Making of Wolverineby Vikram V. , India


UV's

Next came the most uninteresting, yet a very important part, the UV’s. I want to make sure that there is absolutely no stretching in the UV’s, so I layed out the Uv’s in max, and exported the obj to heads UV layout to match texel density, and brought them back to max. The model has two ids’, one for the head, the jacket and the claws, and another for the rest. Since the head is the area of focus in all models, I gave it more UV space for better detailing. One tip to keep in mind when laying out UV’s for games is to avoid overlaps. Overlaps tend to create problems in the normal map generation process. Overlaps can be done in places where it’s unavoidable. In this case, I overlapped small objects like buttons, claws etc.  The more time you spend on UV’s, the lesser you have to worry about stretches in the end.



ZBrush Detailing

According to me, this is the most enjoyable part of an asset creation and the part where an artist can show his true abilities. Having a lot of references will help you a lot in detailing. I downloaded a lot of anatomy references from www.3d.sk, and started detailing Wolverine. I sculpted the entire body first, and kept conducting tests side by side to check out the amount of detail that a normal map can accommodate. Here are some snapshots from ZBrush. This kind of anatomy made him tougher and more “WOLVERINE”.


I exported the lowest level mesh from ZBrush, and used it as the final mesh file in max. When working on a project or a pipeline though, the low res mesh would often be taken for rigging or some other purposes. The low res mesh would be finalized before the detailing phase in these cases. So the morph target button helps a greats deal in this situation. The original low res mesh can be reverted back using this button, and then the normal map generation process can be done with this as the lowest sub-d level. 


Texturing

Hand painted textures is a very interesting process. Wolverine has diffuse, specular, normal and reflective maps. The maps are 2k resolution. I’ll give a brief description on each map I’ve used here. My overall work flow in the texturing process as follows:

I first generate a normal map and a cavity map from ZBrush with the 3dsmax 8 config file, which can be found here: Check out

Normal Map: Generating normal maps can be a confusing and also a time consuming process. For organic shapes, zmapper seems to work out fine, and it’s an overall easier process for generating normal maps, but when it comes to props and other non-organic shapes, I highly recommend 3dsmax’s projection mapping technique. A great tutorial for this can be found at www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow.htm, written by the awesome Ben Mathis.

However, if you need greater control over the normal maps that you generate, Max’s projection mapping method is by far the best method.

For my character, I used zmapper with the max config file. After generating normal maps for the various sub tools that I used, I started to remove seams and adding further details to the normal map in Photoshop. In places where the normal map does not generate properly, I use a RGB value of 127, 127, 255 in those areas, and later blur the edges to an extent that, it doesn’t visually spoil the output.


Then I paint the details like strands of hair with black lines, and a one pixel brush in deep paint like in the image below, and then use the NVIDIA plug-in to covert them into a normal map.