The entire process if creating the model for Caruso has taken me far longer than I wanted to but I think this has been down to my perfectionist ways manifesting in the creation of the only character I get to work on. I wanted to develop my Mudbox/sculpting skills so spent quite some time on adding the little details to Caruso's model - I also felt that the base mesh looked very plain so attention to detail was needed.
Each mesh had to be exported as separate .obj files with high resolution and low resolution versions so I could use Xnormals to generate the Normal and Occlusion maps. This was the first time I used Xnormals to generate maps and I was overall quite impressed with the software. Unfortunately something went wrong when exporting the high resolution mesh of Caruso's head that Xnormals detected an N-gon. I was absolutely sure that the model of the head was completely quads and there were no error prompts when Caruso's base mesh was imported into Mudbox so the mystery has yet to be solved. Luckily, I was able to use Mudbox's own map extraction tools to get the normals for the head.
The final normal map after some corrections made in Photoshop.
The occlusion map after corrections made in Photoshop.
Here are some detail shots of the Caruso character model so far:
I'm very pleased with how the stubble turned out, I'm not usually very good at painting facial hair of any kind but it looks good (if I do say so myself) and definitely transformed Caruso's appearance dramatically.
The clothing folds are looking quite good in the viewport and adds interest to the mesh.
