Making of the Steam Master - Next-Gen Game Headby Sorin Lupu


Low-res Mesh and UV Layout

This phase can be done in almost all of the well-known 3d packages. You can use Zbrush Topology or Maya Live to do it. I’ll use Topogun, a tool developed by Cristi Prefac, one of my colleagues. Topogun will allow me to redo the entire topology for the low-poly model and then bake the normal map, ambient occlusion and color map from the high-res model to this low-res one. I decided to keep the polygon budget around 4500 triangles, so I’ll have plenty of geometry for the character’s facial features.

I’ll import the last level from Zbrush as reference into Topogun and use the second level as a starting point for my ingame mesh.





After I redo the topology for all the parts, I go back to Maya to build the final ingame mesh. I take this chance to optimize what I can by reducing the poly-count and tweaking the UVs. I do this by either using Maya’s Unfold command or Road Kill UV, a cool free UV tool. Here you can see the way I’ve split the UVs into different layouts. Each will have its own texture.



Texturing

After making sure that the UVs are properly layered, I go back to Topogun to bake the normal map and ambient occlusion map. In the next image you can see the settings I used when doing this.




The generated textures will be combined in Photoshop. I usually work directly on the normal and ambient maps in Photoshop to correct the errors produced by the baking. You could try re-baking the textures until you achieve a satisfactory result, but usually it’s faster and easier to just paint, clone stamp or smudge the errors.