Texturing Issues & Progress

This is the first time I've worked with the X-22 model since I'd created the hands for it. I had a lot of issues getting it to work in Mudbox correctly and even more issues with getting it to render. When I imported it into Mudbox I was greeted with several errors, the main two were an overlapping UV and a hidden n-gon which was preventing me from subdividing the mesh in Maya.


Luckily I was able to resolve these issues and began to work on the armour in Mudbox. I got a piece looking exactly how I was wanting it to, so I exported the Normal Map into Maya to see how it would look in there, and not surprisingly it looked disgusting.


I then looked up how to edit Normal Maps in Photoshop and managed to clean up the Map to a point where I'm happy with how it looks. Unfortunately the legs aren't UV mapped the same way so I will have to texture both of them individually.


Another issue I ran into was rendering using MentalRay as the Shader was missing from the material it was attributed to. I reapplied a material to the mesh and was able to quickly recreate the one Gabe had made previously.


Once I'd finally got all of that working I decided I'd do a test of a batch render to make sure I wouldn't run into any problems just before the deadline. I'm so glad I did this because the render wasn't working at all, it was only rendering out occlusion passes for some unknown reason.




After spending ages trying to find what the problem might be my friend suggested I look under the layers in the Maya file which is where I found all of these layers which Gabe had used to test a render earlier in the project. The reason none of the renders were working was because the normal render layer had been hidden in order for the occlusion renders to be used, which had most likely been forgotten about.
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The render finally worked and the texture is looking good so I'm finally able to start the final texture in Mudbox.