Warrior character & Scenery elements

Inspiration/Reference

For my environment, I wanted to use some elements to populate the scene. Firstly, it was important to create a warrior character to help portray the story of my project. It made the most sense to use this character to populate the scene as it is very unlikely you would have just one warrior in this battle. However, time was a factor so I only was aiming to create one variation of the warrior character, the main function of this was to populate the scenery to convey a recently fought battle, and to help portray my story. 

Additionally, I wanted to populate the scene with some various weapons and shields. Again, time was a factor, but I did want to include a bit of variety since the weapons should be much less time-consuming to create in comparison to a whole character. These would populate the scene to give some density and added realism (you wouldn't have a battle with no weapons or shields). These elements did not need to be too detailed, their primary purpose was to populate the environment. 

Here are some of the various references I was looking at for inspiration in my designs. 

'Equipment of the Billman' (Pearson, n.d.)

Arming sword example 1 (Arming Sword, n.d.)

Arming sword example 2 (My arming sword Juvante, 2012)

Arming sword example 3 (Complete Type XV Arming Sword (I33), n.d.)

Halberd example (Medieval Halberd, n.d.)

Long Axe example (Long Hafted Poll Axe, n.d.)

Medieval round shield example (Round Vikings Shield, 2020)

Medieval shield example 2 (Medieval shield three-point, n.d.)

Medieval shield example 3 (Medieval shields, n.d.)

When creating both the warrior character, weapons and shields, I looked for some pretty simplistic references to help me with my designs. I wasn't looking for anything too realistic or detailled since these would be scenery elements to populate the scene with, and would not be the main focus point of the project. Plus, a lot of these would be obscurred by other effects such as depth of field. The priority here in regards to the weapons and shields was some basic variety, but to be simplistic in design and something to maintain and reinforce the significance of my main medieval knight character. 

 Modelling:

I started with the modelling of the warrior character. My plan for this character was to look a lot more cheap and rugged to contrast significantly with my knight character, showing the warrior character as more cheap and make-do. As a result of this, the character would be less armoured and more covered in clothing than protective metal plating. This was something I had come across during my research in my disssertation, where it was mentioned that people in the Middle ages would essentially wear their wealth in the battlefield, and knights by comparison were extreemely wealthy, and so could afford much better protection. 

To start, I re-used the freely sourced 3D character that I had used earlier in making my knight character, which I had used for comparison for realistic proportions. In this case, I was using the character as a base to layer clothing on top of. To do this, I re-used a model of trousers from another assignment that I had retopologised and roughly formed it over the legs of this 3D model. Next, I applied this trouser model as an nCloth. I then added a transform constraint to hold them in place, and then allowed the cloth to take shape. 

After some tweaking to the nCloth, I got to a shape that I was happy with. At this point I stopped the playback and duplicated the mesh. By doing this, a copy of the mesh is made with the nCloth deformations held in place in a new static object with no cloth modifier applied. I did not want to use nCloth in my actual model since it could really slow down the scene when the warrior character is copied, and it could also deform in ways that don't look very professional, so I felt this was the more appropriate decision. 

I repeated the exact same process for the shirt, again re-using a retopologised shirt model from a prior assignment. 

I then created some basic asssets for the character, a chestplate, helmet, eyes and boots. I had to modify the eye lids of the 3D character I had used since they did not fit very well, and the eye lids had no thickness which I added in also. The only parts of the model I have used are the face and hands, with the face being very much covered by the helmet design. I chose a helmet design that covered the face as much as possible since I did not think I would do a very good job at producing a realistic looking face in a short amount of time, and was concerned that it would fall into the uncanney valley due to my lack of experience. My shortcut was using a helmet which obscurred the face as much as possible whilst still fitting the overall design and being a realistic helmet design overall. 

I moved on to creating an Arming sword design. A relatively simple design done similarily to my greatsword model in 4 segments, albeit in less detail. I did reuse the blade from my greatsword model for this sword, but I removed the thinned edge towards the Guard to add simplicity to the design. 

I created another Arming sword variant simply by modifying the Guard from one that curves to a straight one. I also created a Halberd design, which was done by using basic 3D shapes and extruding them in the appropriate places to get a design I was happy with. I have tried to keep in line with the reference images seen earlier without adding too much complexity to the designs, focusing on their functionality. 

Finally, I created a handful of shield variations, again influenced by the references shown above. These didn't take too long to create, and have a decent amount of variety. I did not add any detail for the back of the shields since I could just lay them on their backs, and the lack of detail would not be noticed. I was ready to UV map my models. 

After creating these models all in Maya with relative ease, it was clear that I had probably made a mistake earlier in production by using Z-Brush to model my knight character first, since it required retopology and possibly more time spent on it. Z-Brush is a program designed more around sculpting and finer more organic details, whereas Maya is very good for hard-surface modelling, the latter being what was primarily being used in my project. I have stated that I used Z-Brush for my famililarity of the software in modelling, though it is clear now that Maya is probably the superior program when it comes to hard-surface modelling, and I will bare this in mind for future modelling of this type. 

UV Mapping:

Here are my UV mapped models. The Texel Density is very good, consistent across all of the models for each one. I have fit each model onto a singular UV space since I don't believe that I will need to do these models in too much detail. I used the same process as for my knight character, projecting them onto a designated axis, unwrapping them and arranging them in the UV layout to have a good texel density and pack into the UV space as efficiently as possible. I was ready to proceed with texturing, which I decided to continue using Substance Painter to do so. 

As I am writing this blog entry, I have noticed the right-most shield has a UV issue near the center, where the inner metal ring has been UV mapped badly. This is a mistake on my part, and will be fixed before proceeding to texturing my models. 

Texturing:

I started with texturing the warrior character in Substance, making sure to start by baking the mesh maps before starting to allow the smart materials and other effects to work as intended. I started by applying and modifying some basic materials, applying them to my character. I refined this by adding some scratches and dirt across the model, in similar fashion to my main character. However, I increased this dirt since the character would have fallen and died in battle, laying on the floor. Arguably the character would be a lot more dirtied and muddy from this. 

I used a free eyeball material that I found online on the Substance market, which can be found here. I wanted to use a pre-made free material for the eyes since I believe that the eyes are a big selling point when it comes to realistic faces. Unfortunately, these eyes don't look very realistic at all, either that or something else is causing serious uncanny valley in the current face I have created. 

I started by adding some slight facial hair and eyebrows, eyebrows being an important element I had missed. I had also missed eye lashes, and unfortunately it was a bit late to add them in. Though these would have been quite subtle and I don't believe this is the cause of the uncanny valley being created in this face. In addition, I had added a more appropriate material for the lips, a subtle red colouration to the skin. The extra detail to the face definitely helps, but in my opinion does not completely fix the problem. 

Ultimately, I felt that the eyes were the biggest cause of uncanney valley here. They just didn't look right. The pupils also looked like they were dented in, which looked unusual. I tried to edit the material in the hopes of refining the material, since the eye material I used came with a variety of different attributes which could be edited. However, the material appeared to be causing a lot of performance issues with my computer, and I cannot explain why. As a result, I scrapped this eye material for something else. 

Brown eye texture (Fisch, n.d.)

I was able to come across the above eye texture, a free texture for a realistic eye. The site provided multiple variants but I chose the brown option to help it blend in more, and not stand out as another colour might, such as blue. 

After applying the texture to the eyes, it definitely showed improvement. However, there was still a significant sense of uncanney valley. I also found it difficult to tell if it had actually improved or not, since it could be argued that I had begun to get used to the appearance of the face, and so the effect of the uncanney valley was not as strong as it would be for another viewer. 

Even though I kept these eyes, I decided it might be best to create a blendshape in the rigging stage to close the eyes, and negate this issue, as I was very convinced that they were the main cause for the uncanny effect this face was having. This definitely stems from my lack of experience in this area, something I would need to improve on with practice to do a better job here. Fortunately this character is a small element of the scenery and I have already taken measures to reduce the face being seen much. All in all, the result should be suitable for my purposes. 

Here is the detail I had added for the fingers. After applying a skin material built for hands, I added a new layer on top. This was a fill layer, which only had the height and normal channels activated. I masked the layer and started to draw the impression of folds in the skin around the knuckles and bends in the fingers, to give more detail here. 

Another addition was the fingernails, which I achieved by using a new material which had increased roughness values to add a shininess to the nails. I added a slightly lighter pinkish colour, and manually painted in the nails on the mask of this new layer. Consideirng this detail will hardly be seen, I believe the hand texturing is effective for its purpose. 

Since my last update, I have completed the texturing of the warrior. I have added some subtle blood splatters in the same way I had done so for the main character, though a little more clear and obvious for this character. Overall the imperfections are a lot more prevelant in the design of the warrior, which is intentional to show that he is weaker, poorer and less significant than my main knight character. Overall, I feel the texturing for this warrior - considering it will be a scenery detail - is rather successful. 

In relative haste, I was able to apply appropriate materials and textures to all of the accompanying weaponary and shields. The weaponary is rather basic, using a steel material for the blade, guard and pommel, and a leather material is used for the grip. In the case of the halberd and long axe, the handle is made of wood instead. I have added some scratches and blood splatters on these textures for the purpose of imperfections and adding some realism. 

I am rather pleased with the three shield designs I have created, all rather unique from one-another. The first is split into four parts, with a paint material applied to these four sections, adding another layer of realism to the texturing since shields and banners would typically accompany designs painted on. It also looks more interesting than plain metal in my opinion. 

The second shield uses a similar technique, though has been painted a solid white across the entire shield. I did not want to incorporate any heralidic or realistic designs or emblems on these shields since I am not educated enough in history to be able to accurately pinpoint what sort of designs would be believable and accurate. Thus, I felt it would be safer with a solid coat of paint instead. To add some variation, I added an iron diamond material across the second shield design, keeping the opacity very low. This helps to add some extra detail and depth to the design, so it doesn't feel too flat. 

Finally, the third shield is much more distinct from the other two designs, with a mostly wooden surface instead of a painted metal. I have tried to use a dark wooden material for the surface as opposed to a lighter one to help it blend in more to the background, and not stand out much. I think this design works pretty well. 

Additionally, I applied the same sort of imperfections as I had done with the weapons to the shields, such as dirt, scratching and blood splats. I have also added some bolts to the designs of the shields to add a bit extra surface detail so they aren't too plain, which I did in similar technique as I had for the bolts in my main knight character. The third design features smaller bolts around the inner metal ring since they did not fit appropriately on the thin metal outer edge. 

Here is a different closer view of the weapons and shields. 

Here is a close up of the Halberd blade. The steel material applied looks very convincing in my opinion. 

Here is a close up on the shield designs. I believe the imperfections work very well and the realsim is very well portrayed in these designs especially. 

Ultimately I was very happy with all of my texture work for these models. My final task was to quickly rig the warrior character so he could be posed into various positions across the scene. 

Rigging:

For the rigging of the warrior character, I only needed to pose it and did not need to animate it at all. As a result, I could easily get away with a really simplistic rig without needing to put too much time into refining it. This felt justified as the deadline is getting uncomfortably close as of now, so any time I can reasonably save is worthwhile in my opinion. 

To quickly rig the character, I used Maya's Quick Rig tool. Specifically, I used the Step-by-step function to make sure the rig was how I wanted it to be, and that no issues arose, such as the joints appearing in the wrong place. This worked pretty well and was very fast. 

There are many tutorials online detailling on how you are able to add controls and joints to the fingers of a Quick Rigged character in Maya, since - by default - the fingers are not rigged. However, upon following these guides I was met with lots of errors, and unfortunately the methods did not work. In the end I had to do without the movement of the fingers, as I did not have enough time to go through and create my own custom rig to achieve this myself. 

The weight painting was relatively simple, especially as most had already been done automatically quite well. The main area that caused me issues though was the Clavicles and Upper arms, where the clothing clumps together. This happened with the nCloth creating the clothing, and the cloth must have clumped together so the mesh was almost stuck next to another part. This made weight painting difficult as it was hard to separate this clumped area when the arm moved up. I was able to get it mostly fixed, but it still wasn't perfect. Though, again, the character would be in the background and inanimate, so excessive refinement was not necessary in my opinion. 

Here is the character in a pose to demonstrate basic movement works pretty well. In addition, I created a blendshape for the eyes closing as I had suggested I would do earlier in this documentation, done so in the Shape Editor. This was simple to do, using the Soft Select tool to drag the eye lids so they met and covered the eyeball up. This was then keyed to be the value of 1 of the blendshape, with the default being 0, so that I had the ability to flick between the values. I could easily move the value from 0 to 1 and close the eye. This definitely helped with the uncanney valley mentioned earlier, and looked pretty decent from a distance to me. 

At this point, I felt all these assets were suitable for use in my scene. It was time to move on to the environment design. 

Bibliography:

Pearson, K., n.d. Equipment of the Billman. [online] White Oak Society. Available at: <https://whiteoakhistoricalsociety.org/historical-library/the-late-middle-ages-early-renaissance/the-15th-century-mercenary/equipment-of-the-billman/> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Darksword Armory. n.d. Arming Sword. [online] Available at: <https://www.darksword-armory.com/medieval-weapon/medieval-swords/the-arming-sword-1313/> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Flickr. 2012. My arming sword Juvante. [online] Available at: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/8765199@N07/8198662015> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Castille Armory. n.d. Complete Type XV Arming Sword (I33). [online] Available at: <https://castillearmory.com/product/complete-type-xv-arming-sword-i33/> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Medieval Factory. n.d. Medieval Halberd. [online] Available at: <https://www.medievalfactory.com/en/medieval-halberds-and-pikes/MEDIEVAL-HALBERD.html> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Buying a Sword. n.d. Long Hafted Poll Axe. [online] Available at: <https://www.buyingasword.com/long-hafted-poll-axe> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Amazon. 2020. Round Vikings Shield. [online] Available at: <https://www.amazon.com/ARTIZANSTORE-Vikings-Medieval-Dropshield-Armoury/dp/B08CD341XC> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Avalonsibyl.com. n.d. Medieval shield three-point. [online] Available at: <https://avalonsibyl.com/medieval-shield-three-point-952.html> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Medieval.stormthecastle.com. n.d. Medieval shields. [online] Available at: <http://medieval.stormthecastle.com/medieval-shields.htm> [Accessed 27 March 2021].

Fisch, B., n.d. Eye brown dark Free Texture. [online] 3DXO.com. Available at: <https://www.3dxo.com/textures/5909_eye_brown_dark> [Accessed 29 March 2021].