Player Avatar Project from Christmas 2013

This Project was set at the end of our first term (end of 2013).

We had to design and model our own player avatar, which we would then rig, skin and place into unity so it can work with the motion-capture animation files.

Modelling:

I started off with a quick sketch of my character (above) making sure the front and side references were aligned.

Taking both references I put them into the scene as planes, which I could use as guides for my modelling. Since this was the first time I have modelled a character, I was following along with a tutorial, which used the poly modelling method, as opposed to the box modelling one I was more familiar with.

I started off by placing two spheres into the scene to act as eyes, which I then began to build around using planes. I used the edge extrusion on the planes to build my geometry.

I continued using this method to build the rest of the head - in hindsight I realise I've used far too many edge loops, which later on made it more difficult to fix the Topology. When the head was down, I pulled down the neck.

From the neck, I kept pulling extruding to create the body, and arms, and from then onto the legs. I kept the model in transparency mode so I was able to keep tweaking the shape in order to keep it close to the original concept.

From the legs I pulled out the feet, and continued tweaking and refining the shape of the model. The next part was tricky, as I had to tackle creating the hands. Though I feel I was able to get the base shape, I really dislike how blocky they turned out, especially the fingers.

With the main model done, or just about, I made a start on the hair. Now that I know more about planes, I would of added alot more detail to the mesh, but as a first attempt I'm fairly happy with it.

For a first attempt at modelling a character I was content with it, but I do think I made some stupid mistakes throughout, especially when constructing the face, and putting edge loops in the wrong place.

UVW Unwrap:

We were introduced to the tool Roadkill to assist us with the unwrapping process of our player character.

 I found the tool simple and handy to use, it took some getting used to, but it's definitely a very use friendly program. I tried to place my seams in the least obvious places, though I could of done a better job overall.

I had to resize my uvws afterwards to ensure certain parts of the model had more texture details than the rest.

Textures:

To create the textures I sent my model to mudbox so I can begin sculpting some detail for the Normalmaps.

This was the first time I really used mudbox as well, and I found myself facing several problems. Mainly concerning the symmetry tool, that kept misaligning now and then. Still I went in and started adding definition to the character's body and clothes.

Due to time constraints I did a rather scant job, but I made sure to put enough force on the folds of the clothes and some definition to the muscles. I used the extraction operation in mudbox to extract a normal and occlusion map so I could begin working on my diffuse.

I placed my AO map into photoshop, then used that as a sort of base texture, blotting in flat colours for the model. I started adding detail and texture to the character using photo references to help flesh him out.

I used the same technique for creating his hair and eyes. I finished off the model by refining it, as well as overlaying the normal for additional definition.

Rigging:

For skinning purposes we were using the humanIK skeleton, to work with the mechanim system in Unity.

 I used the skeleton generator in Maya to generate my humanIK skeleton, then I scaled my model to fit it. I moved the joints of the skeleton so that they aligned with my mesh's geometry.

Next task was to orient the joints, so that their orientation flowed in the correct directions, this is to prevent isuses with animations and to ensure they move in the correct directions and angles. This part was definitely tricky, as I had a lot of issues with the skeleton resetting it's position and orientation.

Once I was happy with the Orientation, I could then skin my model to the skeleton, using the heatmap skinning - this method of skinning was helpful as it reduced my workload by having more accurate weights initially. I then manually edited some of the weights using the weight table so I could have a more uniform and obvious spread of weights.

Using the inbuilt weight painting tool in Maya, I began to refine the weights and check how the model deformed by rotating and moving joints. This tool was quite fun to use, and it gave me a good insight into how the weighing of a model should be spread and done. Once I was happy with the weights, I created a control rig, then exported the model as an fbx to Unity.

I made some more tweaks afterwards, such as adding some additional edge loops to the model, reweighed it, before I was finally finished with the project.

Marmoset Render: