Volcano Texture

With my involvement with the boss and it's development, i was given the task of texturing the volcano so that it would all fit together and nothing would look out of place. Looking at the rest of the terrain i tried to keep to that style to make it all fit together. I built up my textures and painted in the details i wanted after creating the AO bake for that section to highlight areas of the terrain.

 After completing most of the texture for this, i was told that this part of the terrain mesh needed to be changed as you could see outside of the map when fighting the boss. This was a bit annoying as i thought that this would of been sorted within block out stage. To make sure that all the major map parts were to the correct scale. After changing the mesh to sort this problem it meant that the UVs weren't correct and the texture was stretched in places.

I just had to adapted and proceed through the problem and do the best i could in the situation. I went back in to the UVs and tried to make them less stretched. After that i applied another AO bake to the new terrain and fitted the texture to the new UV layout. There is a little bit of stretching in places but not that noticeable and i was happy with this stage of the texture of the volcano.

Volcano Texture

I got some feedback from my team and my lecturer and added some more detail to the texture to create this:

Volcano texture update

I increased the texture size of the lava within the volcano to give the impression of size and also added a bit of colour variation to it. I also painted a bit of lava on the front of the volcano. I asked for some further feedback from my team members and they liked the improvements but just want a bit more lava painting on the front where it is now to make it more visible, which is my next task.

Crate Textures

Another couple of assets i was tasked with texturing was the alien crates which would be placed around the level. There were four different designs which were chosen to be used in the level so after adapting the UVs to my style again i quickly created an AO bake to highlight some of the areas of the models and built up a similar texture for each crate.

For this i just simply googled sci-fi crates to give me some inspiration and direction as what kind of texture style i was going for. I also referred back to earlier drawn designs done within the team.

Crate Design 1

Crate Design 2

Crate Design 3

Crate Design 4

All of these models are on the same texture sheet and they have a diffuse, specular and an emissive for the blue energy glow around parts of the crates. The logo or tag on the crates was just a simple design i made within Photoshop with a dirt alpha over the top of it to create the effect that it's been worn down with use.

Easter Island Head Texture

After alpha presentations the team leader of our group went round to see what was left to do and produced a simple gant chart with every task that needed to be completed. I was tasked with a few extra bits of texturing other peoples models. One of those models was the Easter Island heads. This was quite easy to do as i had already done this style of texture on my boss head. The only problem i had was that every body models and UVs in different ways to suit them so i had to adapt and change a couple of things on the models UVs to suit my style of working but is something i have to learn to be able to do if i'm going to be able to work in a team.

Easter Island Head Texture

Boss Full Texture

With the rest of the body of the boss fully textured and to a standard i was happy with i carried on and started texturing the head of the boss. In the original plan our team had we had the Easter Island heads as the alien technology which had been placed there thousands of years ago. With this in mind i based the texture from the Easter Island reference i had and the sandy stone texture they look to have.

 Boss Texture

This was the final outcome of the boss with this texture i had created for it.

Boss Texture

With my arm texture a success and everyone on my team plus lecturers and Andy liking it i moved on to applying that style to the rest of the boss. I used the same base textures and built it up and then painted in the extra detail within the cracks and crevasses of the model.

After making a diffuse for the boss i was then able to use that to create an emissive map to increase the glow of the larger open bits of lava which hadn't cooled down yet

Boss Body texture

Boss texture arm test

For the texture of the boss i only had picture references and an idea of what i thought it should look like in my head and on paper in my previous designs. I knew that volcanic rock was quite dark and looking at lava textures the cracks in my model would be very useful to paint in hot glowing lava in-between.

I built up the rock texture at first and overlaid a crack texture which would represent the cooling lava. After i got that to look good i went in to it and started painting in the larger parts of lava which would be in-between the modeled in crack sections. This was the outcome for the texture of the arm and hand of the boss.

Boss arm/hand texture within Unity 

Rigging the Boss

Another one of my tasks for the game was to rig the boss model. I was up for the task but if i'm honest i didn't know that much about rigging characters or other mesh's. I just referred back to a rigging module i did last semester and the resources i collected when i was doing that. Using that as my base i soon enough had all the bones and controllers set up for the mesh but realized a few things didn't need to be there. For example i could of just had one bone throughout the whole spine part instead of putting in several joints to make it bend with a cluster de-former. After all it was meant to be made out of solid lava and wouldn't be able to curve anyway.

I also had a problem with the curve of the spine with it's spline IK as it would shoot out of place when ever i would move the bosses master controller.
I decided to start over with the rigging as it wasn't going so well and was full of error's. I research a bit more in to it all and planned everything out to the best of my ability and knowledge.

I re-rigged the whole base but with just a couple of bones running through the spine and this time i didn't apply a spline IK or cluster de-former. Instead i just orient constrained the torso controller the joint where i wanted it to bend.

This was all going quite well and once i completed the rigging side of it i moved on to skinning the mesh. At this point when i was painting the weights to the mesh i kept encountering a problem with Maya where it would produce an error message and force it to shut down.

Error Message

I had no idea what to do to prevent this from happening as it kept occurring. I did some research and asked a few other students i changed to maya file type from MB to MA as i was told that benefits animation/rigging files. This seemed to fic my problem so i pushed on with the skinning.

Once this skinning was mostly there, i kept testing the rig with certain animations. I then realized that every time i moved the spine controller the base would move as well. I didn't want to base to move at all but it had to have influence applied to it. The only way i could think about fixing this was to put another joint in that would run from through the base and would connect to the spine joints. 

This meant i had to save the skinning weights and export them. I then detached the skin and added in the extra bone. Once i had re-applied the skinning weights i saw that it had messed everything up with the extra bone. This time there was no way around it, so i had to delete the skinning and start that again.

By this time i knew what i was doing with the skinning on this mesh so it didn't take me as long the second time round and it was a success. 

After completing the rigging and skinning and encountered another problem. Every time i moved the hierarchy the joints would move twice as fast as the mesh. This was another set back which was taking up time. I couldn't find a suitable solution online. I felt quite bad about this as i thought i was holding the team back as someone else was waiting for the rig in order to animate it. 

Rigging problem

I was determined to get this all sorted and asked a few fellow students to see if they knew why this problem was occurring. I then discovered that it was because the mesh and the joints were both in the master controller and didn't need to be. The mesh is already parented to the joints so it doesn't need to be part of the hierarchy. After moving the mesh out of the master controller in the outliner i was able to move, scale and rotate the finished rigged and skinning model with no problem. I quickly saved the file and uploaded it to dropbox ready for my team member to animate.

At this stage i couldn't be happier as i felt i'd finally completed a massive task. It was a great struggle at times and i thought i wasn't going to be able to do it. But after it i feel I've learnt a great deal about rigging and skinning mesh's and i don't think i'll forget it after the trouble i encountered. 

Completed Boss Rig

Completing the Boss and it's AO bakes

After completing the test AO bake with the boss arm i moved on to completing the rest of the mesh. I applied the same modelling technique to the rest of the model. Once i'd completed the modelling and completely UV'd the whole model I went and created an AO bake for the rest of it. Before modelling the boss i talked to the rest of my team and we came to the conclusion that i should split the mesh up in to 4 sections. The arms, head, base and torso. This way i could maximize the resolution of the texture sheets by having 4 separate ones which could be changed if the player shot that area of the boss. After sorting out these texture sheets i created AO bakes for the rest of the mesh. This was the outcome.

Boss mesh with an AO bake

Texturing the Easter Island Houses

Going back to the Easter Island houses i created earlier. I went back and started adding a texture to each one. I had already created an AO bake for these models so using my references i just started building up a texture for each house.

On Easter island i saw that the houses were usually painted different colours so to create variation within our level as well i decided to created a few colour variations for each house. These were my final outcomes.

House 1 Blue Design

House 1 Green Design

House 1 White Design

House 2 Blue Design

House 2 Orange Design

House 2 White Design

Boss AO bake

After finishing off the model of the bosses arm and hands i created a quick AO bake to see how the rock cracks show up on the mesh. The results were quite good and i was very pleased with the final outcome.

Boss Arm mesh with AO bake

Modelling - Boss Arms

Today i went back to modelling the bosses arms which i noticed were too slim/square on the side profile view. I went in to Maya and made the arms more fuller and rounder to represent some formed rock. I then took my sketched design for the hand and started modelling this. Once i had completed that i referred back to my team to see what they thought of the product so far.

Boss Arms & Hands Update

The feedback from my group was pretty good and they liked the direction i was heading in. They said to improve it, to make the hand look more like it's been formed from rock which i totally agree with so I'm going to go back to that and try to improve the look of the hand.