Sculpting Body Parts
When I sculpted I tried to keep things simple. I worked from the lowest subdivisions to the highest. I sculpted one level at a time making my largest deformations at the lowest subdivision. I didn’t do too much high poly sculpting on this character. My theory is to use Nvidia’s normal map generator in Photohut (Photoshop) for any details that are thinner than a quarter of an inch. I did however sculpt wrinkles in the pants, some muscles in the arms, and mud on the boots.
Texturing the Head
When I went to texture the head I tried a few different techniques that would make seem painting easier. I laid out my basic colors in Zbrush first. Secondly I added color variation to the face using random colors and the noise filter in photohut. I kept it pretty basic and let the normal maps do their job. I used photos for reference on the facial hair. I was very pleased with the results. I textured the head and marked where I wanted to wrinkles and crows feet in photohut. Then I changed the colored image into a black and white image and used the intensity of it to create a mask in Zbrush, and from there I made my deformations. I did this to make texturing line up perfectly with the normal mapping. Again at this stage I used reference pictures of Dominic Purcell to texture the head. However I stayed away from projecting or baking any real pictures into my texture maps. I tried to stay away from that because for this project I wanted to hand paint the entire face texture. In return I found it was a lot quicker and easier then using pieces of real photos to texture. I did not have to worry about matching color values and lighting. Each way has it advantages and disadvantages though. The eyes were textured using a simple image with a few photohut tweaks, nothing to drastic.
I used the normal map to make an additional bump and spec maps. I just desaturated the image and tweaked its levels. For the hair and facial hair I created 3 photoshop brushes. The first one was very dark and was the smallest in size in the shape of a dot. The second was larger and in the shape of a blade of grass. The third was also the shape of a blade of grass but thicker. All the brushes colors were variations of brown.
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Texturing the Body/Armour
When it came to texturing the armour I first laid out my color scheme, which was blue, orange, yellow, and black. I ended up having around 300 layers in photohut, I like to keep everything as separate as possible because it leaves me more control to go back and change things. It also makes it easier for me to create spec maps, bump maps, and generate normal maps. Everything was hand painted on the character. I used photos for reference on the mud. But I ended up creating brushes to simulate the mud. I used three different values of brown to create the layered look of mud. For the gloves I used a honeycomb pattern. Once I finished up laying down all my colors I placed all those layers into a folder in the layer manager. Under that folder I created a metal texture. Then applied a mask to that folder and colored the mask that would reveal the metal texture underneath it. By doing this, it helped to achieve the metal-layered look, also to give the look of chipped metal paint. I also baked my ambient occlusion map into my texture for the armour. I created a luminance map to give the glow effect on the lights. The entire character is textured using only 2 texture maps at 2048 x 2048. The first map has the entire body texture and shoulder armor on it. Then second texture map has the head and eyes on it.
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