Monday 25 April 2016

Colour Id Process and work around process

To make the process of creating my materials inside of quixel easier, I knew that I would need to create a colour ID map. Where as what I would usally do to make my colour ID map is take my UV snapshot into photoshop and colour over the top of it, that was going to be a lot of work for me to have to do for all of these objects so instead I decided that I would do it inside of zbrush, by colouring in the parts of the model that would be a seperate material and exporting them as OBJ's with that colour attached. 

So what I firstly had to do, was take the high poly model that I had created before it had been taken into zbrush, and split apart the uv's of the object. This isn't something I would usually have to do with my high poly object as it is a lot more work unwrapping a high poly object than it is to unwrap a low poly object. But I had to do this process so that when I imported these objects into zbrush to be colourised I would be able to auto group the object from UV's and the color from polygroups.



Colour ID within zbrush

Unfortunately for me however, this process was going to have to take much longer. As for some reason, when i was auto colouring my objects from poly groups, parts of the colour would bleed into another colour meaning that there was no hard edges of colour though out my whole object which would be a huge problem later on when applying my materials to the colours.
To work around this I had to endure a lengthy process inside of zbrush. What I essentially had to do was split apart my objects into there poly groups. So that there would be an object for each poly group. The shoulder instead of being one object would now be made of four separate objects for instance, as there would be four different poly groups on that shoulder. With these parts of my objects now separated, I could fill that part of the object with the colour that I needed, and this would then mean that there would be no other object for the colour to bleed into. 
After I filled the seperate objects with colour, I could then merge them all together to create the whole orignal object like it would of been before, only this time all the colours where confined to their own poly group and not bleading into any of the others. This was a tedious work around to have to apply to each of my objects seperatley as it took up way more time than what it would of originally taken, which was annoying but it was definetly something I had to do in order to get the level of detail that I needed.
Layering Colour ID maps within photoshop
After exporting the objects as OBJ's with the colour data that they now had on them, I then baked these colour ID objects onto my low poly objects. I did however have to bake them all separately as, for an example, the colour from parts of the arm where baking onto the torso, essentially putting parts of colour on there that shouldn't be there at all. So I had to bake all the parts individually and then piece them all together within photoshop.

Fixing issues with colour maps
Despite baking them all individually however, there where still some slight mistakes that needed to be fixed where parts of the same object had baked onto wrong parts that later on down the line would mean that the textures would all be looking obscure. so with maya open on one screen and photoshop open on the other with a UV snapshot overlaying my colour maps, I was able to match up the uv's across the two pieces of software to ensure that I was putting colour in the right areas and removing it from where it shouldn't be. 

Final Completed colour ID map after layering process


Colour ID map rendered in quixel on torso. 


Below are some screenshots of my first test of applying materials to my torso object inside of quixel after applying my colour ID maps. 
Im glad that I did this test run rather than jump straight in and begin applying all the work that I wanted to put into it as I noticed that there where quite a lot of mistakes with my colour ID map for my torso that had to be fixed before I carried on.
No only that, but there where also some mistakes with my AO map and my Normal map that also created some obscurities on my object. As you can see in the screenshot above, the pipes on the back had baked onto the sides of the torso making it look really jagged, where as that part should be smooth instead, So i will need to go into photoshop and edit my maps a bit.

There was also a slight problem with the grill at the front. The colour ID had been baked onto the gril where it shouldnt of been, so i will have to remove this part inside of the colour ID map in photoshop.


Despite the mistakes, this test has shown that overall, all my maps work pretty well on this model. The mistakes that I will be fixing will only make the materials looks better and more realistic.










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