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.

High poly character head

Having spent a week modeling the low poly head, i took it and used the sculpt geomitry tool in Maya to define her head even further to make a hight poly head.



However, Dan.C said it would be better to re-modle the high poly head in Zbrush. it took me a while to get over it, but a cup of tea or two later i was fine. So, below is the third attempt at the high poly head. the second version was also a nightmare. I worked on it and got her how i wanted, but Zbrush being a stupid programme decided not to save it. We we'er saveing our attempts as 'documents' which one would assume was the...document. But no! You have to save the 'tool' to keep the head as a working document, because that makes sense (severe sarcasm right there). So i had to re do it from scratch again. which resulted in the below images. having never used Zbrush this was a big learning curve




Below Dan.C attempted to see how the low poly head would look having had the high poly normal map baked on to it. the low poly is around 600 polys where as the high poly has 600,000.

Low poly character head

This week me and Anna focused on building our low poly heads. This is the first time we've ever attempted to make a model as human as this, as a guide we followed a tutorial we downloaded, which was really helpfull. I tryed to styleis her as much as possible in the low poly modle, to make it easyer for Dan.C and Jake to bake the high poly normal map over the low poly version later on. I aimed to keep the tri count as low as possible so we didn't go over our brief restrictions, as a result i think i ended up with a good mesh. Altho having said that i had to add more devisions around the mouth and eyes sints the character will be takling and blinking, so having a higher poly count is required in thoes areas.