Shades of Divinity

Well, the project has been finished for a long time now.. Kinda just forgot to blog that we're finished... =)

We dubbed it "Shades of Divinity", and the final product + more info can be found at http://oskarholmstrand.com/sod/

Getting wrapped up

Well, animation is almost done. I have successfully completed the animation, but it needs some minor fixing until it feels more professional. This workflow - sketching up the whole animation first, and then finalize and perfect it - is the best. Only drawback is that people in the classroom looks over my shoulder and thinks "uh, that's not good", and when some people does this, it's kind of irritation.

Anyway. Right now the follow things needs some attention - then we're ready to go gold.

- animation
The animation needs more attention. This is actually a never-ending task, so I will most likely finish up the other things first, then work the animation until no time is left.

- model
Needs to be tesselated in some areas for better deformations. This must be done in consideration of the normalmaps, which are already generated. Perhaps I could generate new normal-maps, as my workflow allows for it... .Hmm... I placed all manual changes in layers in a .psd file, so I could change the original by just changing the background layers.... (Must be thought over.)

- skin weights
If I add more polygons, I must also paint how they are weighted.

- gui
Fix the gui so it's more personalized

- icon
I'm not happy with the icon I made. I have very fuzzy ideas about new ones, so until I can think of something more concrete, the old one will have to do.

Animation Started

Have started to animate the character now. So far, about 6 seconds or so is completed. I've noticed quite some problems with my rigging and skin-painting, but I'm correcting them along the way. Hopefully, the number of seconds/day will increase as my rig gets more final, skinpainting gets done and most important - I get used to animating this specific rig.

Textures done

Well, I'm pretty sure I posted a post that got lost somewhere along the way... So sorry for the slow update on the graphics part.

Anyway, this is current status:
Textures are almost done! .. Everything except the reflection map and some tweaking. The problem is that I can't see the reflection map on my current card / pixel shader implementation. In order to see it, either Fredrik would have to write a specific pixel shader in 2.0 just for me to test the result - which would not only add more work but also a pitfall if the implementations would differ. The other solution - which also solves a future problem with not being able to test animation - is to aquire a gfx card with ps3.0, i.e. a gf6800.

After some serious problems with getting our school to even respond, we finally got rejected. And then another teacher ordered the card anyway. So, textures will be 100% done pretty soon after the gfx card has been installed.

textures starting...

So, the modelling is 100%, and the rigging is pretty much finished (haven't painted bone weights yet) ... Anyway - I have now started to seriously work on the textures. This is a VERY important part. Ugly textures = ugly overall look. Nice textures = nice overall look.

For the rigging I decided to do many things manually. This is because my experience says that when I try to make things work automatically, they tend to backstab me by not working at all and be very difficult to adjust. By having them manually operated, I will have to do some more work when animating, but I will most likely avoid some very irritating errors. I have tested the rig by baking it and it seems to work fine. At first it didn't work because I had an animated group above the root joint, which ofcourse wasn't read by the exporter. I solved this simply by creating an expression in the rootjoint to copy the things from my animated group. These expressions are baked when baking the simulation, so it works good.

Good model done...

The highpoly good mesh has now been completed and exported as a normal map... Feels kind of wierd to work on something for a long time then just accomplish a 2048x2048 map from it... But - it looks pretty cool... Well I haven't really been able to check if all details are good, because I can't pan in the current viewer - but I think there only will be minor errors which can be fixed in photoshop...

Also slowly started rigging. I really hate rigging. But it's coming along ok. It's actually probably almost finished but I don't wanna call it finished yet, because I'm not sure if it's good enough - have to test it a bit more. The irritating thing is that in order to finally test it, I have to paint the skin weights. If it turns out to be not ok - I will have to paint them all again. (unless the import/export skin weights can magically help me) .. Anyway - therefore, I'm kind of avoiding finishing the rigging right now =)

The high-poly evil mesh will be started today... I really should be going home to sleep (soo tired), but I kind of feel like atleast starting the evil mesh first =)

1 week behind

Well... I went to the SACO education fair, and then to the elmia dreamhack, representing the school... and it took some time I would have used on the project so I'm about 1 week behind now... But I'm compensating by working harder and more.

Currently I'm doing the high-poly mesh for the good angel - to be used in the generation of the normal maps. It's proceeding along nicely, but sure takes some time. I've also adjusted the low-poly mesh in some areas to better fit the requirements of the high-poly. .. The evil angel will be created in Zbrush, which gives room for more smooth things and such...

over and outzors.

Oh and I really need the gfx-card soon, because this card is having some problems handling 2048 textures...