Ambient Oclussion amongst other things...

A little progress report. After a bit of tweaking with topology I think I got it a bit better then it was before, in terms of useability in ZBrush. The mesh is a bit cleaner but between optimization and all there are still quite a few triangles in the mesh (ZBrush hates triangles) but I think I will work out. Next I devided the mesh into seperate logical texture groups (see different colours on the figure below).


This gives you a head start on planning how many textures you going to have and how large. Here 3 texture sheets will be used + wheels. Then came the UVWMapping. In my opinion its the most unenjoyable thing out of the whole project but once it comes together you have a strange sence of satisfaction :). So far I just managed to unwrap the chasis (pink) and since it was the biggest one i think the bulk of the work is done. Tommorow the rest will be done too. Once I unwrapped it I just couldnt resist a little test:

As you can see the Ambient Occlusion baking went ok (pic shows viewport view with applied AO pass as texture, this is not a render). For those wondering: Ambient Occlusion refers to the fenomenon of omnidirectional light hitting the object and illuminating it evenly producing soft "contact" shadows. This effect is still not possible in games real-time so for now we just "bake" it into the texture. The pass comes out as a monochrome image overlayed over the UVs of the mesh. As illustrated below, if you then put it on top of your base colour or texture in Multiply mode it will create the illusion that there is a shadow there. Opacity is used to control it. The Texture Baking feature of 3dsmax is by nomeans perfect and seam errors will be corrected in post-production in photoshop.

By no means does this mean the texture is finished but it gives that extra push to photo realism. AO is one thing that alot of modders miss.

Will show complete AO pass by Saturday hopefully.