This week my goal was to work on the UVs on the character to prep for normal mapping high detail geometry and texture work.
11-4-2023:
Starting out, I knew some pretty significant rework needed to be done on the low poly topology of the head, so I started there with a fresh quad draw mesh to ensure that there would be nice symmetrical seams to unwrap the UVs with. Originally, the character model was given some very quick, rough retopology to in order to quickly jump into rigging and layout, however, this outdated version of geometry no longer meets the needs of clean UVs and advanced animation deformations and needs to be cleaned up.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
11-6-2023:
I received some feedback to enclose the ear in a more quarantined box of geometry which resulted in the following geo:
After adding a mouth bag with teeth, a tongue, and adding bigger cavities for the eyes and nose, my initial unwrap of the head looked like this:
During the week, I got some feedback from Paul on the face topology and was told to keep an eye on making sure that the edge loops around the eyes make nice even "goggles" and don't spiral. Another note I was given was to move the kiting in between the eyebrows down a face or two, so that it sat under the eyebrows on the bridge of the nose and supported the shape of a furrowed brow more in facial rigging. I also got a note to focus on emphasizing the sharp angle change between the lower eyelid and the topside of the cheekbone, and give a bit more sizable geometry to the lower eyelid and to add more edgeloops around the crease of the eye to support smooth blinking deformation and reduce unwanted stretching. I hope to make these changes soon after the next production pass to give as much time as possible for the facial rig to be worked on before the screening so there might be some rough facial animation by the screening.
I then continued to unwrap the rest of the character. I'm not sure how the final texture will be arranged but for now I've decided to separate all skin geo from the clothing geo and hair geo. I found that for almost every piece of geometry I've had to make some adjustments to the geometry to delete or reduce unshown faces that don't need to take up UV space, or retopologize edge flow to optimize seam creation.
11-7-2023:
Continued work on the clothing such as the tie, pants, socks, and shoes, all accompanied by minor geometry adjustments.
11-8-2023:
The hair was an interesting challenge to UV with so many pieces of very organic shapes. The solution I found to making the workflow as easy as possible was to grab all the geo and give them all a throwaway camera projection UV and then individually select each hair piece and cut a seam straight down the middle that divides the top part of the hair that would be shown from the bottom parts of the hair that would be mostly hidden, and then simply unfold the geometry. This process made the hair a lot less daunting of a task, however it did still require a handful of hours of extremely repetitive button pushing and moving shells. I would like to ideally orient all the shells vertically or horizontally so it makes it easier to paint them and give the illusion of finer hairs, however for now this will suffice. I tried the orient tools in the UV editor but had trouble getting the tools to produce the desired result as usually a good portion of the shells would still be oriented perpendicularly to the rest of them.
I also did some significant rework of the geometry on the hands. Originally they did not have any edge flow that would support a glove seam around the wrist and fingers without any sudden redirects in the middle of the hands, so I made sure to add continuous edge loops, as well as decrease the overall poly count by a large amount. I'm still working on solving some high valence vertex placements and if and when geometry is kites and where. However, for the sake of iteration, I went ahead and UVed the hands as soon as I got complete geometry around the hands that had a nice continuous glove seam.
My last major step in UVing the character will be addressing some geometry on the base shirt that has very uneven density and edge flow redirections that do not support the overall shape. I had hoped to be done with UVs by the end of this week but retopologizing from scratch or minorly adjusting the geometry on almost every piece on the character model has proved to be an unexpected setback to my pre-planned time management for the week.
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