Saturday, July 28, 2007

31St Century Warrior - Update 25/07/07

Update:
Well its been a while since I last updated. Above I was playing with and SSS seeing if I could get it working with my normal map for it seemed to be over riding it. I tried everything from a Fake SSS, Reel SSS and no SSS. In both the no and fake SSS I could easily see my normal map working but in my Real SSS I found that it didnt want to work what so ever. I've tried pluggin it into both the SSS's bump and displacement with no luck.

Well I did some research to see why this was not working and it turns out that it does work in the SSS bump its just that with the 3+ colours mixing in the SSS it diludes the look of the normal map causing it to look flat. The ways to go around it is to push the normal in your textures that you are using for your SSS. It also helps to have an AO map and or Light map.

While I was doing some research I disided to do some work on the armour seeing how I wanted to look like metal wise. That is what was my metal material generally going to look like. I wanted the majority of my armour to act like a cars surface, reflecting 3 different colours depending on the angle you are looking at it.

In the image above I am using grids with transpency. I still have to make a spec map and play with the diffuse to give the hair more valume but it doesn't look that bad. Using grids is a low poly approach, and though my character is not lowpoly I thought to try it out to see if it will work well or if I should go with generated hair. You can see from the picture that up close it is noticable that I'm using grids for hair, but from a distance its harder to tell.

Thats about it. I'll post more as time progresses.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

31St Century Warrior - Update 11/07/07

Alrighty back into action. I had a nice brake but its time to get back to work while I am searching for work on the coast. My hope is to finish this guy within the next couple of weeks while I work my current job at a warehouse and apply for jobs within the industry.

Anyways enough of a recap of were I'm at. At the moment I am only focusing on the face's defuse so the specular is a little daughnting but will be fixed in the near future. Thinks that adding a texture helped me see is that I need to fix the meshing around the eyes. There is large black space and for anywone thats a no, no. There is stretching in the ears and other areas besides the hair(which will be left as is). As soon as I get the difuse working to what I want I'll be adding grids for the hair. I was considering doing hair particals but I want to cut down on render time and I've seen some realy cool grid hair that worked in Dominance War this year and I want to see if I can get the same effect.

I'll keep ya posted.