Hello everyone,

Today I have been working on Frank's shoes and here is what I have .

The shoe is finished, and I have started on the texture. This may take a while because I am hand painting the stitching on it, but I think that it will be worth it. I am using a normal map to define the overlapping leather of the shoe. Frank also now has a belt buckle and buttons.

Let me know what you think please guys,
cx

Another quick one

Hi guys, just another quick update for you.
I think I have finished Frank's body, apart from the shoes and hands.
According to my self made schedule, I have tomorrow to finish Frank's shoe's.
I think that I will add the Hands to the Head schedule, because they are both skin based and it makes more sense to do them together.

Here is a What I have so far:

I will let you know tomorrow where I am up to,
until then, goodnight.
cx

beltish

Hey guys,
Just a quick update to show what I'm doing.
I've now added a belt and added a normal for the material, but I still need to add the belt buckle.

I still need to add shoes and hands to this model, but I will do that soon. I will let you see as soon as I have done anything else.

As usual let me know what you think please guys,

cx

textured pants

I fiddled with mudbox today and I've put a basic texture on it to match the jacket.

I wanted to use xnormal to extract the ambient occlusion and normal map, as it gives better results, but the machine that I'm on hasnt got it, so I will do that when I am at home.
Here is what I have done today.

Let me know what you think please guys
cx

pants!

Just a quick one, here is a picture of the trousers so far.

I only have the Front so far, so now I will work on the sides and the back. Oh by the way, I know that there isnt a belt buckle, but that will be a seperate asset, as will the buttons on the jacket.

Let me know what you think please guys.
cx

Jacket

Hey all,
I've been working on Frank's jacket today.
I added the smaller detail, such as seams etc in mudbox, and I have worked the fabric into the normal map so now we have a more realistic result.

Here is the progression of today.

Working in the detail in mudbox

New normal map with shading added

I reduced the amount of shading used

I added a normal overlay of the fabric but it's too strong

I lowered the strength of the weave and this is the final result

I am really happy with how this turned out and I am hoping to get the pants and shirt to a similar standard.

Let me know what you think please people.
cx

Noodle update

Hey all,
just a quick update abotu the noodle shop. I worked on the diffuse, specular and normal for my stools on the noodle bar and here is what I have.

I'm going to stop working on this for now and get Frank done, then I will get everything else to this level. I want to make sure that I've got everything at an acceptable level and then I can go back and add more detail etc should the need arise.

Let me know what you think please all,

cx

Frank who?

Hey all,
today I decided to give Frank the day off and work on my scene buildings, so I worked on a normal and specular map for my noodle bar. This took a little longer than expected because I haven't made a normal map by hand for a while, since for the duration of the last project we used mudbox to create them.

Here is a quick render of what I have so far.

Before

After

After more tinkery

I also did some test render whilst I was playing with the normals to see what kind of effect I was getting.

As usual, let me know what you think please guys.
cx

Quick update

Hi guys.
I didn't get a chance to do too much yesterday as I spent most of the day freaking out about the HUGE earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Spent most of the time checking that everyone I know over there are ok, and so far so good.
I did a couple of tests with x normal to see what gave the better results for normals and ambient occlusion, mudbox, or x normal, and here are the results.

MudBox Ambient occlusion

XNormal Ambient occlusion

MudBox Normal

XNormal Normal

I think that the Xnormal results are better, and more natural but I think that it really depends on the subject that you are working on.

I did a quick diffuse map which turned out like this

I didn't really like the colour, so I have re done it like this

I think that this colour looks a little more natural and worn.

There is still a lot of work to do, but I am enjoying it, but also looking forward to seeing the final results.

Let me know what you guys think please.

Cx

P.S. My thought are with all the people of Japan who are suffering. Please take a moment to think of them.

back in the mud

Hi guys. After speaking to Dean and realising that the last jacket attempt was rather rubbish, I re-started it. Hopefully this is a bit better now.
Here is what I have so far.

I think im going to try a quick ao pass and give it a quick diffuse to see how it looks.
Let me know what you think please guys.
cx