Week 10 and 11

I spent week 10 and 11 adding the final polish to everything. I managed to find time to get the hair cards done which I wasn't sure I'd have enough time for. Overall it turns out much better than I was expecting.

Week 9

Things really started to come together this week, especially with texturing. Not only did I manage to get almost everything left from last week textured, but I also got to go back and really fix some of the things I didn't like about the work I did last week.

I'm much happier with her harness now. I basically went back and re-did the whole thing.  I also really like how her boots came out, but I'd really like to get some more scratches and dings on them.

Before I think about adding in anymore details though, I need to finish her fingers and get the specularity map working right. I think that the lack of proper specular highlights is really hurting the textures. Once I get that working I need to focus on giving her hair, and then maybe I'll have time to think about adding more details to the textures. Unfortunately I only have a week left, so I need to make sure I have this project at a presentable point before I can worry about the little things.

Week 8

This week I began working on the textures for my character.

I started by doing a quick color block in maya.

It was mostly just a test to get a sense of how I wanted to break the character up and not so much for the final colors.

I then got into making the actual textures. Of which I managed to get a good portion of the head and torso done. 

 For the face I used multiples photographs of my actual face and stitched them together over the UVs.

Although it was good practice I'm not very happy with most of the textures I have right now and will hopefully be able to make some major changes to them.

I played around with making a specular map as well, but it was more as a test. I'll have to do a lot more work for the final one.

For week 9 I am really hoping to be able to get the limbs done so that I can circle back during week 10 and really polish things off.

Week 7

Watched a lot of tutorials for making normals and tried things out. Didn't have much success with them. I tried to bring things into mudbox as is and paint them but found that there was just not enough detail for them to transfer properly.

 Here's the face without any normals.

Here's what it looked like when I added normals. As you can see there isn't much of a difference.

 The legs weren't too bad but they weren't great either.

By the time I got to the arms I realized I needed to do something different and fast if I wanted to be able to determine whether or not normals would be worth my time for this project. After talking with some class mates about possible solutions I decided to duplicate  my model in maya and protect it's edges so that when I smooth it in mudbox it would retain the proper shape. Then, because the UVs were the same I could apply the normals I made on the smoothed model to my original low poly version. As a result the details I painted in mudbox were much cleaner and well preserved.

Here's a comparison of what I doing at first, and how it looked when I did it with the smoothed model.

 This is how the normals for the arm looked when I painted on the unprotected model.

And here's how they turned out when I painted on the smoothed model and then applied the normal map to the unsmoothed one. 
Clearly the second method worked much better.

However, after careful consideration I decided it would be better to skip the normals and jump right into texturing for next week because they still would need a lot of clean up and I want to have something that is presentable by the end of the quarter.