Sorry that we skipped the model for now

Digital Choi Material development

This project from it's creation was intended to push my limits to the max. While this was easy for things like dynamics and rigging, thinking up complex material types to deal with is still a bit of a challenge. Design of the materials hinged mainly off deciding on a pipeline, the process I intended to use to get my  character from being a simple model all the way to a production ready character, the choice for me as far as materials were concerned was to render using mental Ray. After locking this decision down I could start designing materials that would work with this rendering package and add the most to my character. the following page will go over creating the subsurface shader for the head, building the complex network of belts and straps to cover the upper body, and working on a complex blinn layered shader for the pants.

skin and eyes: subsurface scattering

The skin of Digital Choi has been the longest development cycle of anything I've probably ever made. I started texturing the head shortly before I won the bet last year at this time, and while I took a break from the character, I was looking forward to pushing him to the next level. Deciding to use the subsurface shader was probably the best decision I could have made, the control is amazing. and while it requires a whole lot of tweaking not only of the numbers in the attribute window, but also a lot of adjusting levels in photoshop. to the right is a screen shot of the attributes I set for my face. What you can't see here is that the shader is setup to a light map that I have saved in my data folder as sss-lightmap. The skin is them build around four textures I got the base of the texture in bodypaint and then taking them into photoshop and tooling about with them, while they still need some effort I think they are approaching the level of realism that I am looking for.

The combination of these surfaces allows for the computer to render skin in a physically accurate manner. but I found that adjusting one texture caused me to have to go and adjust every other texture, I also decided initially to separate the ears from the head and later I went back and re-attached them and adjusted some other problems with texture stretching as my ability to lay out uv's is improving. I think if I was to start over ( which will probably happen ) I would start with painting the backscatter map and getting it to do what I want it to do to the model. then I would get the diffuse to look good on the surface and use it to generate the subdermal and epidermal working my way out. The eyes have a similar material applied to them but are only using maps on the diffuse and secondary specular channels.

Coat of belts: multi-surface material

This was without a doubt the hardest thing I have ever done in texturing. The character from his creation was intended for complex action and fast moving battle sequences. So designing a detailed surface that can read well with the character running full tilt, breaing an aqueduct, or just doing a little parkour was crucial. Given the detailed nature of the surface is what brought the challenge.

First steps

the first step in creating this texture was in my research phase, as you probably read on the front page of the site was in finding some little leather straps that I was hoarding in my collection of stuff at home. the tangible resource of making a little sheild and building a patchwork of leather straps was a great base for this texture. after getting this great scan I was able to place the base of the color map using the UV layout for the chest as a guide. Next came the impossible task(or so I thought!!) of trying to match all the belts along the seams of the character. While I wasn't so much a fan of bodypaint at the beginning of the quarter I quickly saw the benifit of this program as it allowed me to paint directly on the model with relative ease. Not only was it fast but Bodypaint allowed me the creative freedom to pick and choose the parts of the pattern and play a very grown up version of connect the Dots(straps) turning something I had started to dread into a delight. while the texture still needs some work I feel the I have approaced a great start for what will be yet another highlight to my character.

Bump or Displacement?

After getting a great start in Bodypaint I started building the bump map, I had a big decision to make between using bump maps or attempting to get a good displacement shader going. With interest to time I decided to shoot for the bump, but also to develop a map that could hold up with the displacement shader. preliminary tests suggest that I could eventually get this texture to serve as a bump map, The process was pretty simple once I had the diffuse map working. I selected areas on that I wanted to exist on the bottom and started painting in photoshop with a low opacity black on multiply and just worked the layers untill I started to see parts of my map subside into the layers of the coat. then I worked with a white on low opacity screen to bring some of the coat to the foreground. keeping the black and white additions on separate layers definately gave me a level of control over how white or black I wanted some areas to get, and always allowed me to delete the changes I made if neccessary. I learned some of these tricks after hearing some people talk about a personal visit they had with a texture artist who visited the university this quarter, and being able to preserve my changes in a non-destructive way, gave me options throughout the creative process.

Mixing it up: coloring the map

After getting the bump to start working I found that the coat was getting lost in the renders and reading as a big field of brown, so I started messing around with the saturate, desaturate brushes. And also adding color to some of the straps using different layers in many opacities I found that this started to break up the pattern a little. As I continue to work on the files I think I might add some non- leather bandages and things to the final layers of the image. Adding these additional passes really helped when it came time to create the specular pass. I was able to turn up or down the intesity of my additions for the final image, which gave me a whole lot of interesting effects where the coat touched light. I found it most interesting that while the base layers on their own looked overcolored and slightly stupid, the final render of these really made the renders pop!!

Dragonhide casual: Pants

This surface has been challenging since it is one surface but it has a whole lot going on, when you wear armor in real life and it sits on your clothing in the heat your clothes start to collect the patina that the metal itself gives off, for ferrous metals ( those containing iron) this funk is usually rust colored. where non-ferrous metals like silver leave a dingy brown/black gunk. the hero's armor is mythrill which is a fantasy substance but I imagine it would patina like silver but leave the patterns and wear that come from iron. while the area under his pants have this gunky buildup going on, the bottoms of his pants are covered in a slightly wet mud from the road. either kicked up by his beast or a direct result of walking on the ground I want the ability to turn the muck on and off using the texture, I hope to simulate the wet through controlling specular eccentricity, fall off, and reflectivity through maps and will switch them by adding a blend node. By preserving a non-destructive workflow and keeping the muck, the mud and the wet areas on separate layers in photoshop it has made it very easy to create a variety of different maps by just playing with levels on different layers. one thing I did not expect was that controlling a layer using a map means really understanding the value that your gray is putting into the system, mental ray was very touchy when I applied the different maps so it still needs some adjustment. the legs are a little greasy the butt is soft and dusty and the bottom is supposed to look wet. through some adjustment I think it will get there.