Rule Of Thu'um: Gladiator project: how I designed my gladiator

Design Brief

For our game production assignment this spring term, we’ve been assigned the task of modelling a Gladiator. The project is to be carried out using the ‘Autodesk 3Ds Max’, ‘Adobe Photoshop’ and ‘Crazybump’ software. My aims for the project are:

1. To stay organised and well planned

2. Create a realistic character

3. Make an attempt at the ‘baking’ technique for this project.

At the start I didn’t necessarily know which direction my project would take, which is obvious. This project is my first experience of modelling a human figure and rigging it as well. Specifically we are to create “a realistic interpretation of the reference supplied, dressed as a Roman Gladiator”. According to the specifications put onto Blackboard the gladiator must be sculpted:

· With Roman influence

· Within a 2500 triangle limit,

· With extra 300 triangles for armour, props and extras.

· 1024 x 1024 diffuse texture sheet

· 512x 512 texture sheet for weapons and armour (likewise in specular maps and normal maps)

· And rigged with a biped of 28 bones

Research

My research was mainly concentrated around media. I watched episodes of the Spartacus series, which I had already been watching before the project thus I was very enthusiastic. What I was able to take from the TV show is, gladiators tended not to be as well armoured as the Roman soldiers, but there ferocity in combat were unique.

The Gladiators were essentially groomed killing machines, their lives were encompassed around death; I would like to portray in my character in some aspect. Furthermore, in watching a gladiator documentary I have learnt, gladiators had low social standing due to the fact that they tended to come from slave or lower glass backgrounds (some did volunteer however). There were many types of gladiator, each with a unique set of weapons and armour. Apparently the armour they wore was supposed to represent different enemies of Rome, from history of fantasy. Moreover the weapons and armour they used was characteristics of their native culture. There were many types of Roman gladiators but there are 4 which I put main focus on:

Equites- Armed with a round shield a spear and a helmet. Equites used to rife on horseback.
Retiarius a fighter armed with a trident and a net. Most vulnerable gladiator. Only a shoulder guard (galerus his left arm) he is swift and the lead bearing in his net allows him to use it as a whip or to ensnare his opponents, giving him opportunity to stab the opponent with his trident or dagger.
Hoplmachus- carries a small round bronze shield and a spear. His upper legs are protected by quilt and greaves. His brimmed helmet has a large plume.
Tharex(Thracian) carried a small rectangular shield (‘parmula’) and a slightly curved sword (‘sica’) intended to maim his opponents. He was armoured with greaves and a ‘manica’ arm-guard)
Dimachaerus- Dressed like a ‘murmillo’ gladiator but carried two swords.
Paegniarius- they specialised in fighting wild animals and trainers. They only used a whip. They wore no helmet and used protective leg belts and leg padding (Fascia)) – covering the leg from knee down. He carried a wooden arm shield on his left ar. The whip length ensures that he fought best at a distance.
Lastly, the Murmillo –He is a heavy weighted Fishing gladiator, who carried a large oblong shaped ‘Scutum’ (large roman shield) and a ‘Gladius’ (the typical roman sword). Both sword and shield would be used as offensive and defensive weapons. He is heavily armoured. He wore a leg greave and over-boot on his left leg to protect from both his opponents and his own shield. The helmet he wore was distinctive for his ‘large dorsal fin’ helmet, which is reminiscent of the ‘Mormyrs fish’ which his name originates from. He was armed like a Roman legionary soldier. He was my personal favourite, because fighting skill was regarded highly especially their shield techniques.

Conceptual Design

Using adobe Photoshop, I produced a few concepts for the gladiator. The concepts were inspired by the apparel of the types of gladiator’s that already existed. I drew a sketch of a male which would be the base template for designing. The concepts did not take too long to complete, their primary function was to help me choose a design for a gladiator that my gladiator model will follow. Subsequently, I went with the ‘murmillo’ gladiator design, it was the design which I was most interested in.

Process

Step 1.

I started the modelling process of the gladiator by inserting the reference images put on the K drive for reference. I opened the reference images which I needed onto planes in the 3ds max software. The served as guidelines for the shape of my gladiatorial figure that I was modelling. The images were of a muscular life model.

I began to box model my gladiator from head to toe; inserting swift loops were I thought appropriate. Following this I extruded the limps from the main body, subsequently repeating the previous process of swift looping and forming until both arms and legs looked like arms and legs’ then, went round the figure making sure not a single vert was out of place in accordance to the reference image. I think I enjoyed modelling the body, although I had to model the head more tan once, I even used tutorials from youtube.

Step 2.

Following from the previous process, I added topology onto the figure. I can’t say I enjoyed the process but it was educative. In using the reference images of topology from the web I have surely attained a better understanding of the human anatomy. In the case of a low poly gladiator, I’m not entirely sure that I added enough topology or too much. Despite this, I kept bouncing between feedback from teachers and 2^nd years on how well my topology is. Feedback from older peers is definitely supportive; I will continue to keep up communication with older years in between projects.

Step 3.

The next stage was to model the armour, as stated earlier the figure will take up the ‘Murmillo’ archetypal gladiator appearance. Thus, I modelled the legionnaire shield, with the sphere centre and the four lightning bolts. I then modelled his ‘manica’ by copying the figure’s arm into a new element and likewise with the knee greaves. The sword was the most fun to model because it was referenced from my favourite movie, 300 Spartans (It is King Leonidas’ sword). Modelling the armour did prove a difficult task and did not take too long. In total the armour was modelled in 554 tri’s. Although the brief stated the gladiator needed to be modelled with a 300 tri limit for the armour I had an excess tri’s as I hadn’t used up all of the 2,500 tri count for modelling the gladiator’s body.

Step 4.

Unwrapping was not as challenging as I presumed it would be. After being briefed by my teacher Steve on how to use the pelt tool to map, I unwrapped accordingly. When using the pelt tool, you create a seam; we were instructed to leave the seams in hidden areas. In my gladiator’s case, I put the seams under from the waist to the armpit and from the armpit under the arm to the hand. Likewise for the legs, the seam was placed in between the thighs up to the pelvis area and for the head; the seam went round the neck and to the highest point of the head.The eyes and ears were unwrapped separately. I did run into some problems, I found out that my allocation of shapes on the texture sheet was somewhat inaccurate. At first the face looked extremely low poly with high poly eyes and ears. Furthermore there was a lot of overlapping with the shapes in my texture sheet. Ultimately, I had to re-do the texture sheets for both the body and his armour multiple times.

Step 5.

The next step was to texture the gladiator; I think of all, this was the stage was most challenging. This project was my first experience of texturing a humanoid figure, thus I had to consider curvatures in the texturing. It was not as easy as the previous projects. To texture the gladiator’s body I used the reference images of the male model given to use on the k drive and for the gladiator’s face I used pictures of one my colleagues. For the armour, I went to Jewry Wall museum (a roman artefact museum) and took many texture references, which you can see on my gladiator. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to texture using the pick and paste technique or paint the texture onto my character. I must say, choosing between the two lead to panic as I didn’t know which would be most beneficial.
My friend and colleague Jon, showed me how there would be an issue of spontaneous lighting on my gladiator body, if I had only used cut and paste images of the male mode. He showed me how to take away the natural light from the gladiator by using the ‘high pass’ tool in Photoshop. I used this tool and my gladiator has more neutral and natural lighting to him. I ran into two issues when texturing: one was that a poor texture sheet led to overlapping of textures, meaning that I had to g back and forth correcting my texture sheet until it was perfected. Secondly, some of the textures overlapped themselves, e.g. when doing the front and side of the torso it left another seam. I had to use the brush and pick tools to overcome this. Luckily I was able to make my gladiator look decent, I would have liked to work on it more but what I’m more proud at what I’ve learned from doing texturing my gladiator.

Step 6.

After texturing my gladiator I had to add normal and specular maps. I specular mapped the body well, however for the normal mapping I had to re-do several times. A colleague of mine told me to create a height-map on Photoshop of my diffuse texture at first, that way I could create the bumps that I was looking for. All in all, my skills in this have certainly improved since the van project.

Step 7.The final step in creating my gladiator was rigging the figure. To rig I had to create a biped the size of my gladiator, then I moved it into the middle of the gladiator figure. I had to alter the biped as we were only given a limit of 28 bones to the biped. When the biped was placed accurately, I then applied the skin modifier to the gladiator’s figure and thus began to rig. Rigging at first was a tedious task, it entailed going back and for the between moving the bones and correcting the verts in the ‘edit envelopes mode’. On my first attempt a colleague pointed out how I was doing it wrong. The 2^nd time round, I had rigged one side near perfectly in my opinion, but the mirror mode wasn’t working and so I decided to do it again. Although I hated the having to re-do it, It helped me learn how to rig correctly. After making the final corrections, we were instructed to add a fairy dance animation. It looked very nice on my gladiator, beautiful in fact. I am pleased with how the rigging has gone, but also how much I’ve learnt.

Things I need to work on

Certainly texturing, I do believe I could have textured better this project, given the texture budget which we had been set. I had to continually change my texture sheet until I got it correct. However when I got it done right I was contempt. I will continue to improve my texture sheet allocation. I will also make sure I don’t warp the images too much or the texture will be distorted.

The next thing I need to work on is rigging- I had to rig 3 times until I got it to rig properly. This would not have happened if I had applied the biped exactly at the centre of the model.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, despite all the issues I ran into, I am very proud in the way my project has gone. The gladiator turned out a success and the way that model was modelled shows how much my 3d skills have progressed. I have obvious corrections too make, but my time management was better than from previous projects. I will continue to stay focused and organised in order to hone my game production skills. I’m most proud of the knowledge I’ve gained from this project- I now know how to texture figures, high pass and rig in order to animate a character. In conclusion, this project went well, much better than I had expected it to go at first. Here is an image of the final design below.

Thank you for reading.