Level Design - Forest Section

After the main movement scripting was completed I started to sketch out some level designs for the forest section of our game. The overall layout of the game will be mainly the same as the designs, however the environmental assets will look somewhat different as they are being made by Jez and Elliot.

Game Dev model - Problems, changes and rigging.

 While re-modeling the game dev i came across a few problems and had to make a few changes. During development i was having huge trouble trying to get hair on the game dev that i was happy with, i tried different ways but just couldn't get my head around how it could be done. Just in case worse came to worse, i modeled a hat to avoid doing hair. This is something i really wanted to avoid as it drifts way too far away from the original concept.

 

 To give myself a break from trying the hair i decided to try and get some texturing done. This was mainly a test at the time just to see what could be achieved with the hand painted look.I started to try and get to grips with painting clothes and folds in the material. I was quite happy with the t-shirt but i wasn't sure about keeping it grey like in the original concept.

 

 After i was reasonably happy with the model, i also wanted to try and rig and skin the game dev to try and get a early version in as soon as possible. This is something that isn't my strong point and spent a lot of time trying to learn the workflow and process of rigging a mesh with a skeleton and then skinning that skeleton to the mesh. At first i was trying to create a skeleton from scratch with the bone tool within maya because i knew we would need extra bones for the hair (i imagined a nice animated hair bop) and for the bag (also bopping with a walk) but this proved to be quite difficult and ended up spending way to much time trying to get it to work.

As you can see here the gamedev was originally meant to have a bag with him but due to rigging problems i am going to have to do it without. I personally wasn't sure how to skin the extra bones for the bag or how to get this type of skeleton setup working for HumanIK.
HumanIK seemed like a more do-able way to get a working skeleton with IK handles used to animate and control believable parts of the rig.

(Updated)

After i eventually got a better hair base, i used the opportunity to learn zBrush for sculpting. Using the zBrush workflow i was to learn the process of importing normal maps from a high poly sculpt onto a low poly, i had quite a few problems to begin with. This workflow sometimes proved quite difficult but trying different techniques on other software (like xNormal, zBrush, Mudbox, Maya, 3DS Max) means i now have a much better understanding and will use this process a lot in the future.

Once i started trying to bake a normal map from the high poly sculpt, i found that my low poly version was maybe too low poly so it was hard to get the normal maps to look right. After discussing with the team we decided it would be fine to higher his poly count.  So using the smooth Mesh in Maya i increased his poly count from 1.5k to 8k, nothing else in the game will be anywhere near this polycount so i believe we can spare the draw calls on getting a better looking main character, this also means he should animate/deform better.

After a lot of hassle and learning, the rig was eventually done and complete. In the end i used a different type of skinning detection called heat map, this seem to give us a quick result for the time being. Even though i didn't manage to completely rig it myself i have learned a lot about the process and got to grips with using HumanIK. As i don't have very strong skills in animating i advised Luke to see what he can find online

Complete Rig and Pose.