Here comes a new challenge, Vol. II

In the last episode, Nell was jumping around happily due her victory against zBrush refusal to import OBJs, singing and yelling "in your face, destiny obstacles! I'm bigger than God B-)". Then the sky clouds opened, God shown his face, said "oh, yeah?" and this happened:

As we can see, our robot lady has a see through dress that should not be like that at all. Also, she missed an eye. No idea what is causing this, so back to Maya to play with the Cleanup... a bit to see if that fixes anything.  Brb.

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UPDATE

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Fixing the dress

After running Cleanup... I found this under nonmanifold geometry: 

Note: do not sew geometry as 

you would sew fabric in real life.

What I did at the time of modelling was creating some "volume" at the edges:

This was what triggered the problem. You solve it by doing the following:

1. Delete all the attached faces from inside the geometry. This will leave some floating points at the same coordinates which will still cause problems, so...
2. Get rid of those floating points. I do so by selecting the whole mesh and  hit "merge" (Edit Mesh > Merge) with a narrow margin, so all the overlapping vertex combine into one).
3. Then, once fixed, you invert and then conform the normals. This is what actually triggers the "transparency" error, but just inverting the normals doesn't fix the issue if the previous steps are not made beforehand, for some reason.

Fixing the eyes.

This does gets solved with just inverting the normals of the missing eye :)

Here comes a new challenge!

So, I've been polishing the previous model:

Previous model, polycount optimized

New model, now polycount optimization free! 

Now, I am ready to take the model parts into ZBrush to start the normalmaps, and suddenly...

Chrestomathy

Before ruining Lee's vacations with my cries for help, I'll try to solve the issue by myself with the superpower of Google. Will keep updating this entry until I find a solution, or until I end up running after Lee crying for help :)

I remember in a previous exercise something similar happened. The problem was the model had faces with more than 4 vertex so I went back to Maya to run a poly cleanup (Mesh > Cleanup...  and, under "cleanup effect", "select matching polygons" and marking "faces with more than 4 sides"). I did actually find a couple of faces with more than 4 sides inside the nose, so I proceeded to subdivide them:

Chrestomathy Vol. II

Yet still this didn't solve the problem. Will keep on trying...

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UPDATE:

A TopoGun Forum User got the same problem, he says:

It seems that zbrush have problems with the floating vertex. So thats a thing we topogun - zbrush users should be aware of.

So I went to Cleanup... and played around with all the options in there. Found nonmanifold geometry in the lips caused when I merged the flipped halfs: upper and lower lips were merged together by the center. Detached merged vertex there. Still no luck.

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An user named "green" in the DigitalTutors forum suggested "Try deleting the history on the object before exporting, and in the .OBJ export options, try turning Groups, Point Groups, Materials, Smoothing, and Normals to Off."  Done that. No luck.

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Solved! 

Instead of exporting the OBJ from Maya and importing in zBrush, I exported from Maya, imported the OBJ into a new scene again in Maya, and exported the OBJ from there again. This one loads into Zbrush with no problem :)

Silly software...

The "To Do" list.

I am reluctant to tell what the video is going to be about, even when I've got the scenes and some specific shots all figured out already, I'd prefer to give you the final story, ask what you got from it and see if I succeeded as a storyteller rather than tell you what I want to do so you get yourself started into the dynamic business of mistake fishing. We can get there afterwards if it turns out I suck :) 

I might not be happy to give further details about the story, but I am more than happy to share the "to do" list that will make it possible:

3D Modeling:

- Main Character.

- Main Character's bag / container.

- A bench.

- A train.

- System Fluid: teardrop.

Footage:

- Room interior.

- Street.

- Train station.

- Kitten in green screen.

Mattepainting & Photoshop:

- City scenery

- UI interfase

So yes, from the list you will notice this video will contain kittens and a 3D model main character. I though about making it completely in 3D from the very beginning, so I started working on the main characters in a previous module:

... problem is, this will require more than two & something months to be completed since is quite a task. By myself. In a technique I've just started to learn. So, after some common sense kicked in, I decided to make it live footage with 3D elements integrated instead. The above cat will be replaced with a real cat. I will retopologize and give more polys to the main character since the current version looks pretty cheap:

Also, some changes will be made: will change the texture completely and this time will go away from the "cartoony" look to try a more realistic approach. Crossing fingers I will succeed. Wish me luck!

Hello World! This is the first post.

Hello everyone!

 This is the first post of a series of data registry regarding the advances of "The Train" music video, created for the equally named song by Bertil Mark, my friend from Germany who is doing pretty cool in the music scene, and will constitute part of my Major Project (the video, not the song, neither Bertil or the music scene). 

 In here you will find my progress and some other goodies, like: 

• Sketches, screenshots and other graphic works in progress to make this video possible. 
• A variety of rants, mostly against software. 
• Problem solving dedicated posts. This, to leave some record across the internet in case you face a similar problem, so you save yourself some time in resolving it. This comes as a "thank you" for al the forum posters who are helping me under the same logic... and for my lecturers to assist/evaluate me easier. 
• Bad spelling & grammar. Spanish is my first language and I've got excellent grammar there but sadly can't say the same about my English skills, any help on that field is highly appreciated!* (Disclaimer: Nell reserves herself the right to correct past and present posts depending on level of availability and/or laziness). 

 So, let's get started! :)