Getting there!

I've been crazy busy since my last post. I finished the Ugly sculpt in which I had to try and balance the amount of detail with the amount of time I have left. I've done a LOT of research on methods of baking maps and ambient occlusion because it took me almost a week to do that for Clint (only six hours for the ugly - which is roughly a 700% improvement time wise)

I might as well throw this out there right now - This project is going to be down to the wire to say the least. I refuse to compromise on quality (much) so it's going to be tight. I think I will have less time than I would like to arrange the small scene (maybe about a day if I am lucky) but at least I already have a few assets for that. Just need a gravestone mainly. I think I can just about get the texturing and rigging done to a good standard with the few weeks left. I am however banking on hopefully finishing the bad off faster than the other two. I did the entire Ugly character so far in roughly half the time it took me to do Clint. I am hoping to be able to improve on that again slightly.

I hate that I wasted the first month of the FMP on the unfinished graveyard leaving me with such a tight window of time for the characters. However, I do feel that the work I'm doing now is of a much better quality. I honestly have no idea about environments. They are just not meant to be!

I'm going to focus this post on my new ambient occlusion method seeing as the rest of the pipeline was the same as for Clint's character.

I've included this first shot just to show the game res mesh for the Ugly.

The next few shots show the layers I use in photoshop to create the ambient occlusion and a few comparisons of baked occlusion vs NDO2 generated occlusion.

I used baked occlusion for Clint but that took a few days to clean up all the bake areas where the meshes overlapped and the overall result lost a lot of detail in the bake. It also took hours to generate the map.

The first improvement to this method is to generate the self shadowing occlusion for the low res in max. This is great because it takes no time at all and you don't projection map so there are NO errors to correct.

I just have to say here that NDO2 is pretty much the best program ever created in my eyes. I didn't realise it had an auto AO feature. I was skeptical at first but in my opinion with certain tweaks it does an even better job in half the time! Throw in a cavity map with tweaked levels and the result is great!

Lastly I've applied the base colours for the diffuse texture and managed to figure out how to do facial hair.

I thought this looked way better than Clint did, so I've gone back to Clint and tweaked him to match the better pipeline I used on the Ugly.

I plan to get the Bad up to this stage ASAP. He should benefit from the 2 rounds of practice I have now had. Then I will finish the diffuse/spec for all 3. I'm hoping that will not be too hard because I've managed to do so much with the normals and a decent bake!

Back to work!