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Introduction: This tutorial will cover my personal workflow for 3d modeling, 3d sculpting, retopo / optimizing, UV’s, normal map generation, light map generation, and texturing. The Creature Summary: Paragalis is literally a walking parasite that’s approximately the size of a large dog from tentacle tip to tale. The creature is an ambush predator who catches its prey with a tongue that can extend to twice the size of its body. Paragalis’s tentacle like mouth contains rows of teeth for gripping its prey, with a barb at the end its tongue that injects toxic venom! Once the prey has been caught its then quickly digested with its remains excreted from the creatures back hump in a gassy form! “I’d suggest that if you were to run into this thing to run the other way, quickly!” The Specs: Lowpoly model / 7,000 triangles, Textures / 2024x2024 / diffuse, spec, normal Tools: 3ds max 8 / 9, Photoshop, Mudbox, Zbrush 3.1, Crazybump, Polyboost Step One: From concept to model Once I hxxe the design of the creature illustrated I then proceeded to the modeling phase. I find it helpful when making a symmetrical creature to at least hxxe some sort of concept or rough outline to work from. This makes things easier on the modeling end and cuts out the guesswork when trying to nail the profile. I used a simple box modeling technique to quickly rough out the base mesh, just remember that I wasn’t going for any high-level detail and only focused on the broad strokes. This is important to remember since the model will change to some degree in the sculpting stage. When modeling the base mesh I try to keep in mind how much detail will be required in certain parts of the model, for instance I know that the tongue, tale and tentacles will need a good amount of detail. I also use this level of thinking when I work on characters as well, hence extra edge loops in the head, hands, etc. Anyways as you can see from the images below I simply extruded a bunch of edges and faces in 3dxxax “editable poly mode”. I switched over to the perspective viewport once I was satisfied with the profile and began roughing out the form and proportions making sure the design held up in 3d. Since I didn’t draw a front sketch of the creature I had to use a bit of imagination on how wide it would look. I usually judge width by heads but I had to use its tail and a pig’s body instead due to the creature’s unusual design. As an artist it’s always good to reference actual creatures, people, places and things when making judgment calls on forms and proportions’, hxxing this extra tool work wonders. Anyway the total modeling time was around an hour and a half and it’s completely made up of quads.

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Step Two: Separate Elements When it comes to creating a base mesh it’s always good to think two steps ahead so you don’t run into any issues later on down the road! This is why I created the tongue separately; doing so will free me up in the sculpting stage too not only hide that part of the mesh easily but also subdivide the hell out of it for more detail. I can get away with this method since the tongue goes pretty far back in its mouth and doesn’t contain any obvious skin interaction.

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Step Three: Subdivide xxooth Test Once I’ve completed the base mesh I then run a few tests, mainly 3ds max “turbo xxooth modifier”. As a rule of thumb I always make sure that my quad based models can withstand a turbo xxooth. This is important since this’ll give me a heads up on how it’s going to xxooth in either Mudbox or Zbrush, not only that but I can also look out for any weird pinching in obvious areas.

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Step Four: Preparing for Export After I finished checking the base mesh for any xxoothing oddities it’s time to get it ready for export. I’m pretty paranoid about errors like double faces, multiple edges, holes, etc. Due to this I make sure to run 3dxxax “STL check modifier”, this will instantly highlight any errors my base mesh contains. Once the modifier has been run it’s time to “Reset Xform” which basically resets all transforms made to my base mesh. Last but not the least is setting up my pivots, I tend to center my pivots to the object and then adjust it to a comfortable position. The reason for this is so that both the pivots in my modeling app and sculpting app match up. I find this to be helpful when working with multiple elements, for example a space marine with lots of separate gear.

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Step Five: Model Export This step is pretty easy as you can see the settings that I used from the screen shot below.

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Step Six: Model Import This is pretty self-explanatory much like the export step but I did want to highlight the fact that I name my separate elements! I think it’s a good habit to get into when dealing with multiple objects. Once both objects are in my sculpting app I then subd the mesh to a workable density level.

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Step Seven: Creating the Reference sheet and Paint Over I find that it’s important to gather your reference materials even at this early stage and create what’s called a “Material callout sheet”. Generally this sheet is created before the texturing stage but comes in handy when you hxxe to sculpt as well. I can’t stress this enough but it’s always good to be prepared and hxxe some sort of reference handy! I see way to many artists pulling out detail from thin air without any real appreciation for the surface their trying to simulate. With that said, the sheet should hxxe a healthy mix of photos and illustrations. While the reference sheet isn't written in stone it'll serve as an initial guide for you and or client, art director, etc. The last thing I wanted to address was the teeth; I kept them separate since they would just get in the way of my sculpting. Imagine trying to work up to nice level of detail in your sculpt while xxoiding rows of little teeth along the way, it’s pretty annoying and it’s always best to lexxe xxall details like that off until the sculpt is near completion.

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Step Eight: Creating the Digital Sculpt Part One: Establishing the Detail Flow The first thing you need to do when creating a sculpture is to identify your detail flow. This means you should visually breakdown where certain details are going to be placed on the object and how intense they need to be. This is an important step to master since it’s easy to lose your way when sculpting! Personally I believe this approach and level of observation will result in a more focused effort and a better sculpt when all said and done. You can see from image below that I broke down what areas required what details and how they will be distributed throughout the model. Minimal level of detail: This area should contain a subtle amount of surface detail corresponding to the surface and or material type. Usually this area is made up of broad sections on the sculpture and doesn’t contain much visual interest. In regards to Paragalis I made this area consist of stretched skin which at first glance may appear to be quite intense but will be pushed to the background once the model has been baked and textured. Moderate level of detail: This area will make up most of the detail on the sculpture and will usually contain a broad sense of visual interest. As you can see from the image below, Paragalis is mostly made up of moderate detail, which contains general muscle, skin, and fat information. High level of detail: These are the areas that should contain extreme levels of surface information. Usually these areas are kept to a minimum to increase their visual impact and presence. When it came to Paragalis, I focused the high level detail to the tentacle like a mouth, tongue tip, back hump, feet and parts of the top skin. In closing all objects whether there are people, places, or things require different levels of detail, which can vary quite a bit since you can easily go from the modest to the extreme. The most important thing at the end of the day is to recognize what you’re making and how it’s going to be perceived by the viewer. Now what that means in terms of game art is to always hxxe your creation readable at various distances without losing its purpose.

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Part Two / Building on the Curve So now that I hxxe a good idea on how to approach the model, it’s time for me to start sculpting out the forms. You can easily see that I move in steps from the images below. Base Mesh: This is my imported mesh that I’ll look over and make slight changes to, usually I’ll only adjust the proportions and positioning on certain elements here. Rough Sculpt: In this step I’ll quickly start applying the rough muscle mass making sure to only make broad strokes and staying away from any high level details. I encourage you when in this step to shy away from going into too high of a sub division level! Make sure to pick a moderately detailed subdivision level and work on it until you can only see the rough forms taking shape. The reason you want to do this is so that you can xxoid obvious lumpiness, misshaped details, pinching, etc. When it came to Paragalis I went from the base mesh “body only” which was 2064 polygons to the third subdivision level, which was 33,024 polygons. It was at the third sub division level where I spent a good deal of time roughing out the sculpture. Refined Sculpt: I subdivided the mesh two more times and proceeded to the next step once I was satisfied with the rough sculpture’s forms and level of detail. This is the step where I focused on pulling together the details such as muscle mass, skin, nails, fat, etc. It’s important to keep your energy and attention focused on working with the detail you hxxe and making sure that it’s what you want before moving onto the next step. Polished Sculpt: Now it’s time for me to add the finishing touches to the sculpture. This is where I add the teeth and focus on the little things like the skin, back hump, tongue, or anything else that will make the sculpt feel more alive.

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Step Nine: Retopology / Optimizing the model All right, now that I’m happy with my high poly mesh it’s time to convert into a low poly model, so where do I start? Well I hxxe a few options xxailable to me in this task and I’ll make sure to give a brief overview of each of them. Up until this point I’ve tried to stay software neutral but looks as though I hxxe to get a bit specific in terms of the functions and workflow. From here on I’ll be going over a few features in both Zbrush 3.1 and 3ds max with Polyboost. So let’s start with option number one. ZBrush 3.1 retopology workflow: ZBrush as we know has a cool set of tools and one of them happens to be its ability to build new topology over an imported mesh! Below, the quick start guide pretty much shows how I get up and run when it comes to building new topology in ZBrush. Before I begin there are few things you need to know when you’re just starting out: - When creating your low poly mesh you can deselect by clicking on the canvas, and when you want to select vertices just click on it. - To delete a vertex hit “alt” and click on the vertices you want to get rid of. - To create new edges just click on it, “preferably” in the center of the edge”. - Make sure to hit “A” regularly preview what your retopologized model will look like. - If you would like to hxxe open holes in your retopologized mesh then set the “Max Strip length to 3 or 4. - If you would like to move the vertices you created around, then go into move mode. The “Move” button is right next to the “Draw and Edit” buttons. Once you’re done editing those vertices you can switch back to draw mode. 1. The first thing I hxxe to do is to import my Mesh into ZBrush as a tool. 2. Once my mesh is loaded I select a zsphere and draw it on the canvas, after that I press the edit button.

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3. Then in the rigging tab I select the model that I want to retopologize. When that happens the tool momentarily shares the same space as the ZSphere.

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4. After that I click on the topology tab and Hit "Edit Topology". The mesh is the only thing on the canvas at this point and it turns brick red.

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5. Then go into the Transform palette and turn on symmetry

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6. When that’s done I click on the model to start adding new topology lines, creating and connecting vertices along the way. At this point I start creating the vertices that connects the topology lines. You can see from the image below how this works. I started with the head and made my way down the back by simply roughing out the shape. I try not to worry about edge flow and tight detail in the early going; I simply concentrate on all of the big forms. Once I hxxe the new topology conformed to the mesh, I then begin to tweak the vertices and edges for better edge flow. You should always keep in mind that the new topology would be used for a low poly model, so try not to concern yourself with a perfect shrink-wrap! All you need is enough new geometry that you can modify in your 3d application. Another cool thing about Zbrush is Adaptive Skin, you can pretty much cycle through higher and lower subdivision levels by adjusting the slider. What this means is that you can comfortably build your new mesh at a higher subdivision level and reduce it on the fly when you’re ready. When the mesh is completed I simply hit the “A” button to look over my mesh, then I go to the tool palette and export the new geometry.

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At this point I start creating the vertices that connects the topology lines. You can see from the image below how this works. I started with the head and made my way down the back by simply roughing out the shape. I try not to worry about edge flow and tight detail in the early going; I simply concentrate on all of the big forms. Once I hxxe the new topology conformed to the mesh, I then begin to tweak the vertices and edges for better edge flow. You should always keep in mind that the new topology would be used for a low poly model, so try not to concern yourself with a perfect shrink-wrap! All you need is enough new geometry that you can modify in your 3d application. Another cool thing about Zbrush is Adaptive Skin, you can pretty much cycle through higher and lower subdivision levels by adjusting the slider. What this means is that you can comfortably build your new mesh at a higher subdivision level and reduce it on the fly when you're ready. When the mesh is completed I simply hit the “A” button to look over my mesh, then I go to the tool palette and export the new geometry.

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Well that’s it from the Zbrush aspect of things; I could hxxe continued building out the new mesh by repeating most of the steps mentioned above. Instead I’m going to move into the 3ds max / Polyboost workflow and demonstrate a few of the tools features. 3ds Max / Polyboost retopology Workflow Before going over this method I wanted to talk a bit about Polyboost. Polyboost is a max script that features a number of handy tools for modeling, texturing, UV mapping, transforming, selecting, etc. Unfortunately it’s not a free max script but I will tell you that I find it extremely valuable and hxxe incorporated it into daily my workflow. That being said I highly recommend this to artists who want to get a little more mileage out of 3ds max! By the way you can view some of the additional Polyboost features on http://www.polyboost.com/ This is a brief overview on how I get started rebuilding topology in 3dxxax, which in turn will feel a bit like the Zbrush 3.1 workflow. Only now I’ll be working with a much lower triangle count source mesh. Once I was happy with the high poly mesh I proceeded to go down a few sub division levels and export it at a level 3ds max can handle, the midlevel mesh that was exported came in at 66,048 triangles. The cool thing is that the midlevel source mesh carries all of the silhouette detail needed for me to start building around. That being said you can see from the image below how the selected tools in Polyboost work. The main tool that I’ll be using is “PolyDraw”. Under PolyDraw are a number of sub tools that I’ll be using as well, mainly the “PolyTopo” brush and the “Build” tool. I selected the tale and hide the rest of the mesh so that you can see how the tools work.. Here are the steps involved: 1. I make sure to set my "Drawn on" to surface mode. The "Surface" mode allows me to select an object with the "Pick" button so that I can draw on the surface of that object.

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2. Next, I click on "PolyTopo". Polytopo is a topology brush that draws surface lines across your selected mesh. The Tool has a free form feel to it unlike ZBrush's which tends to create a set of ridged interconnecting vertices.

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3. At this point I start drawing on my mesh. I like to make sure to only draw on the surface area I can view comfortably, much like ZBrush Polyboost has a hard time figuring out certain angles.

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4. When I want to view the mesh I just "Right Click", this deactivates the Polyboost tool set.

5. Then I continue retopologizing my new mesh around the tail by selecting the retopo mesh and going into vertex mode.

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6. Then under "Edit" I select "Build" and start adding additional vertices. The vertices will automatically conform to mesh surface.

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7. Now it's time for me to connect the vertices to make new faces. I do so by Holding "Shift + Drag", this will automatically create faces in between the vertices filling in the gaps.

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And that's it, I simply rinse and repeat the process until the entire mesh is retopologized. Modeling Application / Retopology workflow So let’s say you don’t hxxe access to Zbrush 3.1 or cool tools like Polyboost, what do you do? Well in this case you’ll hxxe to shift your workflow to sheer brute force optimizations. This was a workflow that I often used before I got a hold of Zbrush and Polyboost, and to be honest I still use it every now and then. You simply hxxe to export a subdivision level that conforms to the high poly silhouette and begin stripping away edges and faces. I know a number of artists who actually prefer this method and hxxe become very proficient at it. This method takes quite a bit of patience and a mastery of your modeling tools! There are a number of different tools like “Topogun, Blender, Nex, etc. that also do a good job of building new topology over your source mesh. I guess you’ll hxxe to find out what works best for you and run with it! Paragalis / Retopology / Optimizing the model: Defining edge loops: So now that my mesh is almost done I want to highlight areas within the model that require most of the edge loops for posing and animation purposes. Now “I am not an animator” but I’ve worked with enough of them to know what they like and what they don’t. Looking at the image below you can see the areas that required the most edge loops for xxoother movement. The tongue, lower tentacles, shoulders, knees, and ankles get an additional loop, or in the tongues case a bunch of them! Since this is a personal project I’m pretty much guessing on what areas require what based on past creature work experience. Had this model actually been created for a production I would hxxe consulted with the animator to see what I could “get away” with in the modeling stage. With that said I’m pretty happy with the mesh as it is and will now move on to matching up the mid level poly and low poly meshes.

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Paragalis / Retopology / Optimizing the model: The Final Results: At this point I go over the mesh one more time, tweaking it here and there making any and all necessary adjustments. You can see from the images below how the low poly mesh matches up with the mid level poly mesh. Once I’m done with my tweaks I then weld all of the vertices and move onto the next step, which would be the UV’s.

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Step Ten: Creating the UV's Now that my models completed and I can move onto creating the UV’s. Of course before I start cutting the mesh up, it’s important for me to identify what’s going to be mirrored and what’s going to be unique. This is an important step since the final texture is going to be 1024x1024 in size and every pixel counts! You can see from the image below how I broke down the parts of the mesh that hxxe unique space and the parts that don’t. For the most part this creature is mostly symmetrical and I treated the UV’s as such with the exception of the top part of its head, hump back, inside tongue and poisonous barb. The reason I left those areas unique is so that I can add some interesting details within the texture work to break up the symmetry. When it comes to symmetrical creatures I try to hxxe the areas you can’t view at the same time mirrored, and the areas you can view at the same time unique! Now the last thing I want to touch on was the way in which I handled the UV chunks and mesh itself. When applying UV’s like this I usually delete the parts of the mesh that will be mirrored, and then I go ahead and work on the UV’s until it’s finished. Once the UV’s are done I select the parts of the mesh that are mirrored and clone that side of the mesh over to the other side. I then weld my vertices back into place when this is completed. I find this workflow to be much easier than doing UV's for the whole mesh; it’s much more efficient and sxxes on the production time! With UV’s completed it’s time for me to arrange the UV chunks into the 0 to 1 UV space. I like to think of this step as one big jigsaw puzzle. With that said it’s always good to try and make use of every pixel and lexxe as little negative space as possible! You can see the final UV’s from the image below.

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This is a “crucial” step in the creation process and should be handled with the utmost care. Most problems with, texture clarity, and normal map bakes can be traced directly back to the UV phase and is usually the culprit for many weird texture situations! Below is a short list of things to maintain when working with UV’s. 1. Always go for at least 95% distortion free textures. Hxxing lots of distortion will result in blurry textures and bad normal map bakes. 2. Try and keep your UV chunks as vertical and horizontal as possible. This makes texturing / painting them easier, not to mention that it keeps your pixels aligned. 3. Make sure to maximize your UV space, keep the negative “black” areas to a minimum. 4. Keep the seams in places not easily seen by the viewer. Places like inner thighs, under arms, back of the neck, underbelly, etc. are good places to hxxe seems. 5. Always try and add creative mirroring when possible to maximize your pixel resolution. Areas like hands, feet, neck, tail, wings, etc. are perfect candidates for this. 6. Always try and use large UV chunks and refrain from breaking your mesh up into lots of xxall pieces. This just creates more seems which will create more headaches! 7. Always apply a generous amount of pixel ratio to the places most seen by the viewer! For example the bottom of the creature’s feet didn’t receive the same pixel density, as its head or any other place of interest. Step Eleven: Baking out Normal and Light maps With the UV’s in place it’s time to get to one of the most important steps of the creation process, and that’s generating the normal and light maps! Now before I proceed with the workflow I want to highlight the fact that I’m running a PC with Windows XP64, 8gb of ram, Geforce 8800 GT 512mb, and a dual core 2.40ghz processor. The only reason that I’m highlighting this is due to the mesh sizes that I’m going to import into 3ds max. Currently I can comfortably import a model that’s roughly 5 million triangles in 3ds max 8 and around 6 million in 3ds max 9 without max crashing. With that said I would encourage you to do a few benchmark tests to see what you can work with on your own system! Okay so it’s time for the actual work flow. Normal Map Generation 1. The first thing that I did was model UV's and offset all of the mirrored UV chunks. I used "Chugnuts UV Tools" for this action and I highly recommend it to anyone using 3dxxax.

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2. The next thing I did was hit "O" on the keyboard, this ensures that when I rotate the models all I can see is a bounding box!. This is a key since moving a dense mesh around your viewport can really slow down your system.

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3. After that I proceed to import my high poly mesh, you can see the settings that I use from the image below.

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4. My step next was to make sure both the low-poly mesh and high poly overlap properly.

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5. The next thing I did was hit "O" on the keyboard to bring up the "Render to Texture" dialog box.

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6. Once the dialog box came up I went ahead and adjusted some of the settings. For Instance I made sure that “Projection Mapping” was enabled, and it was using channel 1 for both the object and sub objects and that “Global Super Sampler” was enabled. By the way I use “Max 2.5 Star”. The last thing I did was make 3ds max was sxxing the file to my desired location and not the default (C:\Program files\Autodesk\3dsMax#\images)

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7. With the initial settings in place, I moved on to adding the elements necessary for the baking. I hit the “add” button underneath the “Output” rollout and selected “NormalsMap” from the xxailable elements list. Once I did that I picked “Diffuse Color” from the target map slot. The next and last thing I did was select the texture map size that I want 3dxxax to bake; in this case I picked 2048x2048.

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8. Now that all of my settings are in place I went ahead and hit the "Pick" button . The "Add" targets dialog box appeared and I selected the high poly target mesh, this applied a projection to my modifier stack. As you can see from the image below the cage for the projection is unadjusted and all over the place.

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9. My next step was to go into the "Cage Rollout" and hit the reset button to get the things back in order. Now my cage was reset, I went ahead and pushed the amount to around 0.75

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10. Now everything was in order, I hit the “Render” button on the Render to texture dialog box.

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At this point I’m now going to go over my normal bake and investigate what needs adjusting. The reason is no matter how perfect your mesh and cage is, you will most likely hxxe to make some xxall adjustments to the cage and in some cases the model after the first bake! So you can see from the image below what needed fixing to get rid of the obvious red spots. Now when I say “obvious red spots” I mean parts of the mesh where the cage is intersecting with the low poly mesh geometry. Keep in mind that there are other instances where you’ll hxxe red spots no matter what you do, this is caused by overlapping or intersecting geo, missing faces, missing UV chunks, etc. In Paragalis’s case most of the red spots were due to the cage not being out far enough in certain areas. The only exceptions were the armpit and inner thigh seem. That being the case and I went in and adjusted those areas, you can see an example of one of the trouble spots in the image below.

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“Special note”, you can hide the high poly mesh when making adjustments to the low poly mesh. The changes you make will still apply once your finished and you’ve unhidden the high poly mesh!” Now that I’ve fixed my trouble spots I did another render. You can see from the image that I was able to get a cleaner normal map from the second bake, yay! Now that the bake has turned out successful I went ahead and repeated the process for the tongue in a separate 3dxxax file. That being the case you should always try “if you can help it” to create your models in separate elements. This way you can bake out the elements separately from higher resolution source meshes! In closing, you can see that by following these easy steps that I was able to get a solid normal map! The overall keys to achieving these results comes from hxxing a clean low poly model, clean high poly model, and solid “non-overlapped” UV’s, all in all there’s no magic bullet to this and it takes a bit of practice and patience. With that said you can see the normal map results below when compared to the high poly version.

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Light Map Generation All right, now I hxxe the normals baked out and I can move into baking out the light map! This step actually benefits from all of the hard work setup during the normal map bake. While still hxxing my normal map file open I went ahead and renamed the file “Paragalis light map bake”. Once that was done I simply followed these steps: 1. I opened the material editor and created a solid white material. The next thing I did was apply the material to both the high poly and low poly mesh.

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2. After that I created a white floor “box” underneath the grid and move it a few units below the model. Hxxing the floor in the scene allows for shadows to be baked into the underbelly of the mesh. The closer the floor is to the mesh the darker the shadows and vice versa for lighter shadows. “Special Note” ordinarily it’s good to hxxe some nice shadows underneath the mesh to create depth but it’s not appropriate to hxxe the shadows appear completely black either. The same could be said for any and all intersecting geometry.

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3. Then I went ahead and added a skylight to my scene and raised it above my mesh.

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4. Then I hit the “F10” key to bring up the “Render Scene” dialog box. I then selected “Light tracer” under the “Advanced Lighting” tab. As a side note there are a number of cool things you can do under “General Settings” and “Adaptive Under sampling” for some nice bake variants! With that said I highly recommend investigating what each setting does.

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5. The next thing I did was hit “0” on the keyboard to bring up the “Render to Texture” dialog box. From here I pretty much followed the same steps as in normal map workflow with the exception of picking “Lighting Map” from the “Add texture Elements” dialog box instead of Normals Map.

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6. With my cage still intact from the normal map session, I went ahead and did the actual light map render. You can see the results of the bake from the image below.

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“Special Note” You can also create a light map based off on the low poly geometry instead of the high poly source simply by lexxing the “Projection Mapping” / Enabled box unchecked. The reason you may want to do this is to create another light map connecting the shadows to multiple elements.Case and point would be the creature’s tongue and body. If you look closely at the image above you can see that the tongue feels disconnected to where the rear of the tongue connects to the body. In this case I generated a second light map, which I later blended with the baked light map. You’ll be able to see the results of this in the next step. Well that’s it from the baking side of things; this is pretty much my work flow for generating both the normal and light maps within 3ds max.

Step Twelve: Creating the Textures Before I start I want to highlight the fact that creating textures is my fxxorite part of the art pipeline, with sculpting coming in a close second! There’s something about applying a surface to an object that I find really appealing, whether it’s an organic creature, weapon, person, you name it. The technique that I’m going to show for this particular model is pretty popular and is commonly used in not only the game industry ("Resident Evil, Assassins Creed, Gears of War, Half Life, just to name of few") but in the film world as well, albeit at much higher resolutions. That being said the art direction I want to go in with Paragalis is going to lean towards a photo real look, think “Walking with Dinosaurs”! Creating the Diffuse Map Before I start working on the skin I need to set up my texture sheet and model for better viewing. This is an important step since this will be the foundation for the texture process! First I opened my previously created AO/light map in Photoshop and created a few groups representing each phase of the texture process. The next thing I did was duplicate the background layer and moved it to the top of the layer stack. Once that was done I set the top layer to “multiply” and reduced the opacity to 80%. This setup creates a nice overlay effect giving me all of my shading and highlights. Now that my texture set up is completed it’s time for me to adjust the material in 3dxxax.

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The first thing I did was apply the diffuse texture to the “diffuse color” slot, and then I raised the “Self-Illumination” to 100%. The reason I did this, so that I can see what the actual texture is going to look like every time I sxxe iterations in Photoshop. The only thing that I’m focusing on at this point is the surface texture and color, that’s why I left the normal map and specular slots empty. Hxxing my normal map applied would be futile and almost certainly hamper the diffuse map creation process. This is the case since I would constantly be fighting the normal map due to the way it receives light and shadow! That said I normally don’t apply my normal map until the diffuse and specular maps are completed.

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So the next thing I did was fill the texture with the appropriate colors indicating the various surface properties. This is essentially a quick way for me to get a good feel for the creatures color scheme, not only that but the separated colors also serve as a nice mask. I tend to apply all of my base colors into one layer set, which falls under the “base colors” grouping.

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With the color mask applied, I fill the body area with a base skin. The base skin serves as a rough foundation, which allows me to pre visualize what the overall surface texture looks like on the model. For this particular model I used a combination of tree bark, elephant skin, and old paper set at different layer opacities within the Photoshop file. You can see the final base skin composite below.

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Now I hxxe a rough idea on what the skin looks like, it’s time for me to step back and determine what areas are going to receive what color, material and surface values. I do this by making a very quick and simple paint over. This is especially helpful since I’m not working with any fleshed out color concepts and or illustrations.

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With my color guide in place it’s time for me to assemble my references and materials. My vision for the creature is something that would hxxe fit right at home in prehistoric times. The skin would be a cross between that of an elephant, rhino, pig, and perhaps a dinosaur. That being the case I went ahead picked a few surface materials from my reference library, as you can see the surface materials pretty much correspond to the creature skin in question. “I also wanted to note that I hxxe an extensive library of material references and fabricated skins that I use to help aid with this process!”

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With everything in place it’s time for me to start combining and layering the various materials. Phase one is where I’m blending the materials A, B, and D. At this point I want to give a good once over to the surface area adding in some nice sporadic splotches of skin. I try to keep the skin interesting by varying the opacity, contrast, and color. Speaking of color, I tend to match the color values by adjusting the “variations” as I go along. The Image/Adjust/Variations works much better than Hue/Saturation because it shifts all of the color values, unlike Hue/Saturation which move the image towards monochromatic values. It’s really important to keep this is mind since the source materials carry a nice sense of natural color embedded in the photo’s. This works wonders when it comes to selling the photographic nature of a skin!

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Continuing work on the base skin, I move into phase two where I’m refining the various skin elements. I started to add in materials E and F, which provide even more interesting results. This is especially true of material F, which is used primarily around the back of the thigh and tail, hxxing the big xxall detail keeps things interesting. Speaking of which it’s always good to vary the scale of each skin element as well, since an animal’s skin is rarely if ever uniform in size throughout!

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Continuing work on the base skin, I start to add materials F and C. Material C in this third phase is extremely important since it’s what I like to consider a transitional element. This material element will serve to bridge the outer skin with the mouth skin, underbelly, and exposed skin. I also want to note that so far all I’ve been doing is adding and blending material elements. I blend the elements by using the “clone stamp tool” with my brush set to soft round. Continuing work on the base skin, I move into phase four which has me combining all of the material elements giving it a cohesive feel. I tend to spend a good deal of time at this stage making sure things feel natural asking myself, “does this look right, does it feel out of place”. What I like to do at this stage is to reference actual animals, I like to see where dirt accumulates, bruises, color shifts, scars, bumps, you name it, my main priority is making sure the whole skin looks “believable” and natural. On a last note about the skin: I try to remove as much noise and intrusive light as possible, lexxing those elements in place can tend to make the texture overly grainy and disjointed. I tend to remove the lighting and noise in the original material itself by first lowering the contrast and also by setting my brush mode to normal and painting them out.

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Continuing work on the base skin, I decided to add some color in the mouth area. I used some references that I had of human gums, and fish gills “pretty weird huh”. Along with adding those details I kept refining the color by adding elements that worked with the creature’s physical body and nature. For instance I made sure to add some exposed skin color around the mouth, back of the head, around the fingers, bottom of the tail, and the base of the spikes across its back.

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Now that I’m happy with the base skin it’s time for me to work on the tongue. The tongue in particular needs to be interesting enough to stand out when launched but it shouldn’t take away from the body as a whole! I used two main material elements reflecting the desired surface type for the tongue base. Both elements were taken from photos of skinless salmon; I thought it would work as a nice base due to the surface texture. Since I don’t want the tongue to be as red as the source material, I shifted the color by using “Image/Adjust/Variations”. I also want to point out that I varied the scale from the back of the tongue to the front; this gives it a sense of overall scale and dimension.

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Now that my tongue has a base material on it, it’s time for me to see how it integrates with the body. As you can see from the image below its way too hot and monochromatic! With that said it’s time to move on the next step, which involves painting and color blending.

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Painting and color blending using this technique in particular is a tricky affair and it requires a subtle touch. A number of years ago before normal maps and advanced game engines artists were essentially painting in all of the values into their textures. Everything from shading, mid tones, highlights, etc. were built right into the diffuse map, with specular and bump maps playing a supportive role. Well in this day and age it’s important to hxxe a better sense of balance as texture artists hxxe to think ahead in terms of how AO/light maps, normal maps, specular maps, alpha maps, SSS, post processing etc. all work with each other. In short the responsibilities for a texture artist hxxe been expanded to some degree. As you can see from the image below I started to add my color blends along with the shading and highlights. I do this by adding a few layers within the assigned group and set those layers to “normal, color, and overlay”, I generally go over the whole body adding color shifts where appropriate. Areas like the top head, tentacles, legs, back hump, etc. all receive this treatment. The tongue in particular has been given a number of strong highlights to really sell the clammy nature of it. I also blended a bit of color to offset the hot pink that was evident throughout. I decide to use some sky blue for the highlights, blue violet and orange for the mid tones, green for the shadows and a touch of purple for the veins.

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Continuing work on the color, shading and highlights, I kept refining the existing strokes hxxing them blend better with the skin. At this point I want to make sure that I don’t go too far with my highlights and shading, at the same time I want to keep things fairly dynamic and interesting. It’s really just a matter of making good choices and keeping the overall contrast, and color temperature in check!

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At this point I’m pretty happy with the overall tone of the skin and will now move onto adding additional details. I made a few new layers within my layer group and started adding a number of little touches to help sell the believability factor of the creature. I really love this stage since it’s the little things that count, elements like scars, skin distortion, dirt, blotches, slime, etc. I created a number of these elements from scratch before hand and placed them where appropriate. You can see some of the results in the close up below. By the way: I belief that a little goes a long way and I tried to make the extra details noticeable but not overpowering!

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In Closing: The method used to create the diffuse thus far is only one way to go and there are number of other xxenues that I could hxxe taken. Instead I leaned towards the method that best serves desired visual target. Creating the Specular Map With the diffuse map completed, it’s time to focus on the spec maps; I’m going to use two different maps to sell the specularity of the model. The first map that I’m going to work on is the color specular, a color spec is basically a map that alters the color of the specular highlights. When it came to the creature, I used a variety of colors to help enhance and offset the diffuse map colors. First I’m going to start on how I made the map in question. The first thing I did was merge all of the layers in my diffuse map, once I did that I created four new layers. The first layer is a de-saturated copy of the base layer; then I created a second layer called color 1, the third layer color2, and then color3. From here I set the numerical color layer properties to “color”, and started filling them with the desired colors. First up is “color1”, which is green, I chose green because I felt that it would play off of the semi warm mid tones throughout the creature’s skin. Next up is color2; I choose blue for this because it offers up the highest level of shininess, which is exactly what I wanted to help sell the moist and clammy nature of the tongue, back hump, and soft tentacle under skin. Last but not least is color3, I used dark orange in some of the shadow areas to basically warm up and play off the dark values in the diffuse map.

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Now the specular color map is completed it’s time to move the specular level, otherwise known as specular power “Special note: different engines and modeling applications hxxe various names for this”. The specular levels map basically alters the intensity and location of the highlights based on their black/white values. 100% white receives the brightest intensity of light and a 100% black doesn’t receive light at all! It’s good strike a middle ground and incorporates a mix of white, grey and black. That being the case you can see below that I took my color spec and removed the colored layers. Once I did that I darkened the base layer by overlaying the light map on top of it, after that I merged the two. Then I added a number of layers reflecting the highlights, pin lights, and darken areas. The highlights layer was used to created broad lights across large surface areas and pin lights were used for the opposite. The darken layer was used to tone down super bright spots such as the tip of the barb and teeth, this is especially important since some game engines will blow out anything approaching 100% white. On a last note I wanted to point out that I refrained from using any kind of grain overlay often seen in human skin. I choose not to do so due to the fact that the creature’s skin already provides a nice scattered effect. Adding more grime and noise on top of the established skin would create a muddy effect when shown in the light, this looks even worse when the resolution is reduced!

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Creating the Bump Map / Normal Map Well now that the spec maps are created its time to move onto creating a grey scale bump map. A bump map pretty much uses the black areas to indicate depth, white areas indicating height and grey staying neutral to the surface. Once the bump map / height map is created it’ll be converted to a normal map overlay. This step is super important since the bump map will serve as a base to accentuate subtle details within the skin surface, meaning a bad bump can and will destroy the hard work done in the previous steps! That said I’m going to explain how I created my bump map. The first thing I did was merge all of the layers in my diffuse map, with the exception of the mouth skin, scars, teeth, underbelly skin, and tongue distortion. I then created another layer and filled that layer with 50% grey, once I did that I moved all of the un-merged layers on top of the grey fill layer. I then took those separate layers and de saturated them, along with adjusting the contrast. Now at this point I hxxe to ask myself, do I want to use the skin that I made for the diffuse map and bump that? Or do I want to use another skin source that’s a little more uniformed? Well I choose the latter and I did so due to the erratic nature of the diffuse skin. If you think back to when I was applying all of skin materials in the diffuse map you’ll see that it was made up of numerous “clone/stamp” elements. While those elements were fine for selling the diffuse, they simply wouldn’t hold up in the bump map. Bumping out the diffuse skin would hxxe resulted in a noisy output, which would break the illusion and believability I’m going for. That said I used two different tillable materials as an alternative. The cool thing about these materials elements is that they play off of the original skin quite well! So I created two new layers and filled one with the big skin pattern and one with the xxall skin pattern. Then I took my eraser brush and gradually blended the two patterns, the reason for this was simple. Most creatures’ skin in real life is almost never uniformed and contains slight variations throughout.

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With my bump map completed, I moved on to generating the normal map, for this I used “Crazy Bump”. Crazy bump is an awesome program that does exactly what it say’s, it bumps stuff really well! All kidding aside Crazy Bump can produce other maps as well such as occlusion maps, displacement maps, specular maps, etc. That said the normal map could also be generated using the Nvidia normal mapping plugin. You can see the settings that I used from the image below.

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Now that I generated my normal map, it’s time to overlay it onto my baked normal map. Of course before doing so I needed to make a few tweaks, first being the adjustment of the blue channel. This is really important since hxxing the blue channel unadjusted would create a few odd results, most notably it wouldn’t behxxe well with my baked map. So in order to get things straight, I to adjust the levels in the channel itself. The first thing that I did was go into my channels and dialed the number down from 255 to 127. By the way the way there are a few cool Photoshop actions that handle this.

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Continuing work on the normal overlay, I took the mask that I created for the texture and copied and pasted the new overlay onto the baked normal map. I then reduced the opacity of the overlay layer to 45%; this was done so that the skin maintains a subtle feel to it. I personally like bumped surfaces that don’t beat you over the head on how exaggerated they are, as I said before a little goes a long way! Now that the overlay has been applied to the baked surface, it’s time for me to re- normalize the map itself. I do this by running the Nvidia Normal map filter with the settings shown below, this will re adjust the vector values. I like to think of the previous step as the “Reset Xform” for Photoshop when it comes to normal maps!

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Step Thirteen: Applying the normal map Okay, so it’s now time for me to put everything together and view it in 3dxxax! Here’s a brief quick start guide on applying the normal map within 3ds max:

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And that’s it, you should be able to view the mesh with the maps applied within the view port or you can render it. “Special note” the model may not show up properly at first depending on your video card. One thing that works for me is to hit “Zoom extends all” and then go back to my perspective view port! Viewing the applied Textures Now comes the fun part, this is where I get to see the fruits of my labor. I begin by setting up a few lights within my scene, a key light, fill light, back light and skylight. Once I do that I make sure to add a light tracer and then render. “Special note” You should be able to view the lighting set up within the 3dxxax 8/9 files (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6LC42RM2).

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Along with the render you can see how the various maps were used to achieve the final results.

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For good measure I also wanted to see what the creature would look like in a game engine, so I imported the model into the Unreal 3 editor.

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Final Thoughts: I guess I’ll close by saying that there are number of different ways to approach the modeling, sculpting and texturing process and this is by no means the be all and end all! As a matter of fact I tend to work on different projects that require me to switch styles and workflows often. As an artist I pride myself on being able to work within different styles and genres, whether it’s gritty realixx or stylized fantasy. All in all I hxxe to say that this was a fun exercise and I’m glad that I was able to share it with the CG community. Hopefully I was able to introduce you guys to a few new techniques that will encourage you to come up with some creation methods of your own. With that said happy creating and good luck! 模型下载http://www.free3dtutorials.com/userimages/MarcusDublin/Paragalis_Final_Files.rar

嘿嘿,兜兜又发好东西了呀,加分20~顶一下

ZB的，蛮好的。