FMP: Lady of the sword - Baking and Texturing

The first baking test came out quite messy and I had to spend some time to solve all the baking errors I had (most of them on the gloves and fingers, some on the armour). The end result was the following:

I started texturing the caracter using the Metallic Roughness workflow, but when I got to painting the armour I found myself a little lost. In the concept, the metal looks very colorful, and I wanted to replicate that. For some reasons, whenever I tried to add colours to albedo channel, the transitions looked odd and harsh. I tried lowering the roughness, but still, the issue remaied.
 Then, I did some research on stylized texturing workflows and decided to switch to Specular Glossiness. My goal was to have the armour pop out with vivid colour variations, as in this image from Darksiders 2.Drawing the reflected colour made more sense to me than drawing the actual diffuse and the look of the metal soon started to resemble what I had been trying to achieve from the beginning.

After the presentation, my tutors told me there was no way to use the Specular Glossiness workflow inside Unreal Engine. Soon, I also found out there was no way for me to convert my texture sheets from Spec Gloss to Metal Rough directly in Substance Painter. However, that was not much of an issue, since I found a tutorial on how to convert those maps manually in Photoshop.
Progress of texturing:

FMP: Lady of the sword - Retopology

The next step in my process was retopologising the high poly mesh. The whole process of retopology+UVs took me 6 days, since I tend to either retopologise subtools at an early stage inside Zbrush or start from a low poly mesh in 3ds Max.
The hair and the wing were probably the trickiest parts I had to figure out. The hair was made out of individual strands, made with a curve insert brush in Zbrush. They all had subdivision histoy, but even at the lowest level the mesh was a bit too high. So I proceeded to retop it manually,  with extra care for the hair strands that were detaching from the mesh.
Since the wing was supposed to have some thickness, I could not use an alpha for it - I needed actual geometry. I used the same approach and in the end I managed to get rid of most of the triangles.

FMP: Lady of the sword - Sculpture

The first project that I chose to tackle was the stylized one. (concept by Taras Susak) I started with a reference sheet and a rough sketch drawn over the original concept, to gain a better understanding of how I could solve some of the areas that were not clear enough or not visible.

I tried to stay true to the concept as much as possible and add/remove/replace elements without changing the overall silhouette too much. One of the main issues were the baggy pants the character is wearing. At first I was not aware of the problem, but one of my tutors pointed out how they would cause clipping when  animating the character. Instead, I made the pants a little tighter around the thighs and added an extra piece of armour in the front to keep the general shape.
An issue I did not manage to solve completely was the positioning of the wing/shield. In the concept, the wing would not allow the character to move her right arm. In an attempt to solve that, I decided to make the inner part (where the wing connects) end just above the elbow. Even though it was a decision that made perfect sense to me, it resulted in a series of problems. It changed the positioning of the shield a little. Consequently, I could not make the cape connect to the wing in the same way and I decided to get rid of it completely.
The sculpting process took me around one week to complete, with an additional 2-3 days to polish, name and organize the subtools accordingly.

Helmet Character

Unfortunately, I could not change the textures much, since I have an older version of Substance Painter. Instead, I painted an additional roughness breakup layer in Photoshop.
I had an attempt at making the cape shorter, but I could not make the UVs fit the UVs of the long version of the cape. I felt like doing a high and low poly shorter cape, baking it, texturing it and then combining the texture maps in Photoshop would be a little too much for me right now.
I also tweaked the setting a bit and this is the final result!

SoT Props Brief - finalizing

I wanted to separate the props and put each one on an individual texture sheet, but I realized that means I should rebake and retexture them. Instead, I spent some time refining the existing textures.

I tried to break the the continuous lines and make the edges look as interesting as I could and I also tried to erase the artifacts caused by the curvature generator. For example, on the back of the hurdy gurdy, the small red spots are caused by the fact that I decimated the high poly asset too low, and the curvature didn't bake correctly. Now I know for sure I won't repeat this mistake!
I didn't change the final shot too much. Here it is:

Sunset Overdrive Character Brief - hair and final tweaks

 Here is the final outcome of the project! It was an exciting process. I enjoyed it very much and I feel like I learnt a lot.

During the first week of the winter break I worked on the hair. It took me quite a bit to learn how to use Xgen. At first, it seemed unachievable since I had never even opened Maya before, and every tutorial I tried following discouraged me even more.

At some point, I found a very useful tutorial (link). I managed to generate a hair strand and render the albedo and alpha maps. Also, this article helped me a lot with generating the rest of the maps, as well as creating the hair material in Marmoset. (link)
Everything else was pretty straight forward. I arranged all the hair cards manually in 3ds Max, making use of the freeform tools.

1. AO  2. Albedo  3.Direction  4.Normal  5. Specular  6. Opacity

After the character was finished, I went on to create the prop. I decided it would be a guitar, as in the original concept and I opted for a BC Rich Warlock, since it has a really cool design. I modelled it in max, baked and textured it in Substance.

I  tried posing my model differently (as in the concept), but the pose looked unnatural and it didn't really fit the plain expression of her face. So I went for something basic.
i found it hard to decide on the lighting scenario. In the beginning, I went for something resembling studio lighting, but I experimented quite a lot with it and came up with some stage-like lighting.
Overall, I am pretty happy with the way this project came out.

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.