Week 05_ Progress

Week 5 also happens to lay on public holidays, the New Year celebration. Same as last week, only 2 and half week of  working time. The main objective for the week is to complete the Japanese soldier model asset, and best to start on Punjabi soldier creation.

I did some further changers to the Japanese soldier's body to create a slimmer overall body shape, after realising he is still too fit and thick for a world war 2 Japanese soldier. Minor adjustments have been done on the facial feature as well. 

For the cloth creation, I start with the pants retopology using the same technic as past few weeks. With a existing downloaded model as a base, using Maya's retopology tool set to create meshes with clear and usable topology.

The creation of the Japanese solder's shirt when through the same process of retopologising, however the shirt is much more complex and complicated to retopo. Its easy to say after I have finish it, but the process is really tedious.

After both main part of the costume have been retopologised, its time to move on and proceed the rest of the model in Zbrush. The shirt does fit the Japanese soldier body when its first imported in Zbrush, quite some shaping on the shirt is required in order to achieve that. Of course, other details are added as well with a higher subdivision.

Next step is to import in the belt, which is the same exact model as the Malay soldier. However, during the shaping process I did change certain minor feature of the belt along the way. 

The Japanese soldier model only reveals it pants, legs will not be seen, hence it's not necessary to keep them. I imported in the pants model and did some further shaping to match and be proportionate to it's upper body. It's easier for me to work on the pants by hiding the Japanese soldier's for a moment.

With all parts of the clothes done for the Japanese soldier, I bring back its body, add in and shape the helmet accordingly. However, later I realised this helmet  isn't historically accurate for Japanese troops. Thus, for the moment, it is just a place holder helmet from the Malay soldier.

When through the same process as before, exporting all individual pieces from Zbrush as OBJs and import back in Maya for assemble. Cleaning up and deleting of hidden and unnecessary polygons is done to ensure a small file size. Then, it was been exported again as a whole to .obj file and uploaded to Mixamo to help me on the rigging process.

After its done rigging in Mixamo, I import the .fbx file in Maya. As expected further weight painting is needed. Making sure there isn't any obvious issue with the rig and skinning.

At this stage, the Japanese soldier and its rig is completed. However, the helmet needs to be changed next week.

Get stated on the Punjabi Japanese soldier is a lot simpler, as I could quickly get the body shape and cloth asset using the Japanese solider as a base.

By changing some feature for the body, re-shaping of the pants and belt to fit the new body, the base model for the Punjabi is done. The only lacking model asset is the punjabi itself, which supposedly would be provide by my team members. The Punjabi soldier will be fully completed next week.