APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 11 10/31/14

     This week I continued looking at more cartoon references and continued designing my stylized cartoon character. I drew various cartoon designs with various body shapes from thin to muscular. I finally found a good stylized character reference image that quite suits my character design well, although a few some bits of adjustments are needed to be redesigned from the original reference image into my concept art. I also looked at some Disney cartoon character drawing tutorials and the concept interpretations of the body shape that goes with with them. Apple and pear shaped bodies are the most common body shapes for Disney stylized cartoon characters. The apple shape is more used for big and fat characters while the pear shape is more versatile for skinny, normal, big, small, muscular, lazy, or fat characters.
     I used the pear body shape for my cartoon character. Usually characters that are big and muscular with big heads are signified as not being very smart, while characters with smaller body and normal sized heads are smarter. Since my stylized cartoon character is the head master of a college university, I want him to be smart but also strong and with authority. So I designed him to have a big upper body with big hands and feet. I also kept his head to a small normal sized head. His attire is a blue outer coat suit with an interior white suit and a red tie. My character's shoes will be a black boot. His eyes will be blue and his hair will be blond with a small streak highlight of brown and white in the front middle of his spiky hair.
     I have also created the basic mesh for my character and will continue to work on the rest of the body.

Mr. Incredible was a very good reference character that matched most parts of my character design that I needed and so I used him as a reference image for my concept art.

Using the Mr. Incredible image as part of my new reference, I redesigned my character again with few changes. I made the hands and the foot bigger. I might make the forearms bigger too later on. I keep the head at a smaller size. The attire(not colored in yet just conceptualized)  contains an exterior blue suit, interior white suit, a red tie, black belt sash, and black boots. My original character design already had a big exaggerated similar to Mr. Incredible but a bit smaller. This stylized character will be a low poly game character. The poly count limit will be 7,000 or lower.


 Here is my basic mesh. I haven't modeled the head yet because I wanted to start with the whole body first to get everything setup and already connected.

I haven't uniformly spaced the entire body model yet because there are still some more geometry I need to add and manipulate. I will do so after I finish all the body part and the head piece.

APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 10 10/24/14

     This week I refix my tiger model's diffuse map for the claws and tail pieces. The UV of the claw and tail didn't quite fit on the correct spot and so I just decided to paint them in on Mudbox and that did the trick. I also added some low poly long strands of geometry to make the tendril like hair for my tiger model. The yellow tendril hairs cover the back exposed unconnected neck of the model. I also download Xnormals to use it for my ambient occlusion map. Some of the first few maps that I rendered turned out funky. I had to look up at some Xnormal tutorial on ambient occlusion maps to get my ambient maps correct. I also modeled an ice block or stage for my model to stand on for the turntable. My turntable render right now is pretty slow and sluggish. I got multiple crashes during the renders. Might just be my computer. I think I might turn off some shadows to speed up the render process. The render process seems really slow at the moment, I don't think it'll finish in time this week Friday. So I'll just post it during the weekend once it finishes rendering.

     Also this week I started on my next project and started redesigning my stylized cartoon character. I'm not too accurate on the tablet and so I just draw them on paper and then retrace them with ink in either Photoshop or Mirage. The character is the same one I did back in APCG 331. A short bulky dude in a blue suit with a red tie. I'm current making his chest, hands, and legs bigger like those cartoons. Just drawing the image that I want right now.

Here is the re-fixed diffuse texture map for my tiger model. After painting in parts of the claw, I went back and took a new UV snapshot and see if I could rearrange the claws and tail again. I was able to do it and decided to replace this new one over the painted claws version.

                   Here is my updated specular map just after finishing the new diffuse map.

Here is the ambient occlusion that I extracted from Mudbox. I used multiply layers and levels to get the dark spots really deep into the muscles and other creases. I choose the Mudbox version over the Xnormal one because the Xnormal map created some weird white pixels on the rest of the ambient occlusion map that I couldn't get rid of. The lower resolution ambient occlusion maps on Xnormal were fine but they lacked more of the details from the Mudbox occlusion maps and so I chose the Mudbox version. 

Here is my current tiger model with all the maps added on. The newly added ambient occlusion map really defined more of the muscle parts as well as darkening the outline of the body structure a bit. It also made the tiger model a bit brighter too but that maybe just the ambient occlusion map simulating light. I'll postpone the turntable animation for my tiger model for now and get some more bit of rework done on this model. I'll save the turntable for the final.

This is the model that I am currently redesigning and remodeling. Seems to be lots of problems with it and a good redesign will beef it up.Still currently designing his new looks and body structure. Doing a total redesign on the character model and concept art.

APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 9 10/17/14

     This week I continued to work on the sculpting of my tiger model. I tried to fix the back leg muscles as best as I can. I looked at some dog and lion leg muscle anatomy to get a better look at the back leg muscles but the images didn't help either. So I just decided to take some muscle groups that were working on the dog and lion images and incorporated them into my tiger's back legs and exaggerate the rest of the muscles that I couldn't see. Took me quite a while to re-sculpt the back leg because some of the muscles were curving downward toward the other side of the leg and not down, so I had to undo a lot of the muscle work and redirect the flow. I didn't quite get which sculpt tool would be best for fur, so I just went ahead with the bristol too and sculpt in the curvatures of the fur.          It turned out quite well. I also found the problems and solutions to my tiger model's normals stretching and black geometry spots. With some advice from Aaron; by importing the OBJ model of the low poly Mudbox tiger into Maya, it cleared the weird geometry stretching on my normals. Also the black geometry spots were actually missing UVs that haven't been UVed yet and so it left a void on the tiger model. I also looked at some tutorials on making specular maps which used a more refined method of pushing out the inner details and quality of the spec map. It is similar to using hue and saturation and levels to darken and sharpen out the light and darkness of the maps but with some extra things added.
     I encountered another problem with the new sculpted normals just after fixing the older sculpt normals and this time its the new one with the muscle and fur. It seems to be distorted. I might just skip to texturing the diffuse map and spec map first  then come on later to fix the normals.

I later fixed the normal map issues and was able to get the normal map working for the revised tiger sculpture.I also finished painting the diffuse map for my tiger and created a specular map too.

                                                                        Diffuse Map

                                                                        Specular Map

                                                                     Normal Map

Some of the textures for the claws and tail didn't go as I wanted it to. I left them out of the painting in Mudbox and decided to do them in Photoshop because I already had a texture for them but they look messed up as it is. I'll need to fix them again in photoshop and it that doesn't work then I'll just paint them in Mudbox.

APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 7 10/10114

     This week I started sculpting my tiger model after finishing my UVs. I began sculpting the main body first since it's the part that needs to show the muscular bulkiness of the tiger. The head doesn't require much sculpting since it's like a skull mask and will block most of the tiger's facial features. I'm currently using my tiger anatomy reference images to sculpt out the muscles on my tiger. Even though my reference are good, it doesn't completely show every part and contour of the tiger's muscle structure and muscle flow. Making me have to use some online reference and my own intuition when some of the online sources don't give me exactly what I want to see.
     Other than the sculpting, I went back into Maya to resize and reposition some of my UVs to fix some UV stretching and compression. I don't want my tiger model to be overly muscular with every muscle bulging from its body. I just want some bulkiness and a nice cut muscle shape to maintain its agile form. Some of the muscle sculpture don't always turn out the way I want them too and so I'd have to erase most portions of the front chest and arm and re-sculpt them again. I use the depression of the sculpt tool to get a better view and contour shape of the muscle tone on the tiger. It also makes it a lot easier to bulk up a set of muscles and continue on the muscle parts. Once I get the shape and depression I want on the muscle, I smooth it out with the smooth tool to clean up the muscles and depression lines.

After sculpting my tiger body and head, I applied them to my model in Maya. The rest of the body looks okay on the soft normal tiger model but there seems to be some weird distortions on the body and some black geometry spaces on the front and back foot. I think the distortion could be because of the stretching and compression of the UVs. The black geometry could be missing UVs from the main UV map but I'm not exactly sure.