During week 8 I managed to make an alright amount of progress for both characters and the overall scene. Whilst I am still facing issues with my rig of Sonic, I've managed to make progress in other areas when it comes to character texturing, poses and the environment set dressing. This progress can be seen in the image below.
I replaced the sunset lighting with daylight lighting from the Polygon Academy lighting pack as I felt it fit this scene a lot more than the sunset lighting, and is a lot closer to Green Hill Zone as depicted in recent Sonic games.
Whilst it could still be a bit early to make the call to say Sonic and Eggman's texturing is done, I've managed to at least get in the detailing that I planned to have for their materials and should there need to be adjustments closer to submission, I will be able to leave myself enough time to do so.
The detailing that was added to the materials was mostly tertiary such as dirt, colour information, and more accurate fur direction on Sonic. I also fixed some minor issues I had with Eggman's textures, such as misplaced stuble for the facial hair that I somehow managed to miss until a week ago. I rebaked the high poly info to add and fix details that were missing on the bake beforehand.
You can see the materials in more details in these Marmoset renders.
No fuzz:
As of now the character rigs are still not perfect, and I was still having issues with Sonic. I did ask for help from Neil Hall and from his advice I was able to fix the worst of my issues, such as forgetting to delete old contraints and bind poses for all the joints. A lot of the time I ended up messing up the joint orientation, which caused issues when it came to setting up IK handles casuing them to rotate.
I had to bite the bullet and just accept what I had for the time being to get at least one pose in engine. The next time I revisit this rig, I will have readjusted all the orientations to match that of the mixamo skeletal structure and will include the extra meshes for the furfuzz. The pose seen below was posed to the best extent I could get it to work in Maya, which was then edited when brought into UE4. I plan to edit the poses slightly in ZBrush if I continue to encounter issues with rigging and weight painting.
I made some major adjustments to the grass material that I created in Substance Designer. As I'm still rather inexperienced with Designer, I looked at a material breakdown by YouTube user @AnArtAccount' (available at: https://youtu.be/NGOJ0KYN_1I) which breaks down his methodology of creating a grass material. My version is currently a bit more simplistic as I didn't feel the need for adding in mass amounts of detail, though I will refer back to this video at later stage before submission to add detail if needed.
Using some of the methods I learned from the grass materials using perlin noise and slope along with using the blend node, I was able to adjust the dirt material to give it some more rocky variation.
For my background set dressing I sculpted a rocky mountain structure and a Green Hill Zone loop and had them scaled up to be as large as they should be based on the concept art I drew for the diorama layout. Currently these have not been retopologised, they've only been decimated to an extent that's suitable for engine use. Just like with the platform, I baked out the high poly information and included them with the material. The next thing I will need to do is to create a rock material similar to the ones seen in Sonic Generations, along with grass that hangs off the edge with opacity information to be included in the environment materials.
The pretend level layout for the background was put together in Maya, with enough geometry in the areas to paint the difference between grass and dirt.
As I'm now at a stage where I'm comfortable enough with the character meshes and materials, this week will be a bit more focused on getting the environment completed, and between environment assets I will also be working to improve the rigging and weight painting of the two characters. I'm unsure if I'm going to be able to begin any of the extra deliverables this week, but I'm not too worried about my progress at this point.