Playing with Mud

Over this weekend I've dedicated my weekend to getting my UVs done. I painted the textures in photoshop and stuck them on my low poly model. From there I was able to fix up the seams with relative success. There are a couple of intersections between three cuts which were a bit tricky to get the blend of colours perfect and I imagine better planning with splitting UVs could avoid such problems. Luckily it is minor enough I should be able to conceal it in Mudbox.

Speaking of the Dirtycube, I have done some high-poly work and am getting a feel for the program. This is what I managed to accomplish today;

I plan to add the eyes in Maya after completing my high poly model as a simple black blinn will accomplish the look I want for them and attaching them to the model prior is a nightmare. As far as the webbing is concerned I will try to get it done but it is low on my priority list as it will likely cause complications and is not entirely necessary.
For now I need to put my high poly model on hold as my Computer Science partner James has been unable to get my initial model to work in Unity and I suspect it is because of the nCloth deformer I used in the webbing. For this reason I need to animate my low poly model for him to use.

Plan of Action

Now that I have finished my base UVs I need to start working on the textures for my spider. The following images are variants of brown recluse spiders. As my swimming recluse is found in reefs and large rockpools the colouration of the shell would be coloured grey with brown and orange spots or highlights.

I also took a look at crab carapaces because the swimming recluse's exoskeleton hardens to become crab-like. I envision the colour to be closer to the first image, opposed to the orange ones further down.

This kind of texture is what I'm looking for to put on the main shell.

The underside of the swimming recluse will have a lot of bumps and valleys like a crab but I have left these to be represented by the normal map I will create in Mudbox.

So my current plan of action is to paint my base textures first and then create a high poly model. From there I will create a normal map and ambient occlusion map to make everything look sweet.

Down Here It's Better

Down where it's wetter, under the sea (doo-doo-do-dee-dee)! I've been re-modelling my swimming recluse so it doesn't have nearly as much screwed up geometry in it but today I also started looking at potential textures for a basic environment for the high resolution model to inhabit. I found the site http://creativity103.com/ which was generous enough to provide some textures I can turn into a simple coral reef.

I've also nearly finished my remodelling of my Low Poly Swimming Recluse. I still have to UV map it, pose it and sculpt onto it in Mudbox but things are coming along nicely.

I'll add the eyes and webbing once I know it is safe to do so.

Playing the Player

I've been conceptualising more level ideas for EOF. The first concepts are just basic puzzles for extrusion that we could easily implement to fill out content and give the game a decent amount of play time.

They're pretty self explanatory. Well I think so anyway...

The next puzzle come from an idea we were discussing in class. Pretty much we are considering putting in a number of puzzles that mess with the player by either changing up what the controls do or by including indirect measures to progress. This one in particular is a 3D corridor complex that removes the player's ability to walk, replacing it with a marble-maze style world rotation interaction.

'W' and 'S' rotate the world along the y axis and 'A' and 'D' rotate it along the z axis (this is the x axis on the sketch but that wouldn't achieve what is needed to move effectively). The mouse still controls the player's POV so they can adjust the direction they are looking before they rotate the world. What would actually be happening is the gravity vector would just be jumping around the map but it would result in the player falling their way to the exit.

There could also be a number of dead ends just to make the level more confusing >:)

Another room could have the player see everything upside down and inverted and there are platforms the player needs to jump between with the new controls. 

Baking Spider Muffins

Looking over what I've got for 2a is a little messy but ultimately satisfying. I'm really pleased with my model's animation cycle and I think it looks good on a whole. Considering the method of production I may have to remodel it from scratch for 2b but have gotten my skills back for Maya that isn't nearly as daunting a task as it initially sounded.

These are some renders of the swimming recluse static and mobile:

Unfortunately the nCloth tail won't render for some reason so I can't show the movement cycle. You'll just have to take my word that it looks kickass. Unity reject nCloth too so even though the animation was baked correctly and everything it is a little glitchy because there are no joints for unity to attach the cloth verticies to.

From here I intend to clean up the model to export it for 3D print. If in doubt - triangulate... It looks like I'm going to have to cut the model in two and scale them up so it isn't so flimsy. Also, to Maya, this is why I have trust issues;

Cross-Computer Confusion

So everything was going swimmingly (ahaa!) as I was working on my recluse's swim cycle. I even managed to get a spline and nCloth to talk to each other and make a working tail. It was all sorts of awesome. Anyway, I just got home and checked my files and one of the palpus' IK stopped working at some point during the transfer from the uni computers to my own computer. Worst of all so did the tail. I only tampered with the file a little bit in this mode but that was from my computer; my usb still holds the original so hopefully I haven't lost my entire day's work to a crappy miscommunication of code.

So yeah, there's some pretty hardcore stuff going on here. The tail legs are all 8-9 joint splines with nCloth membrane stiched between them. The animation of said membrane is not the best since there are veticies flying everywhere but that's what I expected from a "low-poly" model.

My brain is melting. I'm going to bed.

Putting the "Fine" in Refinement Modelling

Going off advice from numerous sources I decided to clean up my model before I make any attempts at rigging. Unfortunately last night as I was finishing up attaching the second to last set of legs to make my model a singular polygon, Maya crash with a "fatal error" and corrupted the save file to the point where it was unusable. As Maya has a history of throwing its toys I had two back-up saves. I had, however, made a zealous attempt to get all the stitching done in one sweep so I lost about 4 hours work. Due to the setback it took me until now to finish the model properly. But here we are at last :)

...and yes it is just shy of 10,000 polys. It's a learning curve. Everything is a learning curve. Always with the learning and the curving...