Hair Texturing

By the time the hair was to be created, myself and Jake were slightly ahead of Dan R, so it was our job to see if our plan to create hair would be successful. As I’ve already written about in a previous post, we had decided that the way foreword with the hair was to use a combination of Zbrush, Photoshop and Mudbox. The plan was to build the volume of the hair up in Zbush, bump on the chunky strands of hair and apply basic texture in Mudbox and then clean it all up in Photoshop.

We had used Zbrush once in a previous project a year ago, where we had taught ourselves the programme. It was difficult software to learn and I was worried that I wouldn’t remember how to use it. Luckily it seems that after struggling to learn a programme, its difficult to forget it. Creating the hairstyle in Zbrush was interesting, as I kept creating a massive milk maid hairstyle for some reason!

Once I had got a hairstyle that I felt I would be able to work with, I took the subdivisions right down in zbrush to keep the model low poly and exported the model to Maya. I soon realised however, that our devised plan would need some work. Bumping on the creases in Mudbox didn't look as effective as I'd hoped and making the design look presentable was taking myself and Jake on our different models, more time than I felt comfortable with. Time was slipping and we needed a way to make the hair look good, fast.

After watching two episodes of '24' with Dan C for an inspirational break, as creating the hair was beginning to stress me out, I came up with the idea to paint the highlights on in Mudbox and then use that texture map to create a bump map in Photoshop. Together we created a rough test to see if this was feisable. The plan worked, allowing our group a method to create chunky hair, in a much faster way.

When creating the bunchy, I constructed the shape in Maya, Mudboxed it as I had done with the top of her hair and brought it into Photoshop, only to find that the save button wouldn’t work! I had never even considered this as a possibility of happening, but nothing would save! I searched online for help, and found that this had happened to other people, but their various methods of fixing the problem wouldn’t work for me. I dragged poor Jake over and made him reinstall Photoshop for me, but to no avail. Nothing would save. In a last attempt I searched online again and found a blog entry where there was another method of fixing this problem. This time it worked! All I had to do was to uncheck a simple button. Haha.. ahhh. These projects wouldn’t be the same without these sorts of things happening.

The blog of wonder:

http://howardgrill.blogspot.com/2007/09/fixing-photoshop-cs3-crashes-when.html

With the bunchy and the top of her hair complete, I created a hairband and a headband and moved onto creating the fringe.

Wow, if I thought I had come across stress so far, it was nothing compared to her fringe!

I created her fringe the same way in which I had created the rest of the hair. However, this did not produce the effect I was looking for as it was so blunt with no choppy strands of hair at the bottom that it looked stuck on.

Dan C suggested creating an alpha map. This turned out to be rather tricky to get looking right, and so I produced lots of undesired results some which can be seen below :)

Finally, after a long night, I got the fringe looking how I wanted it to :D yay!

It wasn't only me who had had trouble with the hair. Jake had spent a long time working on his too. The images that Jake sent me to look over were good, but not completely what I was imagining in my head. Please see Jakes blog to view some of his hair tests. I felt the bunchys appeared too puffy and the hair on the back of her neck to be too long. I told Jake how I felt, and he was realy great at trying to get the hair, more to my vision.

An image Jake sent me of the hair looking alot more to shape, and a really quick digram I drew on the left to help:

The hair still looked a little too bulky from the side view, so I made a few alterations.

Just like I had struggled with the alphaed fringe, so had Jake. The tests that he had shown me, indicated that he was having trouble getting the alpha to shape the fringe out of an Elvis sideburn shape and the textures for her hair were not as flowing as I would like. Jake took my amendment requests really well, especially as I know I am a bit of a perfectionist, but time was ticking and I needed Jake to begin work on the grass in the graveyard. I assigned Jake to begin work on the graveyard grass and retextured Kittys hair myself, and built a new fringe, also using Lee's hairbands to keep continuity between the models.

Jake original hair and alpha map challenges:

My retextured hair and new fringe:

The above images show the hair very dark. With light reflecting off of the specular map (here the bump was used again) the hair can be seen to have more tone in the final film :) This can already be seen if you click on the image to enlarge.

Lee Textured.

I’m so proud of the final outcome of Lee. I have textured and built two characters in the past, and none were as complicated or as successful as her, which hopefully makes all of these recent sleepless nights worthwhile! The process of texturing however, was really stressful, due to the time limit set and all the software issues that I encountered. I think it is official that any software I touch seems to self destruct! :S Please note that every item of clothing has been modeled and textured individually so a lot of work has gone into this! :)

Lee unwrapped.

To texture our characters we had decided as a group to use a blend between Photoshop and Mudbox, instead of Photoshop alone like we have done on previous projects, due to the understanding that with Mudbox you could paint directly over seams, resulting in the final model having none. Easier said than done. Having never used Mudbox before, I found the interface simple to navigate as it had the same command sequences as Maya.

The first item that I textured were the tights. Although the interface was easy to navigate, getting used to actually placing a texture on effectively was more challenging. To apply a texture you can either stencil or brush it on. After creating the tights material in Photoshop, I attempted to stencil and then paint on the material, finding no success with either method.

To solve this problem, I placed the woolly tights material on to Lee in Photoshop and stencilled on the hearts in Mudbox. This was a little time consuming, but worth the effort I think, as it allowed the heart textures to wrap around a leg convincingly, instead of having to try and manually paint a curved heart in Photoshop which would have been challenging and almost definitely produced a poorer result.

Happy and optimistic now that I had textured my first object, I moved onto texturing the top. I created a basic material in Photoshop which I turned into a brush in Mudbox and simply sprayed the texture on. I noticed as I was applying the texture, that small parts of the model were not painting. I checked the UVs and they were fine, so there shouldn’t have been a problem. I looked online at some forums such as http://area.autodesk.com/forums/viewthread/18260/ and many people seemed to experience the same issue but couldn’t find a cure for the problem. I took the texture that I had made in Mudbox into Photoshop and fixed the areas that wouldn’t paint manually. I also adjusted the colour of the material and created a bump map.

Front fixed:

Back fixed:



Again, with the bow I experienced the same problems of Mudbox not painting on specific UVs and me having to fix it in Photoshop. Luckily, the belt was refreshingly simple to make.

I then moved onto the facial texturing. I began by looking for an appropriate skin tone….

The last image is a refrence picture sent to me by Dan R and our friend Charley to help find the right skin tone. Although the characters had originally been designed to be Asian, this had become more vague as the desin process had continued, resulting in us deciding that the two sisters origins were of mixed Asian and White backgrounds.

The skirt was another enjoyable model to texture. I created the plaid pattern completely from scratch as this would give me more control over the appearance of the texture even though there were many plaid patterns online.

I moved onto the largest clothing item, the jacket. Little was I to know that this item of clothing would be the piece to nearly drive me insane!

Body warmers have a lot of prominent creases. I used online images and my little brothers body warmer as reference.

My original plan was to paint the creases on in Mudbox as a bump map, rather than sculpt them in as this would make the mesh unnecessarily high poly. I took the model into Mudbox and attempted to draw on some folds, only to find that the plain brush I was using, made it look as though I was drawing cracks in concrete. I sent the model to Jake, to check that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he had the same issues. It appeared that I would have to sculpt the folds in after all.

Again no luck. I couldn’t even increase the subdivisions once without Mudbox crashing and I needed the extra subdivisions as the mesh was too low poly to sculpt. Jake suggested increasing the subdivisions in Maya and then exporting the high poly mesh into Mudbox. Unfortunatly, the jacket smoothed more than one division in Maya resulted in Maya crashing, and ultimately not being able to open the file at all.

As I couldn’t open the file with Lee in, I managed to remember through the lightheadedness and cold sweat, that I had made a backup of everything, so lukily I still had my files. Hahaha. My next idea was to create the bump in Photoshop and apply it to the object that way. I began with some quick tests, drawing on some rubbish folds and then turning the bump up really strong in either direction to see if this would work. From what I could make out from the tests, it appeared that this method would work. To make sure, I softened the bump and then mirrored the texture to the other side of the jacket to view the results. As you can see from the imagry, the same texture on the other side was barely visble. I couldn’t find an explanation for the problem. I sent the model to Dan C and he couldn’t find a problem with it either. However, he did inform me that the jacket had given him hell when he was skinning it, (due to its design.. not the modelling :P ). Argh the jacket of evil!

I had to fix the jacket up the best I could, as time was pressing, but there was no way, I wanted to produce a shabby model. I created a texture in Photoshop that had creases in and then applied only a soft bump. Unfortunately there were no actual creases coming straight from the dents on the jacket, but I feel the texture that I created was strong enough, with the appearance of folds to still look good. So after long last…. the jacket was done! :D

The hands took a while to texture, Mudbox was being extremely annoying and leaving a lot of unpaintable areas, so I had to be careful in Photoshop when fixing it up to make sure I didn’t allow seams. My cousins and sister informed me that in regards to nail varnish bright neon colours were fashionable, so I applied some to Lees fingernails. However, Dans and Jake were disgusted, so I toned the colour down as a compromise :)

The ears were fine to make, apart from a slight shock at seeing them so disfigured in Mudbox initially, but to amend the problem was simple, just reverse the normals in Maya, then re export into Mudbox.

The zip was also not a problem, nor were the wellys, although I had the typical Mudbox issue of unpaintable areas etc.

Here be some images of the various maps I created to produce the final appearance of Lee: