Homemade Minis Case

Well, I never painted these dear minis, but I DID finally get a proper case for them.  With some left over foam from a computer parts shipment, a Sucrets container from last cough-drop season, and some clean knifework (and not-so-clean markerwork), and little Nassa and normal-dwarf-sized Loren have a safe home.

Sleep tight.

Nassa the Gnome, Painted Textures

Finally getting around to finishing her up (again).  You may think that Nassa has become my excuse to try new programs and workflows; and you'd be spot on.  I'm now working on her in 3DS Max to get used to Max's Slate Material Editor.  I'm also thinkin' about using 3DS Max's rigging and animation tool, but there is a good chance I'll go back to Maya for that, and do a new character in Max later on.

I added and changed a few things here, especially her two obsidian-like daggers and oversized pirate hat (stolen from a pirate.)  If you were playing the D&D campaign with me it would make more sense.  This is also the point at which I should link to our campaign log, but I'm so far behind on it, that it wouldn't explain it either.

Funny thing, I have been digging Paint Tool Sai recently, for how their blending brushes behave.

The good news is that I can deal with layered Photoshop files in SAI.  The bad news is I can't export tiff files, nor does Mudbox play nice with SAI's psd exported files.  I like using SAI more than I like texturing in Mudbox; though I am still using both programs back and forth.  Mudbox's Export to PSD features is great for getting all of the zones and shapes down, and then I can work with the flat textures for most of the detail, then take it back into Mudbox for cleaning seams.

The downside to working on this while playing the character is that she develops (and changes) on a regular basis.

I'm not modeling the panther cloak.

2D Planning for Action Character Intros

I did these as planning for an action character-intro style animation, kind of showing off each character's fighting styles and abilities. I got inspired by Studio Mir's Road to the Cup League of Legends video.  I only really finished the first one, though I am work on finishing the other two, before doing them all in 3D

Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity

Download the pdf document here:
Direct link

Check it out online here:
Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity - Full Document

You can check my further notes on the subject here:
More on Animated Facial Textures

Essentially, my goal was to create a texture-driven facial animation system that worked in both Maya and Unity.  Making one in Maya is very simple, but I found very little on getting it to work in Unity, and nothing about getting it to export from Maya.

To give a bit of a background, for FIEA, one of our assignments was to document or write a tutorial about something we learned or wanted to learn.  I took this opportunity to pick up Unity, and solve a possible problem for a game I will be working on soon, and a problem I'd been curious about since when I was working on Intrepid.

I came up with a solution using joint animation that can be baked out of Maya and used in Unity.  The Maya portion gave me some practice with Maya Expressions, which is great considering I want to rig up the rest of the character soon.  And the Unity portion gave me a chance to learn Unity, and also learn some C#.  C# wasn't too difficult to pick up, having studied C and Java in the past; the code to get it all working can pretty much be copy-pasted from the document.

Download the pdf from the link above.  It should be very accessible - it breaks it down really small to start; getting it in engine, and how the math of the expressions and the image offset method will work.  And in sections 4 and 5, it gets to the meat of the whole operation.

If anyone has any questions on how it works, or why I did something; or any comments on how I can improve this method, I'd love to hear it.  Send me an email, or drop me a message here.

Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity - Full Document

Click 'Read More' below to see the full document.

Painting Using Mudbox's Export-to-PSD Feature

It's a start!  I have been digging this paint-directly-on-the-model workflow for textures.  It just makes so much more sense in my head.

I want to texture using Mudbox's export-screen-to-Photoshop feature.  It works a lot like Pixexix and ZappLink from ZBrush, but I found it to be much easier to use than the latter, and less buggy than the former.

When exporting to Mudbox, I had a lot of issues to fix.  Not surprisingly, it caught me for a lot of T-intersections and non-manifold geometry, both pretty much standard to a low poly model.  For the non-manifold geometry, I seperated those edges who were shared by a plane (such as in the hat), but kept them in the combined meshes.  I am going to swing back and clean up the UVs, before I jump back into Mudbox.

It really doesn't like dealing with multiple meshes at the same time (or perhaps multiple uv spaces at the same time), but that is a problem easily solved by working on individual pieces at a time, with some clever merging and unmerging in between.  I also ran into issues with overlapping UVs, so the simple fix was to get rid of the overlapping during the painting process.

Nassa Color Schemes

As I'm moving towards texturing my character, I painted up a bunch of options for color schemes.  I'm exploring the first two further.  While I really like the colors of the third and fifth, neither fit the character as well, and character comes first.

The next step was some variations on the chosen color.  The second one ended up being the favorite.

Nassa the Gnome, Version 2

I wanted to experiment with animated textures for facial features, which was my original plan with the old Nassa model.  I've been on a low-poly model kick for a little while, so I decided this is the ideal time to create a new model.  The goal was to stay under 1000 tris.  I also intend to take this one through textures so I can test using animated textures for the face in Maya and in Unity.

I did consider working from my older model, but I really wanted to try applying everything I've learned over the past few months.  It's interesting to see how similar it is to my old model, but how the shapes are so much better now, with fewer polys, too.

The picture above is the newer sketch I was working off of for this new model.  I fleshed out my original idea and design, visually describing the materials her clothes were made of, and the individual layers of the clothing.  I leaned towards a more cartoony look, since I wanted to push the designs of our three DnD characters; one short cute female gnome, one big beefy human/vryloka, and one fat stocky dwarf.

Epic Games Style Facial Rig

This was my experiments on the Epic Games style facial rig.  It essentially allows them to make one hero face, controlled with morph deformers (blendshapes), and then transfer the animation to a joint system on a series of different faces.  Joints are much cheaper to use in a game engine, and it is much easier on the animators to use a single system across all of the characters in the Gears of War game.

I edited the Nassa rig to have a mouth to test this out.  The left Nassa face is the hero using blendshapes.  The controllers drive that face, which in turn move locators parented to the verts on the face.  (I used a Maya rivet script to constrain the locators to verts.  Make sure your UV spaces are unique!)  Then those locators move the weighted joints on the character's face. The transfer wasn't exactly 1 to 1, but it was pretty close, and with more work, I'm sure it'd be closer.  With a higher-poly face, I'd need some more joints and a bit more time in weighting.  However, even these limited joints transfered to the high-poly Chip face pretty well, with minor editing on the joint weights.

(video coming soon, too)

Nassa the Gnome Animation and Mocap

We had an assignment to take some mocap data, and make 5 animations from it.  I decided to make it into a personal project, by running and directing my own mocap shoot to get exactly the shots I wanted.  And then, I proceeded to make thirty-some animations from that.  I modeled and rigged the character myself, and designed her to be in the style of a low-poly mobile game or a third person action game.

The attacks and attitude were based off of my DnD character (a naive dagger-wielding sorceress.)

I recently rendered them out, and I've included some of my favorites from that collection in the video below.  They are a mix of mocap cleanup and liberal keyframing.

Nassa the Gnome - Spark Form

This animation started out as a run test, and I wanted to give it a little more purpose.  This is my take on the "Spark Form" ability, where she moves extremely fast and hits any enemy she passes through.  I only got the first hit blocked in, and I'd love to finish it up.  Looking forward to revisiting this one.



Edit: Updated to a higher quality playblast.

Nassa the Gnome - Double Bounce Walk

This animation was just a rig test using my Nassa character.  I wanted to try out a double-bounce walk, just because I hadn't done one in the past.  It was quite fun doing the arms from this camera.

Nassa the Gnome Character Model

I just completed my Nassa the Gnome model.  One of the upcoming assignments is to take a character model and rig, animate, and mocap with it.  We were given the option to make our own character model, which I jumped on (after complaining to my friends that I don't have any time.)  Not having any other character designs available, I went with Nassa the Gnome from our D&D campaign, since I had several drawings of her already, as well as an image fleshed out in my mind.

This is technically my first complete character model that I built from start to finish without anyone else handling it in-between.  I tried to focus on making it low-poly, both as a challenge and to save painting-weights work.  I ended up at 1243 tris, 243 over my 1k tri limit.  I could easily cut it down by removing from the head and hands, but it was only a soft goal.  The head ended up getting about 1/3 of the tri's, since the head and hair were important for identifying the character.  I also modeled the whole thing without orthos to see how it would feel.

The outfit on the model is slightly different from the sketches I had drawn before, as she got a new set of armor towards the last few sessions, and it gives me an excuse to not have to deal with cloth.  I may come back and add textures, but the point of the piece was the model and animation, and less on finishing the model.

D&D Campaign Session Sketches

These are notecard sketches I did during our first four sessions of Dungeons and Dragons.  These are events that happened during the adventure.  I have my own Nassa the Gnome, Robert playing Norgar the Human (Vryloka), and Cole playing Audrik the Dwarf.

If you're interested in following along, I've been taking notes and uploading them to D&D Short Tales.

Nassa the Gnome - Final

I just finished my Nassa the Gnome mini!  Unfortunately, our DM couldn't play this week, so I got to work on this instead.  I added the clothes in on Wednesday, and I went over to Sean's today (Thursday) to finish up.

I got some Super Sculpey Firm, to see what it was like, and it ended up making the head a lot easier.  It still wasn't perfect, especially because I barely left any armature up there, but I was able to hack it together long enough to bake it.  The Firm Sculpey did really help keep enough details in there for baking (as opposed to the regular Sculpey.)  From there, I did a bunch of Xacto-carving to refine the details.  And in the last step, I added the ears, hands, and daggers.

In the end, I'm quite happy with it, largely because it is so ridiculously small, but mostly because the pose is so twisty and dynamic.  The clothes really accent the turn, and the arms have a real attitude to them.  I'm having so much fun with this; I think my next one will be around 3" using Sculpey firm, and I'm getting excited to try ProCreate in the near future.

My next step is to paint this handsome gentleman and fine lady, and then give them fancy bases.  That macro lens really makes them look gritty, but it will all be cleaned up in the next versions.

Nassa the Gnome - WIP

I must say, she was quite fun to play last week.  She's a Gnome, who wears elven clothes, and appears to be some sort of rogue - appears to be.   I'm really looking forward to the next Dungeons and Dragons session.

But since I wasn't running the dwarf, I had to sculpt a new character.  I started this little piece today at Sean's place.  I was actually able to get some good progress shots on this one.  She's quite difficult to work on because she's even smaller than the dwarf, currently at about 20mm.

It also doesn't help that I'm using regular Super Sculpey modeling clay.  Sean mentioned Sculpey Firm might be a little easier for me to work with.  Nonetheless, using my multiple-bake layer method seems to work alright.  I just have to do a bit of Xacto work in there as well.  I don't work fast enough for the 2 hour window using ProCreate or Green Stuff... yet.

 Armature ready after two tries.

In-progress shots.  The clothing layer will be the next session.

 The sketches I was working off of for the character's designs.