Damn it ZBrush work with me here!

We had a quick introduction to Zbrush from a 3rd year before Easter so I've been trying to put those notes to use and create some stepping stones to try and get to grips with sculpting and Polypainting. So starting from a simple base mesh over in 3D Studio and then over in ZBrush painting in some texture and a diffuse map I got this.

Nothing incredible I know but it was a start and I was only making a stepping stone which is what I got out of it.

So since I was obviously on my way to being a ZBrush master I thought I'd try something else and picked up the rocks from the asset list that were meant to be Dominic's models but the level scripting were given more priority. So I tried a couple of new things for these, first off I went straight into ZBrush without a low poly based mesh something I felt from the start would spin around and bite me but we'll get to that. With no based mesh I instead started using ZSpehres to get my basic shape and went in after with the planar brush to define the forms.

Pretty sure I over worked it. It would work for a more stylised world I think but I'm working from a Fable based style guide and their forms are a lot smoother and not quite so busy.

Regardless I keep working with it, it's rare I use my first model for anything but practice and testing anyway. I added wear and damage to the edges and surface and neatened it up using a morph target which is a stored copy of the model in an undamaged state so if I think I've taken too much off somewhere I can use a morph brush to put more of the original form back into it to lessen the damage. Finally I added noise to the surface and I had a pretty decent first attempt at a rock.

Then I hit the low poly problem. I decimated the mesh and brought the tri count down but the topology was a mess. I know in organic shapes we can be forgiven for triangles but this thing had never seen a quad in it's life. I tried to retopologise in ZBrush but the tri count would skyrocket then brought it into Max to see if I could do anything by hand. In the end it wasn't working, Pro Optimiser did it's best and I tried to clean up after it but in the end the base shape was changing too much and there wasn't a hope that this would match the Hi poly model enough to bake out the normal map cleanly so I'm thinking that it's best to put this one down as a fail and when I go back to try again, this time I'll be producing my low poly first. 

In the level there's been a pretty simple yet effective change. From this:

To this:

The switch to evening lighting was probably one of the best decisions we've made in the project. The light shines through the trees better, the colours work better with the environment and colours of the flowers pop more.

I also got some decorations finished this week.

And used the ribbon, sash...thing to decorate the fences in the garden.

The main things left now are mostly scripting to finish and a few small things such as sounds. We're getting there. 

Is it too late to have our level set in the desert?

Trees! Of course it's the trees because trees were sent to punish game artists for their sins. We got back this week and located one of the main problems with our lag and frame rate issue which turned out to be the alphas on the trees, the water shader is also pretty engine heavy but it mainly the trees fault. So what's the solution to that? Less leaf planes altogether or try to maintain the look of density by putting more branches onto the alpha planes. Regardless either on off these options mean revisiting the trees and changing them again.

So we've located the problem, that's a start. As for the level...

Looking pretty good I think. The work everyone did over the Easter went in, Dominic's been working on scripting in the puzzles and the end is in sight but we still have pretty big to do list and there are some things we've accepted probably won't get done for the DMU hand in such as having the Mad Hatter over at the tea party but we aren't too worried about that.

Importing the palace brought up the Unreal 'Degenerate tangent base' error but after all the trouble when had with this and Mark's archway we were prepared for it this time. Back over in 3D Studio I simply attached the palace to a quickly drawn box mesh, deleted the box and re-exported the palace and all fixed. There was still an incorrect shading issue but I fixed that by increasing the light map resolution up from 64 to 128.

The main worry is that it's not completely playable yet, some puzzles aren't in and so the game isn't set up to let you into the gardens or end the game so that's our biggest problem currently. This is all Dominic's work since this is a level of scripting at is just sailing over our heads so we can't even help. He assures us it will be done and he's fast and good at it so we aren't particularly concerned.

This week was also the presentations so that was..something. I'd spent all Easter worrying what I could present at would be three minutes of cool and funny information, then I remembered that I'm a art history and Ancient Greek civilisation nerd and really should just embrace that. So I gave a presentation on the three stages of Greek sculpture, though an extremely butchered one as fitting an era into under a minute is harder than I expected but it went ok, my timings were mostly on track and I didn't have to throw up afterward so a big improvement on last year at least. 

Everyone else gave a good show too, lots of broad subjects and I left with new knowledge of the genetics of horse colouration and a few more interesting facts about slugs under my belt so in my eyes, it was a good day.

Still hate trees

I finally got around to fixing that awful tree I made to make it a slightly better looking awful tree. Still can't get the flowers to pop from all the green leaves but they're there if the player gets close.

There are a few things left to make for it, like the stages of LODs we have in the level to try and help our frame rate out but that's work for back at the labs because I'm not making trees on my birthday. Now lightmaps on the other hand.....

I may have eaten my chocolate early

I'm not completely sure when Easter is but the result was the same, I once again have no chocolate.

I had hoped to get all my work out of the way by the second week but I was instead challenged to a Ninja throwing fight on Saints row 3 and everybody knows it would be dishonorable to not accept.
I wasn't quite so idle this week. Got that the texture for the remodeled palace done.

I also made some really small changes to my character project based on the feedback I received. The feedback was pretty minimal, 'add more contrast to the colours'. What I'd done so far gotten me a score in the low 50's so I was left wondering if contrasting colours were all I needed to change...where are those other 50 points? But I did what I could without feeling like it was damaging the dichotomy of the colours, neatened up some topology and added some extra finger loops for better deformation.

Again, not much was changed at all. I put some trim on their shirt patterns using their opposing colours, made the bishop symbol on their crowns a shade of the opposite colour too and altered some on the contrast slightly so none of their whites and pure white and the blacks aren't pure black. I did also give Stonewall fingerless gloves to break his arm up a bit more since it doesn't differentiate in shape as much as Gambit's.

I don't expect my marks to change by much if they change at all but it gave me a chance get some better renders of them than the ones I initially had and I fixed some mistakes I over looked in my naming convention so who knows, maybe there's a point or two in there somewhere.