Although the source code for Unreal Engine has been made freely available in more recent times, creating and editing levels using the engine is nothing new. In fact, since the first game that used the engine in 1998, that being Unreal was published the intrinsic link between gaming and games development has always been evident […]
Forward Kinematics (FK) Rigging If you have been following the other posts on the Minotaur you might have noticed that this is not the first post that mentions rigging. In fact, the very first post for the Minotaur “Minotaur” mentions rigging and another post on Skinning “Minotaur XI” also mentions rigging. As you can imagine […]
Texturing The Minotaur consists of several textures and materials that are composited together, this render depicts the current painting status of the Minotaur’s color texture channel. This above image took approximately 6 minutes to render using the Blender Internal (BI) Renderer. This includes 3 Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) passes (each with its own material), a color […]
Optimization Testing Synopsis The model and armor take about 4.5min/fr to render. Using the rendering technique outlined in my previous post on skinning (“Minotaur XI”) the Minotaur in this animation is subdivided 3 times at render- time, then targeted to a high resolution sculpt which was baked at level 03 to displace the subdivided geometry […]
Skinning is the process of attaching geometry to an underlying skeleton or armature. We then use the armature to pose the model and simplify the process of animating it. There were several issues that had to be considered when skinning the Minotaur character, of which the main issue was inconsistent Normals.This post will cover a […]
This image is of the highest level multi-res sculpt which, at level 5, is about 1,4 million polys for this model. Since this is just a test render mainly to see what the character currently looks like when wearing the armour, the armour is rendered at a low resolution. The Minotaur’s lower-body draping-clothing goes up […]
It’s worth noting at this point, that the technique used for sculpting this model is not typical as sculpting is performed non-destructively. In other words, sculpting does not alter the model’s topology by means of Blender’s Dyntopo technology instead sculpting is performed by simply displacing existing vertices on the model. This basically means sculpting on […]
Sculpting I generally lay out UV’s before sculpting commences… This may not be an ideal solution in some cases as vertex translation of the base mesh could occur, when the higher level sculpt data is propagated to the base level. In other words there is always the risk that high level sculpting could inadvertently modify […]
UV Layout Students I’ve worked with have often asked me why the term UV is used? And the answer I give them is the same answer I was given 15 years ago when I was learning about UV’s for the first time. “The term UV is used because it is not XYZ” As ambiguous as […]
The Head There are many adjustments that were required regarding the original cow head to suit a more bull-looking head. Amongst which are flared nostrils, larger horns and droopy ears to name the most obvious. Finally for the head, I added some pitch-fork type teeth, with a particular pose in mind for the end shot. […]
General Form Improvements The arms and shoulder area have been in need of some major form adjustments, for example the shoulders are in a position that relates more to the arms being at 45 degree rotations rather than the current almost perpendicular (to the torso) position. This sort of thing is often a side effect […]
Hands The hands of the current Minotaur model inherently have five fingers as they originate from the makeHuman base male model. However my Minotaur only requires having two main fingers (being part bovine) and a thumb (for the added advantage of being able to hold something such as a weapon). There were two choices that […]
More Form Improvements In the following image I’ve started work on the mouth area. As this character will have a full set of grossly enlarged canines (the Minotaur is after all a devourer of the sons and daughters of Crete), his mouth needs to be modelled in the open position. The previous cow model (from […]
Merging Edges In this image I’ve merged the head to the main body and here’s a close up of the area that was merged… The area in blue highlights where the two components were merged. Note that the geometry has not been cleaned, this is a quick merge so that it is easier to visualize […]
I started a new project a few days ago. After having a look at my gallery, I decided that none of the images demonstrate my current skill level.So in an attempt to improve the current state of my gallery I started modelling a Minotaur which will form the main character for a new set of […]
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Although the source code for Unreal Engine has been made freely available in more recent times, creating and editing levels using the engine is nothing new. In fact, since the first game that used the engine in 1998, that being Unreal was published the intrinsic link between gaming and games development has always been evident […]
