Texturing the mask

There were no final designs made for Caruso's mask in the end so I have taken inspiration from the concept work made by both Nell and Cullan and merged the two to create the texture for the mask. Some feedback from team-mates is quite positive but there will be some alterations made by my team mate Nell if she finds the time.

Some progress shots:

And the final outcome:

I am pleased with the outcome but am a bit on the fence regarding the orange stripes. 

Shoes

Short update: I had originally intended to just add detail to the shoes through the painted texture but I was not satisfied with the plain shape of the foot so I did a little sculpting in Mudbox and quite liked how it looked.

Rough Paint

I'm not usually a fan of using 3D paint tools; I find I have much more control when I paint in 2D. However, considering the amount of finer details I sculpted into Caruso's Normal map, it made sense to use Mudbox's painting tools to give the mesh some flat colour to help me visualise the final texture and also as a guide for painting in the details that do not have their own mesh (e.g. the belt, shirt, hair...)

Rigging Catastrophe

To say I have little experience in rigging is an understatement. Having only really done a short tutorial on rigging a foot, and using Anzovin's The Setup Machine (auto-rig) for a few small projects, I felt very out of my depth when it came to rigging Caruso for the Knightside Chronicles game. After a little research it came to my attention that The Setup Machine wasn't designed to handle motion capture data so my options now are to build a rig from scratch OR to find another short cut. A fellow coursemate introduced me to an interesting Maya plugin called "Advanced Skeleton" which is a set of tools designed to help build a standard biped, bug and quadraped rig. Being a free tool I might as well give it a try, and I found some tutorials on youtube to follow for learning to use the tools. 

Everything was going very well as I carefully followed each step of the tutorial and I managed to place everything in the FITskeleton to the desired locations...UNTIL the advanced skeleton was built:

This was where things started differing from the tutorial and I could find no possible reason why things should go so horribly wrong. As you can see, the ring on the torso is rotated oddly and the red box-shaped controls by the hip...well...they're meant to be by the feet :/ however, I persisted to see how it affected the rig:

Advaned Skeleton has an interesting feature called SkinCage which helps to minimise the need for weight painting after skinning to the mesh - the crude boxy meshes that are created need to be resized to be as snug as possible with the mesh to be rigged. Unfortunately the skincage differed a LOT for my mesh - the strange torso and the massive vertical feet are sure signs that something has gone terribly wrong.

Still, out of curiosity I clicked "copy skin to selected mesh" and lo and behold:

Some [expected] bizzare deformations. It is safe to assume I will be looking for alternative methods for rigging the character. Right now I am horribly behind schedule with production but 4 weeks is still enough time to get everything done - at least the modelling and texturing are almost complete - they were pretty time consuming due to me being a bit of a fickle perfectionist.

A Little Sneak Peek

Working on sculpting the little details that will [hopefully] bring more life to the basic Caruso mesh. I don't have a lot of experience with Mudbox and have particular trouble with sculpting the creasing of clothing. I like to think I didn't do too bad a job here - in fact, I'd go as far as to day I'm rather pleased!

There's some gaps showing around where the head attaches to the neck; due to smoothing...in hind site I probably should have left the head attached to the rest of the body but hopefully a little tweaking of the normal and ambient occlusion maps will rectify this problem. The base mesh will be left unsmoothed to keep a lower polygon count so the gaps will not be present then.

UV maps

I almost forgot to create meshes for Caruso's eyeballs but luckily it's a very simple task. Here is the final UV map for the clothed model of Caruso - I hope there is enough UV space for the mask and face details.

Here is the UV map for the nude model of Caruso thrown in for good measure - the face UVs are exactly the same as in the clothed model so to save time it could be easier to just import the head from the nude model. However, I am still not sure whether nude Caruso will even feature in the final game so it's more resourceful to keep everything (including a texture for Caruso's face) on one UV map.

I had a lot of practice with the UV layouts of the older Caruso mesh so this time round it was much quicker to generate the UV map for the new mesh, and I have noticed I am more efficient with the UV space. Level up!

Alterations

There was a little miscommunication between the completion of the Character concepts to the modelling of the character mesh: I thought the concept drawings provided by Nell were complete and final designs for the character Caruso. However after completing the base mesh and checking up with team leader Cullan for feedback, I was informed that the designs were not final so a few alterations needed to be made regarding the clothed version of Caruso. I am a little confused by the overall pre-production process but it's difficult to have a smooth workflow when there is so little time and so much work to be done to complete the project.

Unfortunately I had already spent a few days generating the UV maps for both the nude and clothed versions of Caruso and had made a start on sculpting additional details in Mudbox...

The first changes were to the lower part of Caruso's clothing, the concept art showed Caruso to have quite loose and slightly flared trousers so I modelled the mesh as such. The feet are separate meshes.

After a short discussion with Cullan, we have decided to go for tapered trouser legs. What I did was extract parts of the nude Caruso mesh and altered the edgeflow slightly. Once I take the mesh into Mudbox I can sculpt to make the bare legs looks more like clothed legs.

The first base mesh followed the concept drawing where the outer coat has an asymmetrical collar/lapels but I personally didn't really like how it looked so have decided to go for a more symmetrical design.

The final alteration was on Caruso's left arm: Cullan wanted Caruso to wear a metallic gauntlet on his left hand that was reminiscent of the gauntlet worn by Final Fantasy's Vincent Valentine. Due to the time constraints and lack of any designs or concept art for this gauntlet we have decided to go for something much simpler: a vambrace. This will be a simple extrusion of the faces on the lower arm and any details will be sculpted and textured in Mudbox. To allow the vambrace to be in view, the sleeve on the left arm will be folded up to the elbow.

Although it was not a lot of changes I had to make, I felt it would be far easier to delete the old mesh and alter the nude Caruso Mesh to make the new clothed Caruso mesh. You may be able to notice that the edgeflow of the coat sleeves are different - that is because I decided to follow the same edgeflow as the unclothed arms to have a more seamless transition into the exposed left lower arm while keeping everything merged into one mesh. Also, the torso, legs and feet are now merged into one mesh to minimise chances of meshes cutting into each other when animated.

In the brief moment of Mudbox sculpting the first base mesh I noticed how the edges of the coat were deforming because it was a single layer polygon plane and it was near impossible to bulk up the inside edge to make the material appear thicker. Since I was already back in the modelling stage I decided to extrude the edges to create an extra line of faces for sculpting.

Now to re-map most of the UVs - not that I mind, I find this process rather relaxing.

Clothed Caruso

For the clothed version of Caruso I decided to import the mesh of nude Caruso into a new maya scene and made the mesh "live" so I could model the clothing as a plane that follows the contours of the body. This acted mainly as a guide while I roughly blocked out the shapes of the clothing, then I made the mesh "unlive" so I could tweek the new clothing meshes into more desired shapes using the character concept art (by Nell) as reference.

The mask, head, torso, legs, feet and coat are all separate meshes while the hands are combined and merged with the coat. By making the clothing from scratch as a new mesh gives me the freedom to completely change the topology - anatomic details are not so important now that the character is clothed so I'm able to create more simple meshes. 

I feel right now the mesh looks far too plain so it will need a lot of sculpting in Mudbox to bring more life into the model.

Problem solved

Took longer than it really should have but I have somehow managed to close off the open neck area. I'm not entirely convinced by the edgeflow and the jaw looks a little weak but I will try to rectify this when I take the mesh into Mudbox.

Despite a few problematic areas in the mesh I am overall, very please with how the model of Caruso has turned out - there were many times I had to improvise when things either didn't line up with the reference or looked odd when matched with the reference so I have developed my eye for detail here and have gained a better understanding of the edgeflow in human anatomy. 

Now it is onwards to modelling the clothed version of Caruso.