Due to a lot of personal struggles during week 9 and 10, I'm now writing both of these weeks in one post during week 11. I'm at a stage currently where I'm almost ready to move onto some of the extra deliverables, and a decent amount of progress has been made in terms of both characters and environment.
Current UE4 scene progress:
Whilst still not perfect, I was able to get the Sonic rig to a stage that I was able to work with it more easily. I currently still face issues with my IK handles, which I plan to fix when I begin animating Sonic for the planned running animation. Right now though I have controls set up for the hands and eyes which allows for easy manipulation of the finger and eye rotation, along with blendshapes for facial expressions.
The pose I made had issues with arm placement, so I manually edited the positions in UE4 and exported the poses out as static meshes to fix any issues with skin weights when posed. The pose seen below for Sonic is based on his character render from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which I chose because of the dynamic feel that is appropriate for Sonic.
Marmoset renders:
Maya rig:
I wasn't too happy with how the fuzz layer was looking when using a higher quality anti-aliasing setting, which ended up looking very pixaleted. I decided to explore ways I could make a fuzz material that was still subtle but not completely unseeable. I decided to look into a tutorial by UnrealCG (available at https://youtu.be/BHU0-9EURRc). ParallaxOcclussionMapping is used with a height map to give off the illussion of depth and to make sure that it doesn't over power the original fur underneath it, I added an opacity parameter that can be adjusted on the two material instances.
I replaced the original water material I was using in favour of the in engine water created by Epic Games themselves. Whilst this water is more intensive and requires shaders to be rebuilt, it's very efficient to use and gives off a lot more of a realistic feel to my envrionment.
The material instance attached to this water allows for a high amount of customisation that allows me to change the appearance of the water to my liking. These include the speed and number of waves, the height that waves travel at, the colour and reflectiveity of the water, foam, bubbles and many other settings. The only issue is that this water is more suited for landscapes, which means I won't have the same effect when the water collides with static meshes as opposed to landscape geometry.
I used Substance Designer to create some basic materials for the background elements such as mountains and sand. These were created without the use of any tutorials, and were done fairly quickly as a way to make these objects seem more detailed from a far distance. Had these been more up close to the camera, I would have done some more research towards these materials. The only thing that requires editing is the curvature on the rock.
I used the same grass greyscale nodes from the ground grass material for the transparent foliage version, and used it to fill up the platform with grass foliage.
I added a bit of fresnel to a few of the objects and character materials, to help achieve the semi-stylised look seen in assets from Sonic Generations/Sonic Forces. These might need a bit of adjustment, but they help contribute to the stylised look quite a bit.
Eggman's pose has been slightly altered and I fixed some of the issues with the zip's skin weights for the rigged model. Further adjustments were made when I brought the pose as a static mesh in Maya to have better control over them.
I have temporarily simplified the material for Eggman's facial hair as the higher Anti-Aliasing settings made the effect from before look to pixelated. I will be looking into ways to make the facial hair look a lot less fake looking, which is a difficulty with character art in UE4 currently outside of VFX use.
I began working on an egg mobile model for one of Eggman's renders, though I was having difficulties approaching the high poly aspect which slowed down work on this model. Hard sufrace modelling is a weaker skill of my skillset, so I do find myself bringing the high poly meshes into ZBrush to fix the issues with pinching that appear in Maya. The textures are nowhere near final, and I plan to work on this further once I finish polishing my main deliverables.
Substance Painter bakes:
Right now I feel as though I'm in a good enough spot, and will be able to get stuff polished ahead of the deadline. In terms of my extra deliverables such as Shadow The Hedgehog and a running animation for Sonic, I may need to do the animation first as that was the main reason I spent as much time as I did on Sonic's rig. Time management has been poor due to personal issues, so I'm going to make sure that I will get as much as I can polished within this week and next.