Texturing
Texture painting seems to be the most time consuming part for me. I often rely on photoshop and I use ZBrush for refining seems - using the projection master. Sometimes I use zbrush for creating what I call a "guide map" for some areas that are hard to recognize in photoshop. For instance, when I’m texturing a face in photoshop, it’s kind of hard to say where exactly the textures for the lips or the eyes, or a certain wrinkle on the skin should be, and that’s where the guide map may be useful. I know that there are several techniques for that problem, but that’s what I’m comfortable with and I believe that, whatever workflow you like - as long as it gives you neat results and doesn’t take too much time - is ok.
The face was one of the areas that I spent more time on and it was the only area for which I used photos for the texture painting. For the rest of this character I painted textures using different photoshop techniques and, of course, lots of dirt masks and different brushes.
Lighting and Rendering
After I was finished with texture painting I exported all my textures as ".tif" files and I was then ready for the shading and rendering. One thing about importing ".obj" objects from ZBrush3.1 to Maya is that, for some reason, it imports them with visible in reflections and refractions turned off, so I had to turn them on for all the pieces before I started shading.
I used regular maya blinn shaders for all my objects, except for the head. For the head I used a mental ray fast skin shader because it’s so user friendly, it’s great for skin shading, and it's cheap in comparison with complex shading networks. I set the reflections to 0 for all the clothes, except for the gloves. For the gloves I took a”sample info" and a "ramp texture" and I connected the "ramp" into the shaders reflection channel and turned reflection blur on. Then I started bringing in textures (color, bump, normal map, specular color...) for each piece, one at the time. Once I was satisfied with shading for all my objects, I started to work on his hair. I used "joealter shave and haircut" for the hair and I think it’s the most user friendly hair plug-in for Maya and it works amazingly with "mental ray".
Once the hair was finished I disabled it and took my "source images" directory and copied it somewhere else. I took all my textures and resized them to 512 by 512 “so that I could set my lighting faster and cheaper. Then I turned "final gathering" on and started to setup my lights. The major light that I used was a big "poly plane" on the right side. For this, I turned primary visibility off and assigned a "lambert" shader to it; then I mapped its incandescence with a "ramp". I had a white "area light" on the right side and a greenish blue "polyplane" on the left side, both illuminating the head and the shoulders area. I used a "spot light" with some drop off for the back light. Once I was happy with the lighting I enabled the hair and replaced my resized "source images" directory with the original one that I copied earlier, thereby rendering the whole character.
|
|
|
