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:

Building Lee

Appologies for the generic pose of Lee- I haven't got a rigged version back yet :) The making of Lees face took two attempts. Apparently, constructing a face is one of the most complex objects to model according to people in the industry, and I defiantly agree. As the characters faces have a lot of screen time, obviously they must be well built. We followed this tutorial when building our characters, as it provides a method that includes good edge flow to your model, which is important for when a face is rigged, to avoid unwanted creasing etc.

My first attempt was dismal unfortunately, as I began cutting in too many lines to add detail to the nose, completely excluding the mouth area which I assumed I would fix later. However, I soon realised when I got to that part, that this would be impossible as there was just too much detail on the mesh. There was no way I was going to be beaten by my own character and so I proceeded to have a second go, making sure to adjust every vert of each new edge that I added. In fact, this advice can be used for any model built. It hadn’t taken long for me to see the original face was wrong, so I still managed to keep to my time schedule. Once the basic face was modelled out, adding detail was not a problem. You can’t fix something if the foundations are wrong.

I then went on to build Lee’s clothes. I started with the body warmer as I thought this would take the most time to construct. I wanted to make sure the puffs weren’t too puffy because as her body warmer is yellow I didn’t want the audience to think she was wearing a life jacket! The collar of the jacket took a while to look the way I wanted it to but it was just a case of adjusting the verts accordingly. I chose to include strips of material that would hide mostly where the zip line would normally be, as I have found on previous characters that making a zip line is a lot of hassle to get looking right, and when its on right people hardly notice, but if its wrong everyone notices. So the less zip on show the better! In the images above you can see that although I have modelled the zip handle, there is no zip line at all, as I am going to model that in the programme Mudbox. This software will allow me to add more detail to my model. In a previous project I had used Zbrush for this same reason but as Mudbox is made by the same company as those who create Maya the controls are very similer and so should in theory be easier than Zbrush. This is a link to some really clear tutorials for anyone interested in learning:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_3/video_mudbox2009/sculpting01.asp

When Dan redesigned my character, the belt he included was to be made of ribbon. However as I was creating the belt, I felt that if Lee were real, the belt she’d be wearing would be made of plastic, with a shiny plastic bow, the type that I would think young, trendy girls would buy from Claire’s Accessories. I spoke to Dan about it and he didn’t mind me changing the design of the belt :)

I then made her top as I wanted to make sure that I had left enough space for her arm to come through the jacket.

The skirt.

The tights, like the face took two attempts as once again I added too much detail too soon, which made any errors I was making unfixable later on. My first attempt looked like a leg of lamb, was completely flat and so was unusable. My second attempt was a lot better I think.

With the body modelling done, my friend Charlie noticed that Lee didn’t have much of a figure, even for a child. I had been modelling the clothes so closely I had failed to notice that. Once again the lattice deformer saved the day, as I indented her waist a little and gave her more of a bum and curve to the back.

I also created some hair tests for Lee. As a group we had sat down and discussed how we wanted the hair to appear. We had all agreed that the Maya hair tool would be unsuitable for what we were looking for as it was far too realistic. As the modelling style of our characters was very chunky, we needed to find a way to incorporate that look within the hair. Dan R had an image of Poison Ivy and I had some images from the film Monster House, and it was decide to try and make hair that looked similer to these models. The only problem was how. I suggested Mudbox or Zbrush as we had used this before in a previous project but the only problem with this was that it might take too long to get the model to look how we wanted it to and maybe modelling it straight from polygons was easier? Myself, Jake and Dans all carried out tests in Maya, each with dismal results. Mine are shown below. I attempted multiple times, extruding a polygon along a curve. Out of the four of us, Dan C created something that at least covered a characters head, even though it looked like ribbons. It seems that in the end we will have to use Mudbox after all, although that is not our main priority at the moment. First, the environments have to be worked on further.

An example of Zbrushed hair, made on a previous project. Instead of such thin strokes, larger ones would be more appropriate for the look we want to achieve.

Once the characters were built we realised that there was another problem. Kitty. Although she had looked good on her own, next to Lee and Cho she just looked out of place. This wasn’t bad modelling from Jake or a bad character sheet from Dan. Kitty had just not converted well from image to model when next to Lee and Cho. As we didn’t specifically know why she wasn’t fitting in, we again spent a considerable amount of time huddled around a PC with the soft mod Maya tool attempting to squash her face into a more appropriate design. Dan C eventually took the model home and showed me two options. Image 1 or image 2. I chose image 1.