Finishing off

Low poly n textures. After fight with renders and 3ds max vs maya I've decided to do it in a simplest oldest way. 3ds max and scan line.

I had a lot of problems during map backing because of seams and normals. They always poppet up when I used vray as well as the smoothing groups and normal map was not as smooth as it could be. At that point I've try to do it in Maya but the stupid issues that this program has, like for example using only 1 core instead of all 16 just pushed me away and I've decided to go back to max and work in it. After few days I've found out that its easy and works great just to use scan line instead of going to mental ray and other fancy renders.

Just a close up on detail

Nano and other bits finished. All thats left now is the Low poly model and baking textures.

Finished HD model

So here we got 3ds max model finished. Or most of it, helmet will be done at the end probably to get it matching to armor. As you can see the model got different colors on its mesh. I've decided to use it as a ID map to help me mask out areas in photoshop that then I could use to texture it easier. Below you can see model and texture from photoshop.

Helmet fun

Another up. Working on on helmet. Thinking of building it of loads of little bits to make it complex. Something that would cover up and uncover up face in a mechanical face. In transformers 2 there was that girl - robot hybrid that had nice animation of changing human face to robot. Maybe something with simmilar physics.

Working on high details

Soo got my mesh remeshed to mid poly. All I'm doing now is detailing it up a little bit again in zbrush. Not sure if it will work but well see.

3Ds Mar Retop

Heya

Soo here we are. Few chapters later. I did my retoping to mid poly. I decided to do it in 3Ds max because it give me a lot of control and is very fast. I think that the winning point over zbrush is that its a lot easier to manage from display point of view, control and the fact that once u position vertex u can just move it on the surface as you wish.

During retop I was using as much as I can the GoMax plugin developed by one of zbrush users. Thanks to that I was moving my low poly and high poly objects in and out of zbrush every 10 mins.

Retop

Heya

So work in zbrush is briliant. Milion of polygons pretty smooth workflow and all that make it easy and pleasure task. At this stage of production I'm pretty much retoping my character every 2h or so. Easy tools make it quite fun !

The only problem I find with zbrush is that it gets a bit hard to retop. Once u put a point on mesh you cant move it if you want. Which mean u have to delete it and position again ! Quite anoying and time waster. There is also issue with retop when you move to behind of ur subject(like leg) its hard to see which wire is front and which is back. It is possible to change visual settings but then it causes other problems.

However its not the end of the world ! 3Ds max 2011+ got great boost in modeling tools including incredible retopology tool.