it to the main body later, so for now it was left as it was.

With this out of the way, I moved on to hands. In reflection out of all the pieces on this post so far, the hands were probably the most difficult to make. Hands aren't my strongest point when it comes to 3D modelling in Max, so it took a few attempts to get right.

I started off by taking the hand from the original blockout and adding in additional geometry. I then turbosmoothed it, however I wasn't happy with the result that it created, and decide to try a different method instead.

For my second attempt I followed a tutorial online, which although gave some nice looking geometry, also caused issues when it came to turbosmoothing and attempting to add in additional lines for geometry. It did however allow me to work out how to do the part of the glove the hand slips into. Again. I wasn't happy, and proceeded to try a different method out.

For the last attempt I found a different tutorial which worked perfectly for the style I wanted to go with, in which it allowed me to create a cartoony hand with space to create working geometry for animation purposes. You can see the initial version and the final edited version below:

With these finished I added them to my work in progress model.

Now as you can see at this point the model was about half way done. In the next post I'm going to show you the work for the final steps for the puppet masters head, torso and coat straps.

Entry 7: Overlord Work

In this post I'll be showing the work that I have done so far for the Overlord.

So basically the Overlord is a huge monster that bosses around the other minions and makes them gather the fear from humans for him, in order to give him power and gain access to the human world.

However, the Overlord is so huge, only his eyeballs will appear before the playable character. Since i got assigned the task of designing, I started by doing thumbnail designs of various eyeball concepts.

As you can see I experimented with different sized irises shapes and vein designs. I wanted to make sure their was a lot of variety to play around with, and also to give the team a lot to chose from. Each team member had different favorite eyeballs, which in the end got whittled down to the first concept, however giving the eyeball the ability to morph into some of the other shapes I had created.

With this decided on I quickly created simple 3D models of eyeballs in 3DS MAX. I originally tried to create yes based off my own idea and workflow, but found that they didn't work particularly well. Also, I wasn't sure how to model the outer eyelid in case we ever needed one.

So after this stage I decided to look up a few tutorials to do get a better idea as to how to model it properly. The results came out a lot better than my first attempt did. To make an eyelid all you need to do is create a sphere, select the slice modifier, and angle it as you want it to be.

After this was done I started trying out manipulating the eyeballs shape into a evil expression. I also made an eyeball as if it had be freshly plucked out of someones socket.

I was also told to create a series of eyeballs with different shaped iris in order to test animation target morphing techniques. So I created a series of 10 eyeballs, one set in low poly, and the other set in high poly, so that the animators could have selection work with.

I sent them the files, but in the end it was discovered that there were some issues with vertex ID's, so the animators are working on a solution and will get back onto me as to what's to be done next.

So with the 3D Model on hold for a little while, I decided to create a final concept for the Overlord in the setting of his HUB world. Since we don't have a established environment a design for the hub world, I decided to design my own set piece based off the selection of images from our design documentation.

Step 1

 For the first attempt in Photoshop I drew up a very basic scene which includes the overlord, the monsters and some scenery. I didn't really like the composition of the piece and was using it more as a rough first draft rather than a proper set construction piece.

Step 2

 So for the second iteration I focused more on the images from the design doc, got a rough idea in my head, and drew it out in a red color brush. I did this so that when I draw over it in black, I can still see how the original looked, and change it up as appropriate.

The idea for the scene was a rocky pathway leading into the distance towards a giant rising tower, where the overlords eyes would look angrily down upon the monster before him.

Step 3 

For this step I focused on the main pathway and the two pillars either side of it in the foreground. I mainly made use of reference from a skeleton temple artwork from the game Darksiders 2. I used a different concept piece for the rocky, jagged path. I also added in stone touches, so that when I get to the colouring stage it will help to add a little atmosphere to this piece. 

Note how the red construction lines our still in place and noticeable, showing you how they both work together and changing with the design at the same time. 

Step 4

 For this step I added in the main pillar for the middle ground. For its lower center I added in a small door to make it look like the corridor stretches on for a long time. The design again mainly inspired by the darksiders concept art. In addition I added in the background pillars to give the piece a sense of depth and work out the basic components.

Step 5

For the last step in this post, i added in the background pillars and the bridges that connect them up to the main tower. In addition roughly added in where the overlords eyeballs will be, although their size may change depending on how much of the background I want to display. But for now their current size give them the sense of menace and imposing nature that I've been aiming for.

For the next blog I will most likely be showing a mixture of further work to this concept piece, as well as the NPC turnarounds, and possible 3D development on the Puppet Master.