[Character] The "Bear Clan" character returns!

[Andrige]

Just thought I'd share the iteration process for the model back when I was making the low poly used as foundation for sculpting the high poly.

No real progress have been made on the rig I'm afraid, I've been busy planning and working on my other rig for my course. And to make matters worse, Skyrim unlocks tomorrow...

[kandex]

You should make a variation where you give it a Smokey hat
But seriously, this looks AMAZING! Great work!

[Toby]

This looks exceptionally good! Keep up the good work.

[Andrige]

Hey! Hope peeps have had a good new year and such! Thought I'd toss in a new update.

First off: thanks Kandex and Toby for your kind comments =)

Secondly, I will abandon the Blender rigging for the moment and move it behind texturing. I have a tough road ahead of me with studies this spring so I'll have to let the rigging process lay low for a while. It's already quite clear to me that it's not exactly ideal to start modifying an already advanced rig and struggle to get the rig in working condition without proper documentation/tutorials to go by.

I'll definitively leave the modeled and textured bear open for other people to download and try out though, and maybe someone can make the rigging into working condition before I do.
Work will be done on the texturing during the upcoming week most likely, so stay tuned.

As a sidenote I found this quite interesting link regarding normal maps, I recommend storing it away as a bookmark somewhere.

[Andrige]

Update!

I slowly got started with getting my programs set up... had some fairly annoying issues that made me switch between 3DCoat and Mudbox back and forth, then found that the best way to do the fur (which will undoubtedly take most of my time) was to do it in Photoshop in the end.

Tonight I've done the base coat basically and finished making a decent brush to use, so tomorrow I'll work more on it. And I know it's quite dark, I'll work more light into it as I go along.

Also the normal map preview in Mudbox sucks; it looks like its covered in plastic. It's that annoying case of having to put it into the game engine in order to see the results properly :/

[Endoperez]

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/09/soft-no ... s-for-fur/

"Aubrey and I had discussed a technique for painting soft fur earlier -- blending the fur with multiple blurred copies of itself. This softens the lighting without losing the tiny surface details. If that works for paintings, why not apply that to the normal maps and see if it works in 3D? On the left is the original normal map, followed by two blurred copies, and then the final composite. The final composite is made by taking the original normal map, and layering both of the blurred copies on top at 50% opacity."

You sound like you know what you're doing, but this might still be useful for you. If nothing else, it makes the fur a closer match to the ones already in the game.

[Andrige]

Ah, yeah I'll definitively try that out, it's a good technique

And now... onward to texturing!

[last]

When you want to make that bear with custom coloring option like those new characters in OG you need to look and understand how Aubrey have made he's.

[Korban3]

Geez, wish I'd seen that blog post before I did my characters
That really is a great way of making it look better, though. The picture of the shiny bear reminds me of Skyrim. Maybe someone should do this for Skyrim, and while they're at it the could reduce the specularity on EVERYTHING. I don't know if it's just having the texture quality on medium or what, but everything is made of plastic in Skyrim, I swear it is. And some objects have really nice normal maps and then some seem to have no normal map at all. It confuses me. A lot.
AND I WANT A BETTER SET OF MACE FINISHERS. I wanna beat their corpse to a bloody pulp, not hit them once in the face with no bruising, proper real-time generated dripping blood effects, facial laceration decals from the flanges or visibly caved-in skull. I don't want all of that, just some of it. At least one or two of those things.
Andrige, your bear has come along really nice.

[Andrige]

When you want to make that bear with custom coloring option like those new characters in OG you need to look and understand how Aubrey have made he's.

Damn! Yes you're absolutely right. I'm going to download the latest build and see if I can find any clues on how it's done.

Geez, wish I'd seen that blog post before I did my characters
That really is a great way of making it look better, though. The picture of the shiny bear reminds me of Skyrim. Maybe someone should do this for Skyrim, and while they're at it the could reduce the specularity on EVERYTHING. I don't know if it's just having the texture quality on medium or what, but everything is made of plastic in Skyrim, I swear it is. And some objects have really nice normal maps and then some seem to have no normal map at all. It confuses me. A lot.
AND I WANT A BETTER SET OF MACE FINISHERS. I wanna beat their corpse to a bloody pulp, not hit them once in the face with no bruising, proper real-time generated dripping blood effects, facial laceration decals from the flanges or visibly caved-in skull. I don't want all of that, just some of it. At least one or two of those things.
Andrige, your bear has come along really nice.

Hm, can't say I've noticed it too much honestly. The specularity works fairly well, although I have modded the shit out of my game with post-processing layers and better (holy shit it's so much better) light modifications.
Also I think you might want to visit a psychiatrist for that, or possibly play that old Call of Duty: World at War game.

[Wobak]

thats an awesome model!

the coloring is done through a "palette map" that works like the weightmaps do. you can have 4 different sections/colors with one channel in the palette map for each. the sections and the palette map are set up in the characters .xml file:

Code: Select all

	<PaletteMap 
		label_red="Clothes" 
                label_green="Fur" 
                label_blue="Leather"
		label_alpha="Armor">
        	Data/Textures/Characters/IGF_Guard/base_guard_m.tga
    	</PaletteMap>

[Andrige]

Update!

Some moar texturing

And I'll wait with the normal map smoothing, I get a better sense of flow of hairs while texturing if it's sharper. Going to smooth it out for in-game tests though and fiddle with it then.

thats an awesome model!

the coloring is done through a "palette map" that works like the weightmaps do. you can have 4 different sections/colors with one channel in the palette map for each. the sections and the palette map are set up in the characters .xml file:

Code: Select all

	<PaletteMap 
		label_red="Clothes" 
                label_green="Fur" 
                label_blue="Leather"
		label_alpha="Armor">
        	Data/Textures/Characters/IGF_Guard/base_guard_m.tga
    	</PaletteMap>

So I'd have to assign the palette map onto the model itself? Hm... I just hope it isn't a Blender-specific feature, as I don't know much about that to be honest...
I had hoped it would be through a texture file

Anyway, thanks for the info! I'll see what I can do with it.

[Wobak]

it is a texture file
for the example code you would make a new texture with the same UV layout as the color and normalmap and color the area of the the clothes red, the fur green, the leather blue and give the alphachannel full value where the armor is

oh, and that texture looks even more awesome!

[Andrige]

it is a texture file
for the example code you would make a new texture with the same UV layout as the color and normalmap and color the area of the the clothes red, the fur green, the leather blue and give the alphachannel full value where the armor is

oh, and that texture looks even more awesome!

*does a silent "fuck yes" with a fist pump*

I mean... that's good.
Thanks ;P

[KiiNGz]

How do you make a fur texture so detailed like this! it looks so cool!