the end!! :D

so this project was really ambitious for us to take on. but i'd rather be ambitions and fail then work with lower aims. having said that... i dont think we'll be taking on such a big project next time, lol. this term i learnt so much tho, so from that point it was a really good project. we storyboarded properly this time and stuck to 90% of the angles we originally decided, which helped alot. the production schedual was more detailed this term and it was a good guied for us to follow throughout the term.

A couple of environment bits i did

So i finished my character and had time to do some of the environment. this totem pole was litrally a slap dash job due to time, which is why it looks so bad(as you can see)!! haha. Having said that i baked it and the normals just wouldnt work. But i think that was fate because i re-did the pole, keeping it simple and worked on the texture more. i quickly zbrushed it and it looks pretty good, you can see it in the animation becasue i dont have a picture with me t put up. I also did the blood pattern on the floor around the totem ploe and the mountain in the background.

*squeltch*Zombieeeeeeee!!!ahh!

well here is the final zombie, un rendered. i think its a bit bitter sweet because there was so much effort put into it and we were having so much trouble on this project. that said im not overly dissapointed with her. she was my first attempt at a human(ish!) life model and only my second character modeled overall. i think part of my dissapointmet was having made all the high poly zbrush parts baked onto the low poly character. i think it looks pretty bad in comparison but oh well... i've learnt alot this term, more than any term i've took on this course so far. hopefully i wil be able to take what i learnt this term into next term and make something much better.

there were sertain things that had to be axed, like... THE plat! :( but dan just didnt have time to animate it and we'd rather not have it in than do and it look shit. also, i iad to axe an alpha map i made for her. it just didnt want to work, which was pretty annoying.

Texturing

Ok so this is the zombie's texture map! At the point of us beginning to texture, me and Anna were a week behind on the production schedual. However Jake was strugeling with animating, so we all decided that he should model the camp, Dan.C would animate and me and Anna would commence with our characters. Now, this actually took a shockingly long time. However i wanted it to look good so i didnt rush it. I UV mapped all of her body and items and sewed together various parts and so on using the checker texture as a guide to line. Under the texture map there is the normal map and the specular map.

High poly character modeling

Ok so this is my favorite piece i zbrushed for my character, her plat thingimibob! This was actually the hardest to make also. I made this out of a rectangle, which i then divided in zbrush to sculpt. It took me a couple of days to make this becasue it kept looking like shit, litrally. Eventually i ended up with this, which im really proud of. I used the mask tool to mask off areas i didnt want to effect then inflated the rest, using the rake tool (rake tool's my best friend) i defined the bunched up parts. I found it quite difficauly making it look like it had weight but i think i managed it in the end... That made it sound quite easy. if.only.


lastly i did her boob tube, i kept it fairly basic. i did the same as i did with the skirt when making bumps in the material. she's going her have fur around the lower part of the top, using alpha channels. and her shrug will be overlapping the upper part which is why i havnt done anything drastic to it.

High poly character modeling

Ok so below is the zombies hair, i wanted to give her a quiff with lots of feathers sticking out of it, which i plan to do using alpha maps. To get the shape i adjested the low poly geometry in zbrush using the tweak tool, befor i devided the geomitry further. To get the hair texture i used the rake tool and identifyed the hair line, as to where the hair would be pulled. im going to give her a plat at the back of her head, which is why there is an area where it all gathers.



Below is her scabby crusty foot bandage. I really like how it tured out in the end considering it was one of the objects i had most trouble with. To get this effect i made a brush in photoshop, which has a bandagy texture on it and streched it out over the geometry in zbrush. The brush was quite shit, but it gave me a good enough outline for me to follow when crustying it up. I used the level took with the softness all the way down to get a harder dege when extruding areas, i used the rake took also to get a cross hatch in the sock too.

Next is the skirt, considering its a basic looking item, it was fairly difficault to make good folds along the seam. I took a different approch with making folds this time, using the level tool on soft then smoothing the ends out, then i used the pinch tool to pull in the ends to give it a tighter fold look. i made another brush in photoshop which has a grainy bump to it that i applied to the skirt to make it more material like.

High poly character modelling

So, having got a low poly body, which me and Anna are sharing we took it into Zbrush to make the high poly version. By me and Anna sharing one body between us, it allowed us to save time making one each. We hoped to Zbrush the body to the extent where you couldn’t tell that we both worked off of the same body. I think that both our characters have very distinct features, on there face and body which separates them enough. As I mentioned before I've never used Zbrush before making this character, let alone making a close to realistic human character. I began with the body, just working over it with brushes I had made in Photoshop to make her look scabby and rotten. This wasn’t too difficult because being a zombie, the character could afford to look not so perfect, which allowed me to play about with brushed quite a bit.


I then took a bone and Zbrushed that up, but I don’t have a screen print of it so I haven’t put it up, however it’s nothing special and I’ll wack it up once it’s been UV'd. I planned on working from the feet up because I thought the garments on her upper body would be harder to create. So I Zburshed her "leg warmer", which is basically animal skin wrapped around her shins. For this I used the 'Macro' tool call 'rake volumiser', which allows you to raise the surface to create lumps and bumps. Its harder then it might seem, but I think I got a good result. I used the rake tool's hatching in my design to my advantage, rather then smoothing it all out, as I thought once it has the rope tied around it, it would make quite a nice scrunched cloth bump. I’m going to use alpha channels at the top and bottom to give it tattered edges.

I attempted to move on to her bandages, which are wrapped round her feet. However, as much as I tried it kept looking like a verooker sock, so I passed on that one for now. I decided to Zbrush her shrug instead, as I had been quite successful with the leg warmer and I didn’t want to leave it before I lost my touch. So I used the same technique as I did with the leg warmer, but I smoothed out all the bumpy bits. The problem that kept occurring with me was whenever I divided the geometry of the low poly mesh I lost allot of shape, particularly with the foot bandage. To I had to 'tweak' the low poly mesh in order to keep the higher divisions shape how I wanted it. Below is the shrug more or less finished. However sints then I’ve elongated the sleeves a bit, so it’s long enough to go down to the bangles. As well as giving it a subtle grainy texture I made in Photoshop. I’ve applied that to a few of my objects because it takes off the plaslicy looking feel some Zbrushed things can gain. Also I’m again going to give the edges alpha channels, giving it tattered edges.

Ok, so I then went back to the body to zombify her up some more, buy giving her a sticky out rib. To get this I used the 'level' tool and had the radius down so the brush had no softness, which allowed me to work away into her stomach, where I then softened some of the edges slightly. I then used the same tool to pull her rib out from her stomach, rather then pushing in with the tool I pulled out the faces until I got a nice sharp rib. I then looked at what I did and realised I had got a bit carried away with the level tool and she had a gapping hole in her so I tried to flesh it out a bit with some oozy flesh. I plan to UV maggots in it to make it less gapey.