WEEK 12 - Mad Hatter - nearly there!

The MAD HATTER is so close to completion! Although I was meant to complete this in Week 10, due to unforeseen situations I was held back. I still need to work on my time management abilities as I am far from successful…

In taking this task of creating the Mad Hatter, I am able to map a couple of LOs including my initial concept art [A N M 2 2 0 L O 4], textures [A N M 2 2 0 L O 5], form, figure and proportions [A N M 2 2 0 L O 6], and a facial rig [A N M 2 2 0 L O 7]. Below are screenshots and examples of how I accomplished all of these.

Our initial concept art which was meant to have a stylized look was evolved into a semi-stylized, semi-realism output.

Form Figure and Proportions:

Since I worked on the sculpt in Zbrush, I had to retopologize the character before importing it into the scene. I faced a lot of issues because there was something wrong with the file. Although I retopologized using Zbrush’s Zremesher and added guides using the topology brush, the model was somehow subdivided quite densely. This made it harder to fix some structural changes and caused the software to crash on me a couple of times. Im glad I made back ups and incremental saves which I was able to recover into 3Ds max later.

(Victory3d, 2018 - How to retopologize in ZBrush using Zremesher)

Zbrush to 3Ds max workflow:

This was an additional step to our production workflow since I chose to work in Zbrush. While importing into 3ds max, I still needed to fix a bit of the sculpt which would have been way more difficult in Zbrush. Before that, I had to reset the xform, and welded the vertices in the Unwrap because they had broken the model up for some very weird reason. I then collapsed the model (made backups before I made this decisions), and adjusted the model. I needed to create a slit for the mouth and delete some polys from the eye pockets to reduce poly count. I made the inside of the mouth because that’s where the camera goes into in the last scene and made teeth for the character as well.

Texture:

I had to repaint the textures on the Mad Hatter in Zbrush around 7 times because the file had an issue. Thankfully it didn’t take me long to paint since I enjoy this and know a little about makeup contour and facial painting. However, it got very frustrating to redo it so may times because the texture did not map onto the unwrap. The file had issues saying the unwrap doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, when I got down to it the seventh time, I ensured to also paint a spec map for the character. It needed to look matte but also have a bit of shine in certain areas. Along with that, I exported a displacement and Ambient occlusion map to use for the scene. Here are the textures.

I needed to play around with the skin shader and probably use a blend material for it in 3Ds max. I was happy with the effect that the skin shader provided after a couple of tests, so I decided to insert the diffuse map in the overall color texture slot of the SSS shader. It was a decent result.

Facial Rig:

The rig was the most daunting thing for me to do. I was super stressed right from the time we learnt how to do it until I actually did. Turns out, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. As a test, I made morphers with three different expressions and used the morpher modifier for it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to be counted as a rig LO. So, I decided to challenge myself and use the reaction manager. In order to do this, I made 17 morphers with individual expressions and used float limits for the controllers to control each expression. This is my final facial rig test.

Therefore, this is a render of the character in our scene. I am pleased with the result but I wish I had more time to refine it as I believe that a lot of places could have been done better. Overall, I believe that I have grown a lot more comfortable with Zbrush and wish to enhance my skills better in the future!