- To Create 2 High Quality Photorealistic Digital Doubles in One week.
- To Texture Paint Sci-Fi All terrain Mars Explorer Vehicle in One week.
I started off with creating rough photogeometry mesh with reference photographs I was given. It helped me to clearly understand the poroportions of the subjects more clearly. Then I Used that rough mesh to sculpt a more detailed and precise model inside Zbrush. That high resolution mesh is then retopologized and low dense meshes were generated for sake of ease of riggin and animation. Then Normals and Heightmap textures were extracted form contrast of two meshes. Those Maps were used in regenerating the original sculpt details in Render time in v-ray.
Armor was modeled inside 3ds max. But It was Very time consuming if I was to create the sharp ridges of the armor manually. So I created the rest of the shape inside 3ds max and unwrapped it, and took it inside 3d coat. There, I drew a hightmap to define the ridge lines of the armor and took the mesh in to zbrush and subdivided the armor several times without smoothing on. Then I applied the painted heightmap on to the armor as displacement and retopologized the final mesh.
Terra Formars fig 1 : Final Look of Asset 'Tesuka'
Terra Formars fig 2 : Final Look of Asset 'Mari'
Texturing of the Mars Explorer was done inside 3D Coat. The asset consisted of 216 Parts. I used OBJ format to get the asset form 3ds max to 3D Coat. 3D Coat however, seperates UVs of imported objects based on their material (If we import an asset with two objects with two UV sets but same material, 3D Coat merges the UV sets of those two objects resulting UV orelapping).
Because of above reason, I wrote a small maxscript snip that once I run it after selecting the bunch of objects I want to take to 3D Coat, it applies unique material to each object automatically. Each material is given the same name as the object it gets applied to. You can get that small script from the link below.
After importing the asset to 3D Coat, Appropreate UV sizes are given to each object. Based on their size and importance (Bigger, more prominent objects of the model are given bigger Map sizes while smaller, non-prominent objects were given smaller map sizes). Finally, Asset consisted of Maps ranging from 8K to 1K. Additional small details were added using painting normal map details inside 3D Coat.
Terra Formars fig 3 : Textured Mars Explorer asset in Terra Formars movie
