Your progression is really impressive. I just love the way you animated the dragon flying, it rocks !! :buttrock:
Keep up the good work.
Stephan
Ara's Tale - short film wip
loramel
#22
Hey Stephan !
Thanks for your encouragement. I will certainly keep it up and try to post as much progress as possible here and on my blog.
Things may getting more interesting once the shading, texturing and lighting starts.
loramel
#23
Based on very valuable input and feedback from Richard Culver and Germano Martin I spent quite some time reworking some of the shots and editing.
The basic idea here is to get more involved with Ara. To let the viewer feel what she feels and thus pulling one into the story. Richard and Germano made some very good points and suggested various changes and/or additions. Based on this input I stepped back a little and tried to get a fresh point of view for the project. Now I have to add a ‘Special Thanks’ section to the credits 
And so I reworked the existing shots. The technical aspect to this journey was that I had to figure out the best way for me to shoot from different cameras but using the same animation. And additionally all potentially baked physics should be calculated only once as long as the animation is the same.
I ended up using a scene for each camera and linked in the animation and objects I needed. A time sink here was some glitch/bug in the asset linking mechanism, which prevented me from easily importing my camera rig more than once, even if I appended it. I had to rearrange (in terms of asset linking) all files, where I wanted to have more than one camera angle. This turned out to be quite a lot.
Work on the rest of the animation has progressed too and I have now about 3/4 of all the shots animated. I do have a list of open polishing todos though.
Here is the reworked version of the first 3,5 min of the current reel.
vimeo link to reel v4
loramel
#24
Despite the relatively quiet during the past weeks here on this wip, production on Aras Tale has not stalled.
Quite on the contrary in fact.
The idea of this post is to inform those few following this wip that the animation phase for Aras Tale is finished.
Its not stellar nor exceptional, but its consistent and passes my expected level of quality, adjusted to my level of expertise in the field of character animation.
And now I also have a number for the total running time which amounts to ( without credits) 7:05 min. Thats 10625 frames used in 58 shots.
And talking about numbers: current total accumulated production time is 564 hrs with 172 hrs used for the animation which is more than modeling and rigging combined.
Next is the detailing of the modeling, especially refinement of the environment and props. And after this I will start the texturing and shading phase.
For this I evaluated some tools to be used as texture paint,minor sculpting tools. But the focus was on texture painting. I did not find the perfect tool and in the end I guess I will use blender, but the new 2.5 series. I also tested these other packages:
[ul]
[li]zbrush: exceptional piece of software, but for texture painting too much for my budget and with the culprit of running it under wine and thus losing the support it was not a real option.[/li][li]3d-coat: runs natively under linux 64bit and would offer all the features I would hope for most prominently the use of different layers for texture painting. Alas, the current nvidia driver 195.36.15 (or .25) does not allow 3d-coat to run. The workaround to use an older driver ( the one which comes with ubuntu) fails to display any movies on my system, which is quite counterproductive when creating a short
[/li] The price tag of 265$ would be ok though. I will keep an eye on the driver issues.
[li]sculptris: with version 1.01 now released it is promising but does not quite fit into my workflow, especially as there are annoying problems running it under wine.[/li][/ul] A cool announcement came from The Foundry announcing a specialized texturing software called Mari, originally developed at Weta Digital as in house tool. The estimated price of 500 british pounds is a bargain for this piece of software. This tool is overkill for my purpose of course but some luxury now and then makes life interesting. Official release date is end of 2010.
Back on topic, from here on there should be more updates to document the progress of Aras Tale.
loramel
#26
Thanks Jeremy for the heads up 
It slowly coming together now.
Right now I am struggling to get the best workflow for my modeling/sculpting/texturing tasks.
And I think I have found a workable, if a bit clumsy, solution. The limitations I am facing here right now are a bit exhausting.
loramel
#27
Finding a good modeling/scultping workflow turned out to be much more time consuming than expected.
Modeling and sculpting are very near in my workflow. I create a base model and sculpt the details, which will be applied back to the model using normal maps. From the scultping process I also derive an AO map for direct inclusion into the models shader.
As I have already mentioned in my last post, I evaluated some tools to ease the process. I tried another attempt at using scultpris, but it just doesnt fit into the workflow and it still has a lot of issues, crashes and quirks which in the end will cost me more time.
Using the bridge from the entry scene I tried several approaches on how exactly to implement this modeling/sculpting and texturing workflow.
Right now I have arrived at the following:
[ul]
[li]I create the base model in blender 2.49 with all the basic rough geometry in place[/li][li]an uv map is created in blender 2.49. I create uv patches where those areas which occupy the most screen space also occupy the most area in the uv map ( sort of a cheap handmade ptex 
.[/li][li]the model is then imported into blender 2.5 and a multiresolution modifier is applied up to the resolution I need for the specific purpose. In case of the bridge I used up to 2 million vertices for the scultping[/li][li]Then starts the scultping, which is way better in 2.5 then in 2.49 but still no real match to zbrush, 3dcoat or the adaptive mesh tesselation in sculptris.[/li][li]From the sculpted mesh an ao map and normal map is baked into separate images[/li][li]The generated maps are then used back in 2.49 for the texture slots in the shaders[/li][/ul]See here for an example of the bridge and how the individual maps apply:
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_base_model-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_base_model.jpg)Basic Modeling
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_ao_model-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_ao_model.jpg)AO map applied to base model
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_norm_model-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_norm_model.jpg)AO and normal map applied
I would love to have the depth painting features of zbrush, 3dcoat or even sculptris. As you can see I use the scultping only to generate my normal maps, so to be able to directly paint in depth would be a real blessing.
I already did some further investigation into texturing. What I will do is the follwing:
[ul]
[li]Again texture painting is done in 2.5 because the tools are superior to 2.49[/li][li]I create a color texture slot for the material with an empty grey image map loaded[/li][li]I use the GLSL feature to display the full material including ao and normal maps. This gives me a good guidance where to put the texture.[/li][li]Well and than he painting starts, with heavy use of the clone feature[/li][li]Once finished and if the targeted material allows it, I temporarily use the created color map to act as bump map too.[/li][li]With the previous normal map active and the color map acting as bump map I bake a new combined normal map, which now include the high frequency details from the color map as well.[/li][/ul]In one of my next posts I will show you the result for the bridge.
Here are another two examples of the bridge in two other shots.
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_01-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_01.jpg)
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_02-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bridge_02.jpg)
loramel
#28
A small update just to show off what a little modeling/sculpting can do to a shot.
It may be common knowledge, but for me its my first movie project and I am just amazed how dramatically the shot changed by just substituting the blocked environment with a fully modeled and sculpted one. The changes are so big in fact, that I may have to revisit some of the camera settings in the other shots to better deal with the added detail. A very intriguing process.
I wonder if the effects when applying the textures, proper lighting and compositing are as huge as this one.
I have put together a video which shows shot 3 simultaneously in the two versions.
Keep in mind that only basic modeling and scultping was done. Lighting setup is nearly non existent, just to be able to see something , and yes its too dark …
loramel
#31
Thanks Stephan and Christoffer.
Nice to hear some feedback.
And sharing my wip on the net has 3 effects:
[ul]
[li]it may get me some critique and helpful advice[/li][li]it may be of help to others or just fun to watch[/li][li]and by reformulating what I have done and posting it on the net its a kind of reflection of what I have done and helps to strengthen the things learned in the process.[/li][/ul]
loramel
#32
Having established a suitable workflow I went on to apply it to the rest of the set
just to run into the next wall.
I still had the view of building a prop like in a still. But in a movie the same prop is seen at various angles and distances. Sometimes different parts of the same object are visible in individual shots are very near distance, meaning they take up a lot of screen space and thus need to have a high level of detail.
I tried to attack this problem by splitting up the uv map with the high detail zones taking up a lot of map space. This cannot be applied to scultping of course as I do not ave the scultpris type adaptive subdivision.
That meant I also had to split some props into several parts each with its own maps and uv maps. Splitting an object into more parts introduces problems when you have to ensure a continous texture across the now individual parts.
In at least one situation I had to build a second stripped down set with just a very simple environment object, which will be seen at very near distance. The environment may have motion blur and dof applied but right now I cannot exactly estimate how much detail is still needed, so I try to keep on the safe side.
I have not used other packages than blender, but what I have seen so far indicates, that in other software you are able to apply individual texture maps to uv sub patches of one model. Using a good projection paint system you can texture models to a very high level of detail without loosing the control of the overall coherence. There doesnt seem to be similar technique available in blender, so I have to resort to high resolution texture maps ( 4K+), model splitting and uv patch tricking.
Anyway, if anyone here has a good idea on how to handle high resolution details on different parts of the same model I am more then interested in hearing them.
In the end the entire set modeling/sculpting turned out to be a highly iterative process. I have now a growing list of small todos to get everything in a state I am satisfied with.
I think I will continue with the texturing and maybe even cloth and hair simulation all for the first set. This should give me a solid foundation to tackle the next set, which isnt more complex but has a lot more shots and may pose some hard questions. I hope to have found most of the answers before advancing the the next set.
I have rendered out 4 shots with the current state of the modeling/scultping in place. No color texturing and no lighting which deserves this name are in place.
loramel
#33
Just a quick update.
After all the sculpting and modeling for the first set I thought is was time to enhance Ara as well and work on some remaining tasks such as the eyes.
Until now the eyes were pretty much a placeholder for the real ones. The outer geometry was there to aid in the rigging and shape key definition, but no further modeling/texturing was done.
As the eyes are said to be a mirror of the soul I wanted Ara to have eyes that could accomplish this. That meant no pixar style eyes and after browsing through a lot of eye tutorials I finally settled on the workflow of an eye tutorial from the gnomon workshop. Its for maya, but he principles are easily transferred to blender.
Well, the modeling part was quite fast, but the texturing part was a little bit more time consuming. And its also a bit too early to start the texturing, but in this case you have to texture it, otherwise you cannot see the iris and thus the most important part of the eye.
During my render tests for the image you see at the beginning of this post, I soon realized that the lighting task will be very important to bring the eyes to life.
I also ran into a problem with the render engine. I wanted to have raytraced refraction activated on the cornea of the eye, but if I do this, the bumps on the iris are not rendered. Right now I use simple ztransparency to get the bumps, but the eyes do not look good from the side. I also tried the standard render engine from 2.5 but got the same result. Looks like I have to find a compromise somehow 
Another point I notice now that the eyes are more defined, is that I have to work on the alignment of the two eyes. Right now they seem a little off.
And for those who are wondering, yes, Ara will have red hair and green eyes
loramel
#34
next small update
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ara_eye_test_02-300x168.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ara_eye_test_02.jpg)
I worked a bit more on the eyes and started to put some facial features on Aras face. I used the current SOC sculpt branch from graphicall for the sculpting and I am quite pleased with the tools which get developed there very great improvement going on here.
After the still image from the last post I wanted to see the eyes in action and since I have a shot where you see an extreme closeup of the eye I put some crude lights into the scene and got the shot rendered.
There is only the normal map active an Aras face and a basic lambert shader for the skin. The eyes are fully textured now. The lighting right now is a pain and you better ignore it, but I didnt want to go into the lighting just now.
I am going to rest the project for the coming weekend as I am going to visit Arco in Italy, which is a great place for climbing. I will not do any climbing myself, but the rock walls there are spectacular and coming just right for building up my texture library for steep canyon walls.
I will post some images on my blog when I am back again.
loramel
#35
next update: this time struggling with the cloth simulation ( warning long post )
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/aras_dress-300x298.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/aras_dress.jpg)
While trying to get everything in place for the entry scene I also allocated time for some serious cloth simulation.
Some may remember that I had several attempts to setup a workflow which would allow me to do fast animation prototyping and yet have all the links to the cloth simulation ready.
Well, that was my impression some days ago too. And then I started to actually apply the cloth simulation to one of the entry scenes. It failed miserably.
I had overlooked one little but significant detail. As suggested in several tutorials and also the blender wiki, I went for a setup with a combination of armature driven (torso and upper arms) and collision driven (skirt, sleeves) type of cloth simulation.
With such a setup it is important how you define your starting position. Usually I start in the rest position and slowly ( ~ 30 frames ) settle to the first pose before starting the actual animation to give the cloth simulation time to settle in. As parts of the cloth are only collision driven you have to find a way to fast position your cloth. My setup so far was to parent the dress to the main position bone of Aras armature. In each scene I only modified the position bone itself to move Ara ( and the dress around).
As soon as I actually enabled the cloth simulation and armature modifier on the real dress ( animation was done with the fake one) things got messy. Moving the position bone moved all the parts of the dress correctly which were only collision driven, but all the armature driven parts moved twice the way (of course) .
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/dress_mess-300x293.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/dress_mess.jpg)
The correct setup would have been to position the armature object at the animation starting position and leave the position bone, which is not the usual way of doing it.
So now I had to manually reposition each animation to be based on the armatures object position instead of the main position bone. A lot of tedious work. And this was now only for the first scene.
Anyway, I found a way and started work on the cloth simulation parameters. And that cost me ~30 hrs of work to arrive at a solution which is satisfying.
There are some (few) tutorials and threads on cloth simulation, and I also have Tony Mullens book Bounce, Tumble and Splash, but there is nowhere a real in depth discussion on how to best tackle cloth simulation. And as I see it, there isnt only one type of cloth simulation but a whole spectrum full. With the sparse information you are more or less on your own and have to figure out how each parameter influences the simulation in this specific setup.
To have the turnaround cycles fast I lowered the simulation quality. This turned out to be a major mistake in my case. It seems if you have a very free moving cloth system where energy is easily added ( skirt collides with legs and gets accelerated or stopped ) the simulation tends to oscillate and isnt able to converge on a good solution. What I observed was that as soon as I started to get good approximation of a dress fabric, the skirt started to get crazy after a few steps.
In a last attempt I increased the quality setting (from 5 to 20) and was amazed to witness a totally different ( but good) simulation). With this I could now really start to map out the best parameter settings. With 5 secs per frame and at least 100 frames before you have a good estimate on the type of simulation it was a long and tedious work.
Its amazing how many aspects contribute to a convincing cloth simulation. First you have to get the parameters right of course. Then the part which is armature driven has to be fine tuned, otherwise you get some strange artefacts. Stiffness and bending scaling was an important tool. I wished there was a mass scaling as well. And last but not least the shape and topology of the dress itself was equally important for nice and fluid movements. I got some hints from actual dress cuts of a fairy dress for my daughter.
What I think is not really achievable is a very stiff cloth skirt, which doesnt bend easily and keeps its form or bends in sharp edges.
I have now a setup which is so far tested in each shot for the entry scene. The trickiest part is where Aras is walking and I am confident to have all aspects of the main scene covered as well. But that will be seen when I start work on that
Oh, and yes, I still have to test it with some wind effectors as well
After so much babbling see here shot 3 with the actual cloth simulation in action.
[vimeo link](http://vimeo.com/12656304)
I wonder what surprises the hair simulation will have for me.
loramel
#36
Just a quick glimpse at what I am aiming for regarding Aras hair.
I have not yet tested if this setup and approach is applicable for softbodies and/or animation but I thought I share it nonetheless.
Regarding the cloth simulation, I did quite some extensive testing again and came to the conclusion, that I had to modify the animation a bit to reduce the very fast movements of the shin in some steps, because this introduced too much energy into the system. The reduction was very small but has a big effect on the bounciness of the dress.
bonkanailios
#37
she is looking alot nicer, you might want to move her model over to the focused critiques area of the forum for a bit. The guys over there are crazy brutal, but unbelievably observant.
loramel
#38
Thanks bonkanailios, thanks for the tip. I may use the critique forum later for specifics in lighting and compositing.
next update:
I decided to post about the current state of texturing the rocks and cliffs for scene 1.
Although far from finished it is a first approximation of what I am aiming for.
After the various expeditions into cloth and hair land I thought that texturing was a voyage into known territory. As like so many preconceptions during the development of this project, this turned out to be some wishful thinking again.
The topics I encountered so far a many and quite diverse. Currently I am at iteration level 4, with twice a complete modeling restart and 3 scultping reworks.
Its a delicate balance you have to do between the amount of modeling, scultping and texturing. Doing it wrong just gives a fake feeling for the cliffs when viewed from different distances. And due to rendering time limitations I refrain from using extremely detailed displacement maps ( with accordingly high poly count cliffs) and try to cover this with bump/normal maps.
I also do not longer sculpt the high details for normal map baking. This could work out if the texturing were painted exactly to the fine details, which turned out to be to much work compared to what is actually gained.
For the scultping I use the GSOC branch from J. Wilkins available from graphicall.org.
The texturing is done with the current blender 2.5 svn trunk. It took several attempts to arrive at a suitable workflow. With my previous projects, I never seriously used the projection painting system from blender. For Aras Tale though I wanted to use this feature.
I ended up with a mixture of projection painting and working in gimp, which unfortunately is far from efficient and even leads to compromises I didnt intend to make.
When working with graphics I massively make use of layers and masks and try to implement a non destructive editing workflow. A typical use of layers is to test things, play around with blending modes and keep different versions in one file, being able to go back and switch between texture approaches.
Alas this is a non-option with the current implementation in blender. Whats even worse are the limited painting modes, with the missing overlay mode the most prominent. The brushes are also a bit limited.
A way out of this would be the Quick Edit feature but I had no luck to get it working in a consistent manner. Reapplying the external edited projected image always resulted in either a tinted texture (which I was able to trace back to hemi lights active ?!?) or just a darkened image. So multiple uses of this feature leaves you with stripes and too dark an image.
What I do now is to use the projection painting to layout the basic texture and work on the seams. It works quite well to almost erase the border seams between different objects. The resulting texture is loaded into gimp and here he high frequency details are added. Back in blender the seams get cleaned up again and some stretching from the gimp editing is corrected.
For the cliffs I decided to use grey scale photo patches. With this I am able to design the basic structure. based on the greyscale texture I start coloring and have a base for the bump maps.
I am using photo textures all taken by me during my last visit to arco/italy.
See here for some photos to get an idea of the environment there. ( lighting quality is bad from a photographic point of view, as I intentionally went to places which were in shadow to get only diffuse lighting, which is best to take textures )
I took some 150 high res RAW images which now is my base for all the various rocks in Aras Tale. All were converted to greyscale, a bit sharpened and lightness corrected to have a consistent texture base.
An important issue was to keep the same scale across all the different cliffs. I used a reference object as starting point for the zoom factor and subsequent project painting. It also helped to have a model of Ara there during painting to fit the rock texture the scale of a human being.
All this said I am still not 100% satisfied but anyway here are some samples of various cliffs of scene 1. The lighting varies over a wide range and hints at the next major headache. Right now its a bit on the dark side and you may have to have a properly calibrated monitor to see it correctly.
And finally here is a shot with some textured cliffs to show how this all works when animating.
Oh, and I almost forgot, I also did some work on the texturing of the cage.
loramel
#39
I did a small test shot of the entry scene highlighting the areas of work I did during the last weeks, mainly cloth simulation, hair and environment texturing.
The image above is a frame directly taken from the shot.
The lighting used here is a bit more than basic and gives a better idea of the mood for this scene. But its only simple lighting, no render layers and no compositing or color correction.
Cloth simulation looks ok now and will be used for the final. The hair looks ok but still needs some more attention, but I am relieved to have it somewhat working. The environment texturing is close to final for the principal textures, only some more subtle coloring will be added.
Whats still missing is texturing/shading of Ara and her dress.
Right now one frame from this shot has a rendertime of 56 seconds in full resolution (1920×1080) on my amd quadcore system. This makes me optimistic to reach my goal of ~4 min per frame. An Interesting side note here is that the preparation time before the rendering itself is starting is 30 secs, so the actual rendertime is 26 secs. As the preparation time does not take advantage of multiple cpus this is a value which does not scale with more cpus.
Right now my time tracker is at 736 hrs and still counting:
5:34 01-Script
43:54 02-Storyboard
73:54 03-Concept Art
14:48 04-Animatics
121:20 05-Modeling
76:04 06-Rigging
171:30 07-Animation
65:21 08-Texturing
54:51 09-Simulation
10:10 10-Project Management
98:53 11-Research
736:19 Total
Its good to see all the single parts put together into a small shot. Whats even better, is that it gets exactly the mood and look I had in mind when I started this whole project. This is very satisfying and helps bear the sometimes difficult times during production of this short.
The shot was rendered at 75% of the full resolution, so do yourself a favour and view it fullscreen.
loramel
#40
Warning: very long post ahead !
It has been some time since the last Ara related post in this wip thread. So I think it appropriate to give some overview about the current state of production and what happened during the summer.
Still back in June I had planned to have Aras Tale finished for submission for the Suzanne Awards 2010. During July I realized, that this goal wont be reachable without compromising motivation, health and professional as well as private life. So I slowed down and with much regret let go of the october date. Looking back it was a good decision, as it turned out that the summer was extremely demanding in regard to my professional life leaving not much free time and energy for anything else.
But work on Aras Tale has never really stopped. Texturing for the whole entry set is now finished. See here for a shot from the entry of the canyon back to the bridge
What came next were several appoaches to texturing Aras dress. This coincided with me trying out Mari. In the end, Mari ( besides too expensive for me) didnt work out for me, because pressure sensitivity was not working with my setup. (Its a Qt 4.5 vs. actual xorg wacom driver issue, and Mari ships with its own version of Qt, so no fix possible here).
The work with Mari and several other texturing apps (Zbrush, 3DCoat) showed me what I would really like to do and let me build up quite some frustration with the current state of texturing capabilities of blender. Unfortunately the corresponding GSoC did not bring much leverage here.
All in all the last 3 months were a constant struggle with my inexperience, shortcomings in blender (2.49 and 2.5x) and not being able to get my visions implemented. I am in dire need of some feeling of success
Now that I can dedicate more time again to Aras Tale, I revisited my dress texturing approaches. Let me detail a bit how I try to do it and why and also show you the obstacles I had ( and still have ) to overcome.
To get details correctly done projection painting is the way to go for me. Until now I almost never had used blenders projection painting for texturing but had always directly painted in gimp, but I was never really satisfied. If you could solely rely on projection painting, uv unwrapping could be much easier, as you would never had to go to the 2d image for painting.
For the cliffs I mainly used the clone tool with cloning from another uv layer to get the rock textures placed. With texturing the dress I needed a much finer control, meaning to really paint on the dress. This very soon showed the shortcomings in blenders paint engine. A very limited brush engine and way too few blending modes made me soon recognize that an external painting program was still very needed.
To get the needed level of detail for the dress I split the UVs into patches for the top, the skirt and the belt.
This is also a leftover from my tests with a combined workflow with Mari. I actually have 3 uv sets, the 2 last sets just copies of the first shifted to the left, so that the affected vertices are at the center.I will than have 3 materials for the dress which will use these uv sets.
Now for the nice part blender is offering. For a slightly better texture painting support I use blender 2.5x for the texture painting. What may be not so commonly known is, that you can assign different images to each of the faces. For the diffuse color map for the whole dress I assign 3 images to each of the 3 parts of the dress. When entering texture paint you can paint on the whole object and will effectively draw on 3 images at once. These images may have different resolutions. This is a very convenient way to draw textures in a consistent way.
For the actual painting I use a combination of the clone from another uv layer method, direct painting with simple brushes and sometimes using the quick edit feature, where the current projection is exported into an external editor ( gimp in my case). You can add details there and apply these changes back to the texture image. Its important to note, always to use the exported image as a reference and do all the extra editing in a separate layer and only apply this layer back to blender, otherwise you may get weird artefacts or double coloring.
After some time I got used to the workflow and with patience I actually got the work done. This has to repeated of course for all the different channels (bump, spec etc). A better and less tedious setup process would be a real help here.
The first test renders revealed a problem with the bump mapping implementation in blender 2.49.
Consider the following setup
A simple uv sphere with a seam at its front and simply uv unwrapped. In texture paint mode some gray strokes are put so that they cross the seam. The painted image is used as bump map for the sphere. The resulting render looks as follows:
Note the very visible seam. That discovery is just one example of the many obstacles I met during the course of this project.
And here is the workaround:
Blender 2.5x does not exhibit this problem, but I cannot use 2.5.x for rendering as its does not import 2.49 files properly or not at all. The solution is to setup a material in 2.5x with the created bump map. I can then bake a normal map which is essentially a conversion from the greyscale bump map to a tangent space normal map. Using this normal map back in 2.49 works perfectly no more seams are visible.
Its working, but introduces a huge overhead and potential error sources, but I know of no other solutions here.
The good side is, that I can finish now the dress texturing and it only involves work but not magic. Its also some valuable lessons learned which will be handy for the next texturing job Ara herself.
See here for the current state of dress texturing/shading:
With all this recent experience I find it hard to predict a definitive release date for Aras Tale but hopefully it will be early 2011.
And I am pretty sure there will be a Suzanne Award 2011 as well