Sunset Overdrive Character - Weeks 9 and 10

Here is the final outcome I managed to achieve before the formative hand-in. The character is far from finished, and I was a bit disappointed I could not finalize it up until now. However, I felt like I needed to slow down a bit, since the stress and the long hours of work have caught up on me. I still need to create the hair cards for the eyelashes, eyebrows and the hairstyle itself.

 

I feel like I learnt a lot while working on this project, especially about skin and texturing in general. I spent the last two weeks working on the retopology, UVs, bake, textures and eyes, since I was sick with the flu and couldn't work much during week 8. The eyes proved to be quite a tricky part and I am still not completely satisfied with the result, but I will work more on them during the winter break.
The retopology is always a pretty straight-forward process. However, at some point I had to look up for some reference to see how other people retopologize big folds, that break the silhouette of the character. I observed the flow of polygons in several game character wireframe views I found on Pinterest, as well as this Polycount thread. ( link )
At first I tried using Zremesher. My idea was to use the retopology Zremesher created for the sleeve (where the folds are), and then edit the rest using Zspheres retopology. However, I couldn't get a decent result with the target polycount that I wanted to use. I wanted to have my polygons quite even across the entire model, and I feared that if I used this method I wouldn't fit in the tri-count later. Instead, I retopped the entire model in Zbrush. I feel like ever since I learnt how to do this, I gained a better understanding of controlling topology and edge flow, since I can always draw the topology on my character using polypaint before actually building it. I find it easier to do so, since I can always use isolate the lowpoly mesh I'm working on and its highpoly version and use Project. I found out this method helps me improve the bake considerably. Luckily enough, some of the work was already done for me, since the insert mesh brushes I created were quite low poly from the beginning and all I had to do was to duplicate the respective subtools and delete the higher subdivision for the low poly.

My UVs have always looked somehow messy and this time I really wanted to find a way to straighten them so as no space would remain unused. I had used peel mode before to fix the UVs, but I never realised I could use it to straighten the curved UVs. So, for the UV islands that were not cylindrical I used Pelt Map, then straightened them manually in Peel Mode and used align vertically/horizontally for the edges of the islands, while making sure there were no visible distorsions happening. For the somehow cylindrical shapes I used Unfold strip from loop, which creates nice and straight UVs.

I didn't have any major problems with the bake that I could not fix easily, by increasing or decreasing the cage size. The fishnet was a bit more complicated to solve, because when I created the NanoMesh I accidentally deleted some of the polygons on the side, but in the end I made it a little bit thicker and that solved everything.

Up until now I had followed the general look of the concept. However, I wanted my character to only be inspired by that concept.
At this point, I took some of the material references I used in the sculpting process and put them in one image :

 I tried out different colour palettes. I like the bold, vivid look of red/orange on the character's turtleneck and I like how it contrasts with the green tone of the skirt. I am fairly happy with the way it looks now, but I still consider changing them after I receive more feedback from our tutors.
Using the old logo of Tiamat for for T-shirt was just a personal preference. I had second thoughts about it, thinking I could either find a punk band, or write voodoo child (considering she has a rag-doll)

Went on to create colour and roughness variations:

Texturing the skin was quite challenging. I tried using actual pictures for the face and projecting them onto my model, for a more realistic result. However, I had to re paint most of it by hand, since the anatomy of the model didn't fit the pictures very well.

I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do the eyes. At first, I tried following a tutorial where the eye was made up of 3 separate (not welded) meshes: the sclera, the cornea and the iris, which I sculpted in Zbrush. In Marmoset, I applied refraction on the cornea. However, I wasn't pleased with how it came out - the transition between the iris and sclera was very harsh and welding the edges of the two objects did not help. Also, this weird issue was happening:

Then, Lewis showed me another method to make eyes and that worked much better. After the formative hand-in, I looked up how other people set up their materials for eyes in Marmoset and tried to replicate that. I can now say I'm happy with how the eyes look.