Blend Shapes

More blend shapes anyone? Just finished all the blend shapes for the cop, took freakin ages...
Now to build the GUI they are gonna run off :)
This is just to show you what I have been working on over the past couple of days. I am hoping by the end of today all of these will be done and bound to his head. They are taking me a while because I want to make them look awsome :)

Render Tests (from louise)

These are the render tests that louise sent in an email (13/13/10) :

"....here are some toon outline render tests of your cop character. I will have to get some feedback from you at some point, so we can tweak the settings to get the look that you want, so these are just a starting point. There’s various different toon shaders applied, and there’s a few images that have been comped with an ambient occlusion pass. Might be nice to render out a sequence with the character animated, to see if you need to animate the lines or not.

Cheers

Louise"

Spirit Update

So here is what the spirit looks like at the mo, I am passing it over to Tom today, then he will finish it off and I will get started on packing out a whole heap of Environment models....

Cop UV's

Hey guys and girls!

I have just finished UVing the cop.
I will now email him to andrew so he can start texturing him while I get to rigging.
Tom

Some elements...

Just a couple of things to populate the city, more on the way!

Story board patch

K so here's the story board patch, with the 2 additional cops taken out. It's still subject to some minor finessing once we delve into the pre-vis a little more, as with everything...

Cop Modeling

Hey guys, the cop is well underway!Here he is with just 3471 faces. Was hoping to have more done by now, but maya crashed and I was caught up doing other stuff. Hopefully tomoz is more productive.



So just the head, shoulder straps and batton to go. With a polly count of 6161 so far :)

Here is the Cop almost done. The ears took me a long time but they are finaly done and look really good! Just have to do the shoulder straps and the inner mouth and hes done. Hope you like the change for the batton. This is at 7803 quads!

The cop is now complete and thus a high quality render is in order. Click the image below for a bigger shot. He came in at just over 10, 000 pollies so, boo ya!

Kiddo Polly count

Hey guys!

So just finalising Kiddo and putting him all together.
So far I have knocked off 10000, pollys on his shoes, and just smashed off 200 pollies from the cap, the cap now also has much better topology. Everything else is all good, apart from the head and Im still not sure what im going to do with the hair but Ill work somthing out.
Thinking about remodeling the head, just because Im not happy with it in general but I could also smash off a couple of hundred pollys if I did do it.
So far what you can see in the image below is 12400 pollys which I think is pritty good, this means that the final character may be 20000 pollys which I think is workable, considering the one I gave you emma was something like 32000 I think...
Oh well I will keep working at it :) should have it done real soon!
Ok so he is so close to being complete, just have to wrinkle up his pants and add hair and thats it.
In this state at the moment he is exactly 20232 pollys. Which is very close to what I estimated. I redid his head from scratch burning about 400 pollys off it and with a much better topology for facial animation.Hey guys.
So here is kiddo pritty much done, modeling wise... he is 21028 pollies, the wrinkles in his pants might look a bit weird but when you see them in full turn around/ textured I think they should be fine. Ill email Andrew the file now.

The shoe WIP!

Here ya go guys, the remake of the sneakers, all over again. And only 770 pollies so far! But this time it is so much easier and I know what Im doing, in the end its all just good practice. Ill update as I go :

Just some screwin around in mentalray.

More detail and the shoe is still only 1800 pollies, goin well :)

New render

So close to being done now, just have to wack on the tabs on the sides and thats its, should have kiddo done fully by tomoz then I will send it to Andrew to be UVed and Textured while I either get onto rigging or working on the cop.
DONE! 9926 pollies all together!

Some Changes

Hey gang!

Sooooo I did some experimental research over the past 2 days and found out a fair bit o stuff.
First of all Normal mapping is generally only used in games, I found through experimenting with Kiddo's cap and trying everything I could with different retopo, UV mapping techniques that if you dont have much detail to map, it dosent look too grand at all. We are much better off just useing the pollies as best we can (which will still give off the quality we are looking for) and just use bump maps where we can.

For example these shoes here http://www.flickr.com/photos/asterokid/2460413710/in/set-72157604361232024/ are just modeled and then bump mapped and textured, and they look friggen sickcore. So once again textures are the key :)

Also I relised that mentalray will render out geometry which is in 'smooth mesh preview' this means that if we have to we can keep the geometry of the charcaters real low (without having to smooth them) and just hit '3' on the keyboard before we render.

So00 over the next few days I will be kit bashing Kiddo, which means rebuilding parts which need rebuilding such as the sneakers and making sure they are as low polly as possible, and then stuff that dosent need to be rebuilt can just be thrown back in and udjusted.

This should take out a massive chunk of work time as well, not having to go low geo to high geo, then retopo, UV's, texturing then normal maps and ambient occlusion maps, then to rigging...

Should be good and Im pumped!

Tell me your thoughts?

Kiddo High Quality Render

Just wipped up this high quality render while still trying to work out Normal Maps.
Not having much luck in getting them to look real prime but yea... Ill figure somethin out soon.

Cityscape Reference Pictures

http://www.steambotstudios.com/V2/portfolio.php

Shot 1

here are some screen caps for the opening shot (page 1 of storyboards). Pretty close match so far, but need to work out why the camera doesn't crop the same in preview compared to render...

City Lighting

i took the image that andrew posted in the previous post and started using that as a reference for lighting the city. below are a few different styles of lighting that i came up with.





really its a question of what colours would best suit and compliment the characters. im thinking either a turquoise or purple base.