Once the concept drawing was completed. I started a rough lowpoly modeling and there is a 6000 limit for polycounts. And there is extra 1000 polycounts for a weapon. I built up the lowpoly one about 6500 the first, and after finished modeling and texturing, I cut down by 6000.
It’s a very symmetrical model so I could save texture space later. The Bigun has a lot of details all around of his body. And it’s not enough to show his detail through geometric. All we tried to look it complicated is normal map. After finishing lowpoly one, I started an UV layout.
High Poly Model:
And I started to make highpoly one, I tried to sculpt a high poly model from low one in Zbrush or Mudbox, but it didn’t work well with a hard surface model like Bigun. So I decided to make it in Maya using Smooth Proxy tool. It took a
long time but it worked well. After I got both, I baked the normal map and occlusion map using the xnormal tool (http://santy.xnormal.net/). It’s very simple and powerful. But I had to bake a normal map by piece not all geometric together. After gathering all separated normal map and occlusion, I combined them in Photoshop as one piece.
Texturing:
After I created occlusion map from the xnormal tool, I put this one in a Photoshop layer as softlight, it brought more geometric information to color map. And color is monochrome color like black and gray. And I tried to make it shining but paint on metal feeling and dirty. I highlighted every edge on surface and added scratches and oxidations as details.
