Week 03_ Progress

This week my job will be finish up the modelling of the Malay soldier character and testing for our newly installed renderer Vray. 

Continued from last week's progress on the shirt creation. I transpose the shirt sleeves into the character's arm position. Using Zbrush's build in retopology tool, I retopologised the shirt once again to avoid irregular topology. Next, I began to shape and sculpt the skirt to fit the soldier better and adding in rough details. 

I have tried to model the pockets and buttons using the usual sculpting methods, but that didn't work. So I try to model them in parts, by using the masking and extruding tool. In this manner , I would also have more control over the shape and details.

My approach to the shorts creation for the Malay soldier is similar to the shirt creation. First, I get a reference model and began the retopology process using Maya topology tool set.

After the tricky retopology process, I got a shorts base model with clean topology.

From the base model I have, I extrude the shorts leg to the respective length as shown in the references. Then, I add in some line detail while its easier to be done in Maya. Smoothed the model and export to Zbrush for further shaping.

Import the shorts model in Zbrush. 
The shorts is in place after positioning and shaping it to fit the Malay soldier model. 

There are other model element which are done by my teammates, such as helmet, belt and shoes. Those model part are also imported, positioned and shaped in place. Here is the look of the Malay regiment soldier at this stage, with most part of the uniform pieced together.

There are problem with shoe, where the model doesn't seems to be able to translate in Zbrush. The shoe model will stretch and distorted when I tries to move it. All this issue doesn't exist in Maya, need to check and deal with it next week.

This week the school have granted budget and purchased Vray to enhance our workflow, production quality and speed. With the new plugin, I have tested the shading and lighting using Vray, as well as its well known real-time (RT) rendering system. 

The real-time rendering works great, producing fast renders during working process and provides instance feedback on adjustments been made. However, thought some testing real-time rendering is not any faster, in fact slower in actual rendering of finals image sequence. For instance, it took 3 minutes per frame to render a sequence as shown below using real-time render; while Vray batch render only took lesser than a minute.