FMP -UE4

For the UE4 presentation I decided to do a single scene with all three characters since they are supposed to belong in the same universe I thought that it would be fitting to present them all together.
After I rigged them all, I tried to pose them in a way which would look nice from all angles, this is why I didn't want to have them all facing the front. I tried doing some semi-dynamic poses, also I thought that having the two main characters being back to back kind of suggests their relationship and would look quite interesting.

Probably the most difficult part was setting up the shaders. I used my previous scenes in Marmoset as a reference for how the materials are supposed to look like and I used the Marmoset import plugin in UE4 to help me set up the shaders. Most of them were quite straight forward without additional settings, the only changes were converting some nodes to parameters, so I could make material instances which allowed me to tweak the materials easier and change the texture sheets. I had two types of textures sheet, high res ones which were 2k and lower res ones, 1k and 512, which fitted my budget of a 4k sheet per character. The differences between the resolutions aren't very obvious from a distance, but the high res ones look better for close up shots.
The most difficult parts were the skin, hair and eyes materials. I used the character benchmark project from Epic to study how they did those shaders for realistic characters, but while they looked amazing, the set up was far too complex for what I was trying to accomplish. So I watched some online tutorials, used the Marmoset materials as help and tried to come up with something looking decently. In the end, I couldn't really fix the hair and it's still looking a bit weird in some angles.
Also, I made some simple materials which I used for all characters for the eye occlusion, cornea and waterline.

I made some simple particles to make the scene more interesting. I wanted to make some flames for the demoness to suggest her powers and I also added some flying embers for presentation purposes. The last time I tried making particles was in the first year and I've almost forgotten how fun that was. 

Setting up the lighting was quite tricky because I had to make things look nice from all angles and this stopped me from going for more dramatic lighting. I would have liked to have some more rim lights and maybe some more contrasting shadows but it didn't work out like that. 

In the end, I added a post-process volume to enhance the image a little and reflection capture. The sky is just a simple sphere with a flat colour. Also, I made a simple matinee to make a turntable. It's just a camera attached to a sphere in the centre of the plinth (which is hidden) which is spinning around the models. 

Overall, I think the scene is looking decent enough but I feel like I need much more practice in UE4 before creating awesome character renders. Also, this being the first time I am trying to render characters in Unreal, it was quite intimidating and it took a lot of trial and error to just get to what I have now. 

It took me around 4-5 days to set up everything in the scene.