Week 3: New gloves/shoes, retopo and texturing early stages

This week I wasn't working as efficiently as I was hoping to, and felt as though I was starting to fall behind a little bit from the amount of progress made last week. Regardless of that, I'm still ahead of my original schedule as it was mostly planned out as flexible as possible. Here is the progress I made in week 3:

I started this week by redesigning Sonic's gloves to be fingerless as opposed to having classic style gloves. This helped with making Sonic's redesign feel fresh in comparison to what I was working off of before. The design of these gloves are mostly following along with the design by Laia Flores Lledo, though when it comes to texturing I might change the texture a little bit from a leather glove to something more like the original Sonic gloves.

I redesigned Sonic's shoes based around the feedback I recieved regarding Sonic's design, and I ended up creating an idea that I and many others actually am quite fond of. It's less like Sonic's original shoes, but more akin to that of Sonic's grinding boots from Sonic Adventure 2. I also wanted to add in a nod to SEGA within the design, by including the letter S in their iconic logo font.

The high poly was blocked out in Maya, and then exported into Zbrush where I sculpted seams and used live boolean to add detailing such as holes for the shoe laces and detail for the shoe soles. The SEGA logo underneath the shoe soles was made using the type font in Maya with fixed topology and imported as a subtool. I plan to add some further detailing to the high poly shoe when I revist the sculpt in preparation for the high poly bake.

I was having issues when it came to trying to modify Sonic's face and overall sculpt with it being completely dynameshed, so I felt it was wiser that I took what I had and bring it into Maya for retopology. I followed along with a retopology guide by Danny Mac 3D to make sure I didn't make any mistakes when it comes to edgeflow on the model, though I did need to make my own adjustments to best fit Sonic's design as Danny Mac's tutorial is focused on female humanoid characters.

With this new topology, I was able to adjust the shape of the sculpt more easily. The biggest change was Sonic's snout area, as before it looked rather goofy due to me misinterepting how it looked based on 2D artwork. I was able to balence it out to get something that looks much nicer and more like Sonic.

At the moment this model isn't very well optimised. Before I rig Sonic, I will need to delete some of the edge loops so I can lower the triangle count drastically. A lot of the topology is also going to be hidden under fur cards, so you wouldn't be able to notice some of the less smooth sections unless you remove the layers of fur cards.

Here are the UV layouts, laid out in a way that they can be imported with UDIMs in Substance Painter (Body, Gloves/Shoes, Eyeball and Eyelens):

I made a seperate subtool for testing facial expressions for Sonic using the layers in ZBrush, which can be exported as blendshapes in Maya. I will try to use this more in depth with seperate layers for each side, once Sonic's low poly model with fur and extra tetiary detail is completed and is ready for rigging. Here are some examples of facial expressions that I've made for Sonic:

Happy face

Sad face

Mouth closed

Mouth open

Aggressive

As of right now Sonic has a very basic texture set which is placeholder until I'm ready to delve more into the texturing side of Sonic. I baked out the high poly as a bake test to see how it looks currently, and besides some meshes needing to be seperated it overall turned out great. I added a fill layer on the base colour that contained Ambient Occlusion and Curvature to make areas pop out more on the base colour, rather than using baked lighting which is more intensive on performance in Substance Painter.

I imported my mesh to Unreal Engine to get an idea of how the model currently looks in engine. Most of the materials are very basic so far, except for the eye lens material which uses a material setup that I learned from a YouTube video by Demitrius titled "Rendering Eye with refraction in UE4". This is a translusent material that uses a fresnel based refraction that runs through a lerp, using parameters to effect the distortion seen in the eye.

The lighting setup currently used in this scene is from a pack provided by PolygonAcademy, which contains a day, sunset and night ligting set up that you can copy and paste into any scene. I may need to look into making my own lighting set up closer to when I begin detailing my diorama scene, as I might find that this lighting doesn't look as suitable for the overall scene as I may have thought.

This week I am going to focus on getting Sonic's fur done using fibermesh to groom fur cards and xGen to create fur strands, along with other tertiary details that will be seen in the high poly bake. By the end of this week or start of next week, I should be making more progress on Dr. Eggman's sculpt and possibly retopology.