Hugh Holder
Well-Known Member
Hi all,
I just wanted to share a couple of commission builds I made over the last three weeks.
Here is my final sculpt & render of the Stormcloak guard helmet from Skyrim
Rendered all passes with ZBrush, then layered together in Photoshop to produce final shot.
I started by taking screen shots of the model in game then using them to set up my reference images in Photoshop.
Once I had all of the angles I needed I modeled the base mesh in Maya.
I knew that I wanted to produce a Pepakura model that had a texture, but to do that I would need to use the program's UVs (not Maya's) for the object. So I exported the low res model and did all of the unfolding. Once finished, I exported the model with UV data and brought it back into Maya.
Next I had to assign edge crease proxies to ensure that the model would properly sub-divide for detail sculpting (a tedious process that involves selecting sets of edges and manually assigning hold values)
Once I had a semi-hi res model converted I imported it into ZBrush to further divide the poly count.
Bump preview
I had to divide the model a few times to ensure that the texture would be somewhat usable. I ended up with the helmet being just over 3 million polygons. Next I just dropped the model to 2D space and used projection master to capture the color information from the reference I set up earlier in Photoshop. After picking up the object and returning to 3D mode the color information is imbeded into the UV information (the Pepakura texture)
I learned that Pepakura exports it's objects with a different rotation than how it imported them. At least this was the case with Maya. It also flips the UV direction but not the normals, which also causes issues. But after I realized what was wrong it was an easy fix.
The last issue I had was actually getting the texture to properly load into the unfolded 3D model in Pepakura. Even though my model was using the unfold as it's UVs, the texture was being skewed and distorted within the object faces. To fix this I had to export the texture bitmap to destroy the junk UVs - then use the bitmap scale to adjust my exported texture so that it would fit.
My only gripe is that I don't have the HD version of pep so the texture resolution was limited to 1024x1024 pixels.
All in all a pretty successful job I think.
About a week before this I did a sculpt of the Dragon Priest mask as well, only this time I made a Pepakura version as well as a hi-res .STL model for CNC or 3D printing work.
And here is an ongoing list of other models I finished:
Iron Helm - Skyrim
Ebony Helm - Skyrim
Clone Pilot Helm - Star Wars
Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for reading.
-Hugh
I just wanted to share a couple of commission builds I made over the last three weeks.
Here is my final sculpt & render of the Stormcloak guard helmet from Skyrim
Rendered all passes with ZBrush, then layered together in Photoshop to produce final shot.
I started by taking screen shots of the model in game then using them to set up my reference images in Photoshop.
Once I had all of the angles I needed I modeled the base mesh in Maya.
I knew that I wanted to produce a Pepakura model that had a texture, but to do that I would need to use the program's UVs (not Maya's) for the object. So I exported the low res model and did all of the unfolding. Once finished, I exported the model with UV data and brought it back into Maya.
Next I had to assign edge crease proxies to ensure that the model would properly sub-divide for detail sculpting (a tedious process that involves selecting sets of edges and manually assigning hold values)
Once I had a semi-hi res model converted I imported it into ZBrush to further divide the poly count.
Bump preview
I had to divide the model a few times to ensure that the texture would be somewhat usable. I ended up with the helmet being just over 3 million polygons. Next I just dropped the model to 2D space and used projection master to capture the color information from the reference I set up earlier in Photoshop. After picking up the object and returning to 3D mode the color information is imbeded into the UV information (the Pepakura texture)
I learned that Pepakura exports it's objects with a different rotation than how it imported them. At least this was the case with Maya. It also flips the UV direction but not the normals, which also causes issues. But after I realized what was wrong it was an easy fix.
The last issue I had was actually getting the texture to properly load into the unfolded 3D model in Pepakura. Even though my model was using the unfold as it's UVs, the texture was being skewed and distorted within the object faces. To fix this I had to export the texture bitmap to destroy the junk UVs - then use the bitmap scale to adjust my exported texture so that it would fit.
My only gripe is that I don't have the HD version of pep so the texture resolution was limited to 1024x1024 pixels.
All in all a pretty successful job I think.
About a week before this I did a sculpt of the Dragon Priest mask as well, only this time I made a Pepakura version as well as a hi-res .STL model for CNC or 3D printing work.
And here is an ongoing list of other models I finished:
Iron Helm - Skyrim
Ebony Helm - Skyrim
Clone Pilot Helm - Star Wars
Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for reading.
-Hugh