This is a quick insight on the Character Creation for Game / Cinematic project by Mattias Eriksson.

There is some difference in this document compared to the blog page. Have a nice reading.

gsCEPT 2010

Content
Research and Concept Rough and fast modeling. Retopology UV mapping High polygon modeling Baking AO and Normals Texture Export to Unreal Conclusion Resource index

Research and Concept

I knew that research was an important part, so before I did concept drawings I did some research about steam punk topics. In meanwhile I started to think about the background story about those two characters which shapes their appearance and write it down so I get a more solid story. Because of that I knew what kind of pictures I need to collect as reference before I start to concept. When research and collecting pictures was done I put the most important pictures on so called Mood board, reason for that is to keep track of your idea, and dont get lost within thousands of pictures you may have collected. When you concept these characters you can go back and look at these reference and get a fast understanding of your idea.

For the sniper girl did I a detailed concept from cloth style to all asserts to her. To do this save you a lot of time when you start to modeling, but beware not to take too long time when you concept it, or you will consume all the time you was supposed to save for modeling part.

For the robot was I not so sure about how the detail would be. Instead to spend a lot of time to think about that in concept part did a less detail and a much faster concept. In the same time I tried to see how fast I could make a concept and how much details I really needed for modeling. With answer in my hands now, I know that more detailed concept will help a lot in modeling part.

Rough and fast modeling

When concept part was done I started to do sniper girl rough base mesh to take into Z Brush. I didnt do any right topology in this moment or UV map. Because I will take it back in Maya to retopology and build a fresh UV map. But be sure to distribute polygons right for example more polygons at face and hands then chest or belly so you dont have to crazy subdividing to get detail at face and then have tons of unnecessary polygons on the chest. Be sure to have humanoid reference when you sculpting, or else you can get some UV issue when you in later stage try to change the new base mesh because of wrong humanoid form. I made the robot only in Maya. I build it with simple primitives and some adjustments with vertex and merging to start with. When I had blocked out all big shapes for the robot I saw then my concept of robots head was not proper to my steam punk style. To a fix that I toke a print screen from Maya and start to do paint over in Photoshop to see what kind of heads matched. To keep the steam punk feeling was it necessary to do some more research for helms in steam punk style. Already here did the lack of research and concept for the robot stealing my time. When I was ready and satisfied with the new idea of the head I jumped into Z Brush and did a very fast sculpt on the head based from the drawings and exported it to Maya so I had a 3D reference. Did some minor adjustment as scaling and soft select vertex and moved them around.

Retopology
I was able to choose from three different kinds of retopology tools NEX, Z Brush and Topogun. But ended up in Maya make live tool instead. I think its much underestimated tool. It had all what I needed to retopology my meshes. What I did was doing a Lambert shader with red color and about 30-50 % transparency, assigned it to the original mesh. Then select the mesh and click on the magnet icon and viola its a live object now. Now its only to take the polygon draw tool and click it all out on the mesh. A tips you can think on, is to only do the other half if the object is symmetrical, that saves you a lot of time when you duplicate and mirror it. This part has no magic tricks its only to put together a nice topology for the new base mesh. Try to keep a low polygon count when you do this. Because it can be little bit tedious to move and correct all vertex if you done wrong topology. So keep it low and correct topology from beginning and then put in some edge loops and snap them to the live mesh to make more detailed form.

UV mapping
In this part did I use Headus UV layout, a great tool for fast and nice UV mapping. I separated both characters into four UV maps. I planned to have 2k textures to get most of the details, and Unreal engine can handle 2k textures. I scaled up some UV parts to get more texture space and some other did I shrink. But remember not to change UV scale so same part get different scales, It can make it difficult to texture later on. For example if you scale jacket arms different against the main body part of the jacket and have a strong patter texture on the jacket it can be very hard to match the size difference of the patter. You can also be little more efficient if your character are symmetrical you can UV map the left side and then duplicate the left to right and flip the normal map and flip also the UVs editor in Maya. But remember dont choose the mesh and then flip it destroy the UV map, it sees whole but when you want to move the UVs they are completely separated. It can be very tedious to repair it later on when you want to be quick and move the UV map around. Another tip is try to make your UV space mirrored so you only need to make the basic texture on left side an mirror it to the right side.

High polygon modeling

First did I start with the sniper girl, I took the finished base mesh with UV map to Z Brush. Then re-project from the original mesh to the newer base mesh. When I do this I save time instead for re-sculpt everything I already have done. Then I start to add details on her, just simple sculpting. I will not go into detail how to sculpt in Z Brush, you can find very good resource at their homepage and other sites. Remember you dont need to have so very high level detail, because you will then need a high res texture map like 4k to have any advantage. I did that mistake but I learned very much of Z Brush tool instead. You can always fake wrinkles with texture instead of normal maps, and its more efficient for the engine to have lower texture map too. So the trick here is to find the fine balance between what is necessary to sculpt and what you can do with texture instead, it is also depends what kind platform and game engine you work with.

For the robot did I put in some more lines near the edges which were supposed to have hard round edges. I used the 3 key to check how smooth it will be when I later do a mesh smooth. I also add some bolts, screws and other smaller objects that add details to the robot. Remember you dont need to UV maps this if you only want to use this to bake normal map and AO. This part is little bit different from the project, I have UV map the higher model and tried to keep UV map when I removed edges to get a low polygon mesh. Which was not so successful, it took very long time and was a very tedious work to keep track if UV map didnt collapse. When I later change the project topic, did I not need to have a UV map on high polygon mesh and it was a complete waste of time.

Baking AO and Normals

I used Xnormal and its free, to bake my AO and normal map. I found out it was lot faster than Mayas baking. I used the standard setup except from small changes as resolution, AO quality and search zone for baking between high polygon and low polygon mesh. There are good guide out on internet here too, so I skip that part how to use the software. I baked out 2k maps, I can always shrink it later in Photoshop. Normal maps can be little sensitive in this case so keep that in mind if normal maps edges seems strange to you.

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Texture
I did 2k textures for each UV set to both characters. Texture part for the sniper girl was primarily made in Z Brush with plug-in called Zapplink. Its like you project the painted texture on the mesh, and best part of it is you use Photoshop as a paint tool. It gives you pretty much freedom. But it also has some small disadvantages like you need to mask away sides on your mesh, or you will get some artifacts (texture stretch). Zapplink is also little bit buggy so you need to work with the default layers correctly or it will crash for sure. Except from this small issue is it very powerful to avoid classic seams you would get when you texture manually on a UV map in Photoshop. For the robot did I all texture in Photoshop manually, and you can do this work very fast if you get hang of it. For example I picked a default metal texture which I made a big seamless texture with correct patter size for the size of mesh. So you dont get small rusty pore big as coins on your character. That will not look good, keep that in mind. Then I just copy it over all UVs with that material. Dont bother about repeating patter yet. Do now a color and contrast and brightness correction, dont forget to multiply the AO also. Now can you do some patter changes on the metal, I use a new layer and a clone stamp. Then pick some nice areas you can clone from and start to paint little random on the new layer. You can then create a new layer and add some extra texture like dirt, blood, color splat and whatever you think match on the texture. Remember name all your layers smart, so you dont get confused if you go back after some weeks and want to change it. Another tip is to have normal map in same texture PDF document. Because some details dont appears on an AO map. So get help of both baked texture to do a diffuse texture map.

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Export to Unreal
Before I export everything to Unreal needed I to do some things. First download UDK and install, the exporter for Maya comes within installation except you have to manually copy it to Mayas plug-in folder. Then you have two ways to export your stuff to Unreal, static or animation. Mel command to static is axmesh and for animation is axmain. Remember to activate the plug-in in Mayas plug-in loader. I downloaded an Unreal rig for Maya then bind my sniper girl to it. You have to skin weight paint it little bit, like elbows and knees. Here comes the most difficult part if you are not familiar with UDK. UDK is very solid and complex editor, and you work and navigate little bit different from Mayas user interface. You have to open a so called blabla lib to import, create materials, import textures and see how your skin weight works in animation. I will not take these things up here its too big, but I write down links to great guides. But the great thing here is you can save your creation as a single package. Then you can send that package to another person and dont have to be afraid that something is lost. You will also notes that you character dont stand, thats because Unreals up axes are Z not Y as it is in Maya. You can change these settings in preference in Maya to have Z up or you simple change the parameters for the imported character, which you find in animation previewer (if you exported as animation). OBS one thing is very important, normal map need to have z+. You can change these things in xNormal when you bake the normal map. I have read you could also invert the green channel in Photoshop to correct that. But I cant confirm if that works.

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Conclusion
This project has been very educated for me, it has also given me some insight how it might be at a game industry. The most difficult part except from some wrong priority in the project was to understand UDK and Z Brush. There were many mistakes, but very educatable stuff. I recommend if you are planning on similar project and have not worked on UDK and Z Brush, do only one character and do it very nice. If you have time you can always do some more charcters but it doesnt matter if you not done with it and can choose to skip it without it looks bad to your project. For me I got less time for more experimental in specular maps, refelction maps and glow maps. But you know best your limit, it is just a tip. I hope this gave you some insight too, you are welcome to ask if you have some question.

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Resource index
Eat 3D (A great resource of Z Brush and Unreals new UDK) www.eat3d.com Headus UVLayout (They have great tutorials for their software) www.uvlayout.com xNormal (Great baking software and its free) www.xnormal.net/1.aspx Z Brush Central (Main resource for Z Brush) www.zbrushcentral.com UDK Homepage (Tutorials, downloads and more for UDK) http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html

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