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FMP: Dr. Henrik Ottmeyer – Texturing, rigging and presenting

I started out by giving each material a base colour and a 0.5 roughness value. I usually work on one material at a time, while leaving the other ones the default grey value and I’m trying to break this bad habit.  When I began texturing I had in mind the art style of Dishonored 2. However, I couldn’t settle for one, since both 1 and 2 had elements that I loved. For instance, I wanted the skin to look as in the second game, but I liked the color variation of the clothes in the original concept. So, I made up my mind – I was not going to worry about the specific style, but rather make it look good (at least to me).

Firstly, I started refining the skin texture. I noticed that dishonored characters tend to have way more pronounced skin tone differences on the different areas of the face. For example, the blue/purple tone under the eyes is way more pronounced than it would be in a normal person. So, I gradually built up the skin undertones, the colour variation, the colour of the pores with a curvature mask, added white spots, blemishes, added in the colour of the beard and a few black pores to look like small ingrown hairs.

Then I started on the clothing. I added a few colour variations to the shirt, both hand painted and using the AO and curvature maps. I generated the roughness with grunge maps and added a few extra layers to get a more varied result. The apron was fun to paint, since there are quite a lot of shades of green in the concept. After painting the apron, I added a height map with black and white stripes. This made the material look a bit shiny, so I had to bump up the roughness. I did the same to the pants – added colour variation, hand painted and generated based on the AO and curvature maps, added roughness, roughness variation and a height map.

 At this point I was quite pleased with the upper part of the body, but not so much with the pants and shoes. I needed a more visible hue change, or maybe brighter colours. So I went into Photoshop and tweaked the saturation a bit and added some more variation - some green, red and yellow tints.
I also made a high poly verion on the lenses and baked the normal map. The issue was not very apparent on the transparent lens material, but here is a before and after for the other one:

And that's how my material setup for these lenses looks like:

After the textures were finished, I made the scalpel in 3ds max, both the high ald low poly versions. I unwrapped the low poly, then exported everything to Substance Painter. I baked the maps and then applied a basic metallic texture to it. Making the blood look good wasn't easy. I used the stains that come with Subtance painter, but they are quite transparent and they looked more like coffee stains than blood splatters. So I had to pick reference images and make some of my own alphas.

For the plinth I wanted to have some ceramic tiles as in the concept. I made the material quite easily in Substance using a pre existent alpha texture. I added in the albedo channel a mid grey for the base colour and a darker tone in between the tiles. Then, with the same aplha in the mask, I added a 0.2 height value to make them look like actual tiles instead of a flat plane. I set the roughness quite low, and painted in some roughness variation and that was it. I had my plinth.

After I finished texturing the charcter I went on and rigged it in 3ds Max. I brought the model in Max, assigned a multi sub-object material to it, reset the x-normal and brought the pivot point to the origin. Then, I added a biped system and started placing the bones in the correct position. I then started skinning. This time I finally figured uot how to paint weights in Max, and that really sped up the whole process.
Presentation usually takes ma at least one full day of work. I usually need to come up with a bunch of different scenarios and compare them to see which one I like better than the other. Surprisingly, I didn't lose so much time on this one: I placed a main light, a low intensity filler light and a few rim lights and everything worked like charm. I was wery pleased with the result. Last but not least, I baked the thickness map for the skin (I don't usually bake it when I start my project because it's the map that takes the longest time to bake without being so useful in the texturing process) and I edited it into Photoshop a bit, then used it as a mask for the translucency. I set the subsurface scattering to a bright orange color, then I changed my mind and set it to a very saturated version of the albedo. Since I was still in the phase when I try things out and see if they work for me or not, I set the tint of the translucency to a dark red. It made she skin have more of a yellow tint, just like wax. 
I rendered the last two GIF images in marmoset as well. Instead of capturing a video, I exported a 300 frame jpeg sequence. Then, I brought all of them into Photoshop using a script and I created a frame animation.

FMP: Dr. Henrik Ottmeyer – Retopology, UVs, baking

This time I retopped the mesh in 3ds max. I started with the head, paying a lot of attention to have the necessary loops. Instead of using pictures as reference, I used some Marmoset viewer scenes I found on Artstation of Dishonored models. For the rest of the body I tried to keep the polygon density quite even and add extra loops to the joints to make sure they would bend properly. I also added some extra polyloops on the waist. This time I tried a different approach with the clothing – instead of having the polygons follow the folds, I retopped them as a cylinder and cut lines where the folds are.
The only areas where I increased the polygon density is the head and hands. The polycount of the character is 25k without the hair cards.  EDIT: 27.5k with the hair cards

I split my UVs into 6 texture sheets: one for the apron and shirt, one for the skin, lenses, eyes, one for the gloves, shoes and pants and another one for the hair and hair cards. There are some spaces left on some of the texture sheets since I didn’t have time to make them look tidy, but there are no visible deformations. I put the glasses on a different texture sheet because the lenses are going to be transparent and I didn’t want to have any troubles with the UE4 materials.
Also, this time, instead of using 2 meshes for the eyes as I did for my first character, I used only one. Even though I may not be able to make the iris look realistic, it is cheaper and the shader doesn’t take 10 minutes to compile on my PC. (I did some research and making the parallax on the iris when you use a single mesh is quite complicated and I am not that advanced when it comes to UE4)

 I baked the maps in Substance Painter and I think it was for the first time when they came out with no errors at all from the first try. However, at some point I noticed that there was something wrong with the topology of the apron and I needed to rebake the normal and the AO. I will talk about the texturing process in the next blog post.