FMP Conclusion

I barely finished the final renders in time for the hand-in but they are done!
I decided to make a PowePoint presentation to showcase the characters and the process. I included the main pictures for each stage of the process from this blog and the final renders. I didn't see the need to go over everything and explain them again since this blog contains all the information, so I thought I'd just focus on the images and use as few words as possible.
I had a lot of problems doing the voice recording, from making the programs work to the computer not recognizing my microphone. In the end, using multiple programs, I managed to get something recorded but the quality is not that great ( I apologise for all the noise in it). I tried making a short summary of the project to fit the 5 minutes frames, since going over everything individually took me over 7 minutes without even reaching half of the project.
I cleaned up the UE4 file before handing it in, just deleted the starter content and all the "test" files which I had in there. The 3ds Max contains all the characters in their final pose, together with the rigs and materials. Also, I added the pictures from the PowePoint separately too, just in case something happened with the ppt.

Reflecting back on these past 5 months, this project was definitely challenging and it made me push myself to the limit. I am glad that I managed to stick roughly to the schedule which I made before starting but I had to make some changes to adapt to unexpected events. At some points, I fell behind but I always managed to catch back up later and finish everything in time. I wish I had some more time for stretch goals and polishing things up, but I will work on that before adding this project to my online portfolio.
Looking back, I can see how I could have done some things better and there are areas which I am not completely happy with but I think the good outweighs the bad and I definitely learned a lot with this project. Going at full speed from start to finish to make everything consistently was difficult at times but I think my skills improved since the first character that I've done this year, which is what I wanted.
I am very happy to see this project done, I didn't imagine at the start that this is how it would turn out but I am not disappointed because I know that I did my best with the resources that I had at that time.
Finishing university now makes me a bit nostalgic and I feel like these 3 years passed in a blink. Of course, this is not an end, just a new beginning for my game art journey which I am excited to start. Learning never stops, so I won't either!
Thank you for taking the time to go over this lengthy blog and I apologise for all inconsistencies and spelling mistakes!

FMP - Marmoset renders

I wanted to make individual presentation shots for each character and I decided to use Marmoset Toolbag for that because it is much quicker to set up materials and lighting (and also make wireframe renders). I am really pressed by time because it took a lot to figure out the UE4 stuff so I thought it would be best to do it like this and actually have a chance to finish the project before the deadline (also Marmoset renders were part of my stretch goals).
I made some more neutral poses for each character and set them up the usual way. I tried doing some more dramatic lighting this time and I added some smoke and dust backdrops to make the characters pop from the background. As always, it took some playing around with the lighting types, position, colours and intensities before finding something which looks nice.

Overall, I am pleased with how the renders turned out. If I had the time I would have played a bit more with the lighting but I had to settle for something quite fast. 

I regret that I had some other poses set up for all of them (without the glasses and scarf for the biker and without the cloak for the demoness) which I planned to present in a different lighting situation so I could show other angles of the characters, but I had to give up on that to make the deadline. I will probably keep working on those for my online portfolio and also polish what I have now.

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. 

FMP - Rig&Skin

I rigged and skinned all characters in 3ds Max using the biped. I added additional bones for some areas to control them better (like the cloak and dress for the demoness, the chain for the biker).

Because both characters have a lot of small objects and pieces attached to them and it was really difficult to skin it I decided to split the meshes. So I split the hair, eyes, the cloak (for the demoness) and the chain and cloth belt (for the biker). It was much easier to skin them afterwards to the same skeleton than trying to fix everything all at once.

 Rigging and skinning took some days for each character. The meshes are deforming alright in most poses, but for some more exaggerated ones, there is some clipping which I couldn't fix. The part which is bothering me the most, are the sleeves of the cloak for the demoness because they should be affected by gravity and change shape depending on how she's moving her hands and I couldn't rig them to work well in all poses. Because I really have to move on and finish this project, I decided to adjust the areas which are not working properly when doing the final poses directly on the meshes, so they would look right in the renders (since the characters won't be animated anyway). 

Rigging the cat was a bit trickier since I was starting from a biped, but I could find an example of a horse being rigged this way, so I tried to do something similar. I tried to adjust the bones so they would roughly fit the actual anatomy of a cat and added some more bones to control the wings and the ears. 

Overall, it took an entire week to rig and skin everything and a few more days to work on the poses for the presentation. That leaves me with roughly a week to finish the presentations in UE4 and Marmoset before the deadline. 

FMP Updates

After I finished the cat I took some time to go back and make some adjustments to my other characters. I worked a bit more on the textures, adjusted the hair and fixed the meshes in some areas, mainly just cleaning everything up and adding the finishing touches.

The biggest changes were to my demoness character, as I added some new elements to the design. Initially, that's what I had in mind but because of the time constraints I left them out, so now that we got an extension I decided to add them in. Even though it's not a huge change, I think it makes a difference and I like the look of my character much more now. It also helped me decide what to do with the opening in the back of the cloak, as I wasn't really happy with any of previous attempts with tattoos or other types of markings.

I created the feathers in Maya with xGen and all the other meshes in 3ds Max, and then unwrapped and packed them together on the texture sheet for the horns, which had the most empty space left. 

I think the feathers give the character a nice look and more material diversity, and also fits her theme. It's still elegant and in a way suggests the fallen angel idea, also this type of cloak and feathers remind me of classical fantasy mages, which match with her powers too since she's supposed to be sorceress like. When working on the concept right at the start of the project, I was debating whether to add a tail or not (and I was thinking about the classic pointy demon tail) but decided against it, so when I added the golden chains now I thought that I could fake it like this to make it look more interesting from the back. 

For the other character, the changes are not so obvious, I mainly worked on the textures a bit more. I spend some time cleaning up the tattoo and adjusting the colours, added more wear and dirt which would be visible from a distance and fixed the roughness maps. 

From the point of view of the textures, I'm quite happy with how the characters turned out and I'll try to stop changing them now because I could keep tweaking them forever and never finish this project. 

Now, that I've cleaned all the meshes, I started working on the rig and skin which will probably take some days since both characters have a lot of accessories and hanging bits and pieces, but I will try to finish it as quickly as I can so I can start playing around with poses for the final presentation. On the side, I'm also gathering some references for props and a plinth so hopefully, all will be well and I'll manage to finish everything in time and maybe squeeze in some of my stretch goals before the deadline. 

FMP Demoness -Hair

For the past days, I've been working on the hair for my second character. I didn't want to do something very complicated for it, so I tried going for a shoulder-length wavy hairstyle.
I made the textures in Maya with xGen just like I did for the previous character, and placed the hair cards in 3ds Max. I approached the process in a similar way as last time and built the hair in layers, starting from the base hair which would cover all the scalp, multiple breakup layers and some flyaway strands. Also, I added thin hair strands on her eyebrows and eyelashes.
The hair in total has around 4.7 k tris which makes this character almost 20k tris under the budget that I had. I can see now that there are some areas where I could have spent a few more tris but it is looking decent as it is and I don't have the time to remake things now. I am thinking of adding some more accessories which were in my initial concept of the character but I am leaving that for the end if I have time for them before the deadline.

There are some hair areas which need to be adjusted but I am leaving that for later, as well as doing the finishing touches to the textures because I need to start the last character now if I want to finish everything in time. I am planning to spend no more than 3 weeks on the last one but I am not sure how things will turn out, hopefully I'll manage everything.
Doing the hair took a lot of time, I had quite a lot of issues with it and the software and I spent at least 4 days just remaking things because they didn't turn out well. This is why I had to spend a few more days than I had initially allocated for the hair to finishing these things up. Still, I'm glad that I managed to learn xGen and get some decent hairstyles done for my characters so the whole experience was worth it, now I just need to catch up on the work.

Here's a small gif to show some stages the hair went through.

FMP Demoness - Textures 1

The week I finished baking (on Monday), was the last week the university was open, so taking into consideration what was happening with the virus I decided that it would be best to return back home until the situation calms down. I didn't manage to get much work done that week since I had an interview and the rest of the time was spent packing, travelling and then setting up my workspace at home. My computer at home is not as fast as those in the labs but it can still handle most programs decently so hopefully I won't have many problems with that and I can finish everything on time. 

So after this busy week, I was finally able to start texturing the character. I had references for most of my materials so I had a fairly good idea on what the materials are supposed to look like. At first, I tried getting the base properties of the materials right without worrying about wear at all. This is how I built the materials for my previous character too, which is a method that works really well for me because it forces me to make interesting materials (as brand new)  without relying on the wear and tear. 

This was the first material pass. Probably, the most challenging materials for this character were the fabrics, the ones on her dress and the lace material. The lace was actually a bit easier than I expected, I made the base fabric material first and then masked with a lace tiling alpha (and added height to it). It was much more challenging to get the dress material to look how I wanted to since I wanted to make it look quite elegant and have some highlights on it. Adding metalness to some of the areas did this trick quite well without making the material look like plastic (I mainly used references of the sorceresses' dresses from Witcher 3).

After a second pass, I started adding more details and adjusting the materials. I started thinking about the wear of the materials too, I don't want to make these characters very worn given the world context but some battle damage would make sense (I am trying to find a balance for now, if I have time, one of my stretch goals is to make different battle-worn levels for the characters). 

I added a bit of opacity to the lace material, a mid-value to go over the entire mesh. I think that it works better now and it resembles more the material I was going for. I am still not sure about the thick edges of the material, I am thinking of adding some tears right near the edges to break the continuous lines. 

Also, I started adding some height patterns to the metals and other areas, most of those have only decorative purposes and I think they contribute to the elegance that I wanted my character to have. Only the patterns on her rings are some demonic sigils that I found, I thought that adding those might help suggest her powers. 

I wanted to make the shackles on her legs visibly older and more worn than all the other materials, since she was supposed to have been imprisoned for a long time and freed when she made a contract with my previous character ( I hope I cand find some names for them until I finish the project, but that's the hardest part). After being freed from imprisonment, I didn't want her to lose those chains completely as a way to suggest that she is still bound (with the contract) and not completely free to use her powers ( I added the glowing marking on the shackles to give them a more supernatural look, so it would be more visible that they are not regular chains which can be broken easily). This character's main motivation to collaborate with the biker dude (who is a demon hunter) is to find a way to be completely free and regain her powers (which the biker guy can channel through the contract and make him more op).

Something more challenging about both these characters is showing that some of the things they're wearing have different ages, so they would need to have different wear levels too (and on top of that comes the battle damage which is a different story). For this one, the shackles are visibly older, the dress is supposed to seem different from the other materials too (it should be something that she had before the imprisonment, that's why I was looking at references from the Witcher which is medieval) and all the other things should belong in the modern world. I think those aspects are quite difficult to illustrate and match together so things wouldn't seem completely out of place or unplanned (or just a mistake). I don't think I was that successful showing these aspects through my first character and this one still need a lot more work too, but hopefully, I can find a balance.

 I tried to suggest the demonic look through her skin material too, that's why I added a lot of veins on it to kind of make it look translucent (being imprisoned for a long time it would make sense to for her to be very pale too). Making her eyes glowing contributes to that look too, also I think it would help for some dramatic lighting renders at the end. The horns were quite challenging, I looked at a lot of real-life references but I found it quite difficult to get the material properties right. 

The main element which is missing is the tattoo on her back. That's a big part of her design so it's important for me to get it right. I tried out a few patterns but none were looking right so I am gathering more references. I am considering extending the tattoo over other parts of her body too ( which would make her look more demonic) but I would have to see how that works. Also, though about making the tattoo emissive, I think it would make some cool final renders but wouldn't make much sense otherwise. The third option would be to make a scar instead of a tattoo, something like hot iron branding, but I still have to look into how I could texture that convincingly (it's also important to make the scar look different from the one on my previous character since they would have different causes).

This is the progress that I managed to make in one week. I still have a lot to do before the textures will be finished but it's getting there. Until I decide on what to do with the tattoo/scar I will take a break from texturing and start working on the hair for both my characters, as this will be quite time consuming too. 

FMP Demoness -Low Poly, UVs, Bakes

I spent a week working on the low poly, UVs and bakes. I'm quite happy that I managed to finish all of these so now I'm not that behind on schedule anymore.

For the low poly, I already had some of the objects (like belts, buckles) made as low polys from the start so I only needed to adjust them. The other parts I retoped in Maya, I really tried to keep the silhouette of the objects, have clean loops for deformation and keep everything at the same poly density. The only part which is higher in density is the face, as I didn't want to have any sharp edges around there, I also added some more loops on the sleeves of the cloak just to be safe, so it wouldn't clip with the arm. 

 The low poly has around 43k tris in total, my budget is of 70k tris so this leaves me with a lot of budget for the hair ( I don't think that I'll actually get to 70k though, the hair wouldn't probably have more than 10k).

My texture budget is one 4k sheet for the entire character, so I decided to split it in more 1k sheets for all the different areas like I did with my previous character. I mainly took into consideration the material the objects are going to be made of when splitting those, this way it would be easier to set up the properties for each material in engine. The only issue that I have with this method is that there is quite a bit of empty space on some of the sheets, but overall I can get more details in than if I had grouped them all together. I ended up with 9 texture sheets and I will need to add 2 more, one for the hair and one for the eyes.

After I've finished those, I baked the normal, normal obj, thickness, curvature and ao maps in Marmoset Toolbag. This was quite straight forward and I didn't get any big errors which I couldn't fix directly in Marmoset. 

I'm happy that now I can finally begin working on the textures since this is going to be a big part of the character and that I managed to save some time and catch up on my schedule.

FMP Demoness -Sculpt 2

I spent another week finishing up the sculpt. I went over everything and tried to get them all at the same stage of polish. I didn't want to add many surface details at this point as it would be quicker and easier to do that in Substance Painter. 

That's how the sculpt ended up looking at the end. The only thing that I added was a ring on one of her horns to break the symmetry and apart from that, I just tried to fix everything and get some nice details in. If there is something else that catches my eye, I will fix that on the go, as I really have to move on to the next stage now if I don't want to fall behind on my schedule. 

Fortunately, some of the objects are already low polys so I don't have a lot to retop, I am hoping I can speed things up a little now and finish the low poly and UV in another week. 

I took a pic almost every day so I thought I'd make a gif of the process.