Week 4 and 5

Due to a combination of burn out and family matters, I was unable to find the time to write my blog posts for the previous two weeks. Instead, I have decided to combine them into one single blog post.

Week 4 and 5 was focused a lot on Dr. Eggman and atttempting to get hair and fur working the way I wanted it to. I had a lot of issues trying to get Sonic's fur working, and I felt like a headless chicken running around in circles trying to make something that felt correct. I tried both hand placing fur cards in Maya and using Fibermesh in Zbrush, but the outcomes weren't as pleasant as I would have hoped.

A lot of my attempts at making fur cards that blended in with Sonic seemlessly did not work as I had hoped, which is when my tutor Shaf pointed me in the right direction. His advice was to duplicate the topology of Sonic's body, and have it as a low opacity shell that goes around the main body. This method can be used to create a layer of fuzz that when used in engine will give the effect of Sonic having fur without it being too noticably fake. This technique could also be used for a grass on a flat surface as well. I noticed this same technique being used in a game I played recently, so I'm curtain that I can pull this off well enough.

The fur technique is currently just using the main body textures at a lower opacity, which will be replaced with a specific fur opacity material.

Now that I'm at a more comfortable stage with Sonic that I can return to at a later stage, I began working more towards Eggman who at that point had been neglected. I began to build up the anatomical form of the body as despite being hidden under clothing, it still felt important to do in order to fit the clothing onto Eggman just right.

With the clothing, I extruded areas that would be covered by the appropriate clothing items to create the base shapes, and used standard brush and clay build up to make some of the basic folds needed. I was going to have to reposition the arms though, primarily for rigging purposes. This was something I should have taken into account before sculpting.

I decided it would be better to do the retopology of what I had done in Zbrush first to then adjust the arm position. The topology still needs a bit of work, but as of now it's fine for sculpting and using to test materials in Unreal Engine.

I brought Eggman into Substance Painter to try and make some test materials to see how he would ideally look in Unreal Engine. I followed along with a human skin tutorial in Substance Painter to help get a more realistic base, whilst tuning down a lot of the extreme details. I plan to use the realistic skin I have to adjust it into a slightly more stylised CG look later on. The clothing also uses edited versions of realistic PBR materials, though the focus is less on the colour info from the materials and more the reflectivity and how it reacts to lighting. Base Colours have more of a priority over the high detail.

I felt more comfortable doing hair cards and having them be hand placed with Eggman's moustache. I generated 4 hair textures in Substance Designer, seperated them into 4 different planes and then placed and scaled them using the moustache base mesh as a placement guide. The hair was done in a way that the area growing closest to the roots would have more volume, whilst the areas closer to the tips would have less volume.

In Unreal Engine, the material is a masked material that uses the hair shader to use the proper lighting values hair would have in realistic lighting. Masked materials tend to simplyfy how the opacity mask displays opacity, so I used a DitherTemporalAA node to help give a more realsitic sense of volume to the hair strands.

I set up a basic UE4 mesh test scene with neutral lighting and a material testing cube to both test materials of the characters, and to get the desired height scale reference for when I export the final versions of the characters.

For the diorama scene, I have lighting preset created by PolygonAcedemy for sunset lighting. I also included a basic temporary water shader, rotating ring blueprint actors and some additional lights.

I also threw together a very quick checkerboard tile dirt material in preperation for working more on the diorama scene. This material still needs a lot of work, and I might try using ZBrush to assist with material creation when the time comes for it.

As of right now, I'm still fairly on track. I've found myself procrasinating a lot, but I'm not in a place where I'm too worried about the output of my work. This week I will focus on readjusting topology for both characters, redoing UVs and texturing Sonic.