On with the next step: I baked a normal map and Ambient Occlusion map from the high resolution sculpt. Additionally, following a remark from Manuel, I rendered a Displacement Map for each LOD using blender. This displacement map would allow getting high geometric detail of folds at lower polygon resolutions thanks to the use of shaders. All of these are however on my wishlist and not actually available in MH.
Note that while normal map and AO are only made from the highest LOD and are reusable for all LOD meshes, a displacement map needs to be made for each LOD specifically, by comparing it to the high resolution mesh.
Again AO is applied to the diffuse texture immediately using a program like photoshop or the Gimp, displacement and normal map can be used together in a shader to render the model.
- Displacement maps of different LODs
Remember that I can generate all these from one model in a blend file thanks to the wonderful "Multires" modifier in the new Blender. I only need to change the level of the "Preview" slider and render to texture.
This is one of the textures I made for the shirts:
To create a new one you would just have to open its design template (psd or xcf) in photoshop or the gimp, and change the color layer and add any drawing you want. Leave the AO layer with shadows on top of it with blend mode to "multiply". There's also one other layer to introduce some additional textile texture detail on top of it.
For the lowest LOD mesh, if you don't use advanced shaders, you might opt to fortify the effect of the AO layer a bit so it gives you a little more shadow detail.
Now, armed with the wonderful MakeClothes script made by Thomas, I converted the meshes to MH clothes. I made good use of the new trick I've learned: select the shirt mesh, and click "Auto vert groups", then edit the vert group associations in case necessary. I did the same with the base mesh: select it and press "Auto vert groups".
Because this shirt was tight fitting I had some problems with the very high resolution mesh:
- Errors at very high polycount mesh
This picture is of the high resolution version, exported to MH and imported to blender again using MHX. I believe the problem is that it alternatingly matched vertices to the body of the base mesh, and to the clothes helper geometry.
A fix for this would probably be to change the vertex groups on the basemesh so that I exclude the clothes helpers from the Left, Right and Middle vertgroups. Because this is a tight shirt I want to match to the basemesh.
I must add however, that this error only seems to occur on very high resolution meshes. It seems that the in-between polycount level works best with the MakeClothes script and MH clothes in general (these being the game or medium versions of my clothes)
To conclude, here are some screens of the shirts in MH:
- High resolution shirt in MH
- Low resolution shirt in MH
You can see that in the first the shirt pic the shirt is tucked in, and in the second its over the jeans. I haven't gone into making masks for it yet, but it would be nice to have control over whether I want the shirt on top or under the jeans.
I might make the bottom of the T-shirt a bit more interesting, as it is very straight at the moment, making the non tucked-in version of the shirt not very interesting to look at.
Interesting detail:
The polycounts (in quads) of the different shirt meshes are as follows.
Longsleeve:
Low: 260
Game: 1040
Medium: 4160
High: 66560
Shortsleeve:
Low: 160
Game: 640
Medium: 2560
High: 40960
You save a lot of geometry with the short sleeves, but remember that in return the character will need to have more of the arms showing, which will compensate out.
It's a start. I will make work of sharing the models as well as the source files soon.
Maybe I should look into finding more permanent ways to host them than my own webspace and forum attachments.