Summer 2015.

Character Disaster.

looking at my character I realised there was many mistakes. Feedback pointed out the manliness of my characters face etc... There was a lot of un-clean texturing and I felt the whole character looked flat and dull. 

Not only did it not look great but the model had far too high a poly count and messy to work in a game efficiently. Most of the geometry in my model didn't really add anything to the character so was completely unnecessary. 

I went straight back to the start and re-done the whole character. But before I started any modelling I looked at Laura Crofts model from the first new 'Tomb Raider' and at lightning from 'Final Fantasy 13' to get a idea of how industry does it. I was really impressed with the Laura Croft model, how it looked so realistic yet had such a low poly count. If that was achievable in the few pieces of geometry they had then mine has no excuse to not look better, especially as my last character had over 100k Tris. 

With this in mind I took my clothes from marvellous designer and reduced and cleaned them up more appropriately this time and I re modelled and sculpted the body parts, props and accessories. I also re-evaluated my overall design to come up with something a little more interesting and that would be more practical in the real world. 


Keeping my geometry to a minimum, but that still kept a smooth enough shape to compete with current generation game graphics, I baked all my sculpts onto my model. 

I ended up with bakes I was pretty happy with and already my character felt a lot less flat and looked, to me, more realistic. I really tried to unwrap my model cleaner this time allowing a lot of space for my larger parts, such as the shawl, and keep the scale/resolution of my textures even across the whole model.  

For my last character model I used a lot of images to produce my colour map. I felt this made my model look rather patchy and repeated. It also restricted how much of my own creativity I could put into the model. Making materials using PBR I realised that the old image way of texturing wasn't as necessary any more. 

Now I have a slightly better understanding of PBR I decided for all the above reasons to hand paint my textures this time. Then use the power of PBR to make the surface look realistic. Painting my colour (albedo), Gloss and Metalness will also allow me to develop a better understanding of how the maps really work and I can fine tune each piece to suite my needs more. 

I started by painting in all my base, flat, colours. Hoping that the normal maps will keep producing that nice detail for me. 

Next I will layer over top of my base colours with things like dirt and little wear patches on the clothing where appropriate. Details to make it look more realistic. I also need to add little planes around the eyes for eyelashes, paint my albedo maps for the hair, Broach and the tassel on my new hat design. Then I will produce my Alpha, Gloss and Metalness Maps. 

The string looped through the metal rings also needs duplicating all over the model, once this is done I will evaluate the whole design and see if there are any more little details/ accessories needed anywhere on the model.