Week 04_ Progress

This week, technically be have only two and half day of working period, due to Christmas. However I will still be back on Friday to speed up the work. The basic task for me to complete is to finish up the Malay regiment soldier, and start progress on the cloth creation for the Japanese soldier.   

After some trial and error, I was able to solve the last week's problem, translate distortion issue of the boots model while imported in Zbrush. With that solved, position and shaping the boots to fit the soldier's foot is a lot easier.

Considering the high poly count on the boots, I tried the retopo it in Zbrush. However, the OBJ file of the retopologised boots are always corrupted. So, I still end up using the high poly boots.

The boots are the last piece of puzzle for the Malay regiment soldier model. At this stage the model is more of less completed.

I proceed by doing some adjustment and cleaning up to certain parts of the clothing. Retopogise parts as mush as I can while maintaining the maximum details.  

Next, I begin to create the UVs for all parts of the model. The Zbrush build in UV unfold plugin make this really straightforward.

After some testing, the models are still to high poly, file size has to stay under 30MB for uploading to Mixamo. I figure that I could drop the subdivision of certain parts of the clothes further, and make use of the displacement and normal map to bring back the details.  

The displacement and normal map has been exported and reapplied in Zbrush.

I have exported all parts of the Malay soldier in individual OBJ file. In this manner, it will be more convenient for changing individual parts after adjustment, which I did multiple times later.

Here is the complete Malay soldier model after importing and piecing all parts together.

In order to further reduce the poly count of the Malay soldier model, I have to delete hidden and unnecessary surfaces. This greatly reduce the file size.

In the beginning, due to the upload file size constraint, I wasn't really too insisting on using Mixamo to kick start the rigging. With the help from our lecture, Mr Leong, I have try using a existing character rig  provided to bind with the Malay soldier model. 

Half way into the skinning process, many issue and problem emerge. I realise weight painting a full character from scratch will be way to time consuming than expected. Not to mention I have 3 character in total to be rigged. Hence, I still decide to use Mixamo to speed up the working progress. This is why I am so concern about the poly count and file size in this report as mention earlier. 

The Mixamo auto-rig is a great way to help me started on the rigging and skinning process. However, it isn't all perfect, many adjustment in weight-painting needs to be made.

Further testing have been done to make sure there isn't any really obvious issue with the skinning.

The working process to the character creation have lots of back and forth, trial and error along the way. Nevertheless, the Malay regiment soldier with rigging is finally completed.