Displacement issues and finishing up Poppy.

I've had various issues lately. I'd wanted to create displacement maps for both the folds in Poppy's jumper and for the fur on the fox character (it's definitely necessary for the latter). However, on my current pc only maya 2014 is working and they've changed some of the settings. I was finding it difficult to get my displacements to render at all with Mental Ray's approximations and tried rendering out my maps from Zbrush, Topogun and Xnormal. I have since realised that I wasn't exporting them correctly from Zbrush but this issue is now rectified and so the fox can have his nicely sculpted fur afterall. I decided the folds in the jumper and the detailing for Poppy's bag, ear and hair look nice using just a normal map.
So I sculpted folds in the bag, Poppy's ear (which I've kept fairly simple and stylised) and spent quite sometime trying different ways of getting a sweater type detailing to the jumper. I tried stylised sculpting in or the ribbing but it never looked very neat. I tried bump maps which worked nicely but I would have had to change the uvs which isn't really an option at this stage. I ended up tiling a sweater texture and applying it to the uvs in Zbrush, repeating the texture, masking by it and then inflating the geometry slightly. For the ribbed sections I used an alpha that was taken from a texture of ribbing in a jumper and applied it directly. I then baked out the normal.
I finished painting the diffuse texture in both Zbrush and Photoshop and adding some detailing to the bag like pictures of poppys and Poppy's name. I painted darker tones to areas of recession in the folds and subtly highlighted some areas since we're going for a stylised textured look.

This is a combination of the normal, diffuse and ambient textures with the wireframes.
I have made displacements for both the jumper and the bag straps in case we require them later on for further detailing.

I've started applying shaders such as the misss_fast_simple shader for the inner eye, the mia_material_x for the cornea. I intend to use the misss_fast_skin shader for the skin and possibly basic lamberts for the clothes and bag or the mental ray mia_material_x again as this simulates most materials well.

Seeking suitable music

Mine and Ruby's housemate mentioned a while ago that he has a friend (Dom Hough) usic and would like to work with creative students on a project so we hoped he'd be able to compose something for our piece. I showed him the animatic and descried the type of sound that might be suitable. He put together some quick short pieces just to try and gauge our reactions.
We felt they were a bit artificial sounding perhaps, we wanted to stress that we'd prefer a more natural sound than synthetic.

I did some research into the types of music you hear on children's tv shows and came across a composer from Australia called Mark Hansen.
I felt some of his songs which are aimed at children would be suitable and shared it with Dom. He's currently making new samples for us to listen to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlhLvVHUMXI&feature=youtu.be

This one was Katie's favourite so I flagged that up with Dom.
He'll possibly be making sound effects for us too and if so we'll keep them nice and subtle.

Arianna: Final Rigging Update

I believe rigging for the giraffe and Poppy is officially done!
Below are the blendshapes for Poppy:

The jaw control now only moves the bottom part of the mouth cavity, the bottom teeth and the tongue, so the animator can have a say over how much of the bottom teeth get to be shown.

To get complete control over the deformation of the model, I have added joints and controls to the hair, the backpack straps and the skirt. The rig look a little bit more complicated than I thought it would originally, but at least we know we have control over everything!

As for the giraffe, there aren't nearly as many controls. The legs have an ik/fk switch as well as pole vector constraints, and the spine, the neck and the tail all have ik splines.

Katie: Final house models and setting up block test

We realised from the block test that only 5 houses models, instead of the original 6, would be needed and the rest could be duplicates with slight alterations. Here are the 3 final models and all 5 together:

I updated the block test using Ruby's street plan and my house models. I decided which houses would transform onscreen and where to place duplicates so that it would be least noticable.

Jack: Final block out with finished models in progress

Ruby: Old Concept Art & Texturing Styles

This one was a tester, but everyone quite liked it so apart from a few adjustments we went with a similar style to make the one below, which is to be used as a reference.

Ruby: Transforming Houses & Street Plan

More transforming house designs!

And the first version of a street plan to help us when heaping together the assets.

Katie: Simple houses+ 2nd funky house

I've finished modelling all the simple houses now. The mid-ground of the street will be based on these 6 core designs, with slight alterations. We tried to make the style of these buildings fairly plain whilst still keeping a fun, cartoony feel. Do do this I relied on angular lines and basic shapes, but modelled asymmetrically and exaggerated some characteristics.

I've also finished the 2nd funky house, and aim to get the rest finished asap. This one was a challenge as the original design did not translate very well into 3D, but after some alterations I managed to make it work.

Fox Model

The fox was possibly the simplest of the organic character models. He still needs his displacement map which will contain the sculpted fur detail to try and match the concept as closely as possible.

The fox's uvs are pretty straightforward but, unlike the giraffe, it is more islands. I found there was too much stretching if I combined it all together.

Poppy UVS

Poppy now has 4 tiles worth of uvs. I pretty much uved everything as I'm not sure what the texturing style will be like so figured I'd go ahead and do it all to be safe. I've tried to make sure that he resolution for each piece will be pretty much the same as the next apart from certain islands that I knew would have some sculptural detail transferred to it via a displacement or a normal map.

The only area I'm not 100% happy about is the hands as the topology around the thumb meant that I couldn't divide the uvs into a palm and a back of the hand equally. I've tried to put the seam where it won't be so noticeable but if it is then I'll try and paint it out. When it's textured.

Katie: Colour Transition Test Render

To test how we will transition between the two textures, I did a test render of the house transformation (using simple lambert shaders) and composited them together using a ramp as a mask in Nuke.

To get the two versions of the houses I rendered using the first set of shaders, then changed the shaders and rendered again. I assumed I would be able to duplicate the house and so have two versions of it in one scene file but that will not work with blend shapes, so for the final product I will either have to do as I've done here, transferring the textures over to the same geometry, or create two blend shapes by hand, which would be more time consuming but probably more simple when it comes to rendering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chPEQp7dtkM

Katie: Funky house model, test transition, and uvs

This week I finished the funky house model, and animated a rough transition between the two that will be used as a test for the texture change. Developing this first house has been pretty slow going, as I've had to learn a lot of techniques as I go, but from now on my work flow should be much faster as for the other houses I can re-use a lot of parts from this model.

Transition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_mbMPqHBkw&feature=youtu.be

I've also uv-unwrapped the simple house and have started on the second version. This is a completely new subject for me so it took a little while to get used to. I used planar mapping and adjusted the uvs if I had to, although I found that very little tweaking was needed, especially as these elements will never be seen in detail.

We will render two versions of the house, one which will be grey, and one coloured, and transition between these in compositing. This way the texture, that would normally be distorted due to the blend shape, will always be even.

I will make two sets of uvs, one for the simple and one for the funky house. I transferred the uv's from the simple house over to the funky version (taking advantage of the equal topology) and will now have to start tweaking these uvs to correct the stretching.

Ruby: Expressions, Poses & Fox Design

Character reference sheets for Poppy done. Got a couple of pose sheets, all these are poses that are actually used in the animation which I stuck to due to time constraints.

Also did some expressions (again, those I thought would be relevant) to help Arianna when rigging the face.

Aaaaaand the fox studies and turnaround. The anatomy of the fox was quite hard for me, as good reference for a front view were difficult to come by. I ended up going off taxidermal reference and adding in fur hoping it looked right. Hopefully the model won't look too muscley.

Modelling and uving progress

The girl model is finished unless further changes are needed due to rigging or animation. I will still need to create a displacement map or a normal map for the folds in her clothing and I need to make one for the hair sculptural detail. 

 

She also has teeth and a tongue.

This is the giraffe model so far. It needs tweaking and smoothing out in areas that appear to be bunched together. I want to refine the feet but the topology itself is looking animatable.I need to build the inside of the mouth just so that there is no visible gaps from below.

 This is the giraffe's topology so far and the beginning of the uvs.


Poppy also has some uvs though her's will take a little longer to complete due to the amount of pieces and her importance to the piece.