I made a quick test scene in Marmoset to get an idea of what the materials would look like and play a bit with the material settings. I know that this is likely to change when I put it in UE4 but I find it a little easier to try and copy the look from Marmoset at first and work my way from there for the final presentation.
I am going to change the lighting set up as well because now it is really flat, as I just wanted to see the details on all my materials, but for the final renders, I would like to have some more dramatic lights going on. Also, the alpha map is not really displaying properly for my top piece but when I tested it in UE4, it looked much better, so I decided not to change it at the moment just for Marmoset.
I wanted to try some new things which I didn't do for my other characters, which were doing a fuzz map for the fabrics, an SSS map for the skin, setting up the parallax effect in the eyes and adding a transitional mesh between the eyeballs and the eyelids. I think that even though those details are quite subtle, they do make a difference and give a nicer look to the materials overall.
With(left) and without(right) the SSS map, eye parallax and eye transition^
After getting some very good feedback from the people from Dambusters Studios and Ubisoft, I changed some errors I failed to see until then, and also got some nice ideas for what I could do to further enhance this character.
One of the very important things that I neglected was the size of his eyes, which was quite a bit bigger than it should have and fixing that was a nice improvement. Also, some areas needed more roughness variation so the highlights would look better and more varied, like the skin, front of the vest and boots. Also, fixed the alphas on the fabrics to make them look a bit cleaner and more varied at the edges. I worked a bit more on the tertiary details too and that made the materials look much nicer from a closer view. The stitches needed a bit more work too, before they were only sitting on top of the clothing rather than actually going in, so I added that pressure in the fabric with a height layer.
I still have a few more things to add to the textures, like some more edge wear and dirt in the lower part of the body, fix the colours in the tattoo and make better AO transition between the objects, but for now, I will leave it like this and come back at a later time to change those, as I am running a few days late.
The last week that I had allocated for this character I mainly spent doing some research into UE4 shader settings and presentation and made a few tests, still got a bit more work to do before making things look presentable. Also, looked more into hair cards, how to create them with Maya xGen and place them. The hairstyle of this character is quite simple so I am not that worried about it, but my next character will have a much complex hairstyle so I feel like looking into this stuff at this point would only help me down the line.
I didn't quite manage to fit all the work I had to do in the 6 weeks that I had planned for this character, mainly because I didn't take into consideration that I would have days when I couldn't work at all (or do very little) because my health has not been the best lately. Still, I will start my next character next week and continue working on this one on the side.
Main things to finish: hair cards, rig and skin, UE4 presentation
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