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.