FMP Biker -Sculpt 3

I managed to finish the sculpt at the by Wednesday, the third week, just as I wanted. I didn't have a lot of changes to make, mostly just making adjustments. I worked a bit more on the folds of the fabrics but I didn' add any wear or damage to anything because I think it would be more efficient and easier to tweak if I did it directly in Substance Painter. Also, I was thinking of making different wear stages for the textures if I have time, for example, having a standard one, not too worn, and a really worn and beaten down one, so having wear on my sculpt wouldn't really help me with this.
I added some simple accessories, I am not completely sure if I should add more, but if I need to I'll just duplicate the ones that I already have. At this point, I have all the elements that I need in place and if I need to change anything it would be easy to reuse what I have.

I am leaving skin details, like pores, for Substance Painter as well, again because it would be quicker and easier to adjust them, and also I could add colour/roughness variation at the same time.

For the hair, I will leave it as it is for now, as it gives me the overall shapes and some direction for the hair strands, I don't think I need more to build the hair cards on top of that.

I am thinking to add more details to the jacket, something like patches or pins, but I will try that out in the textures. Also, I will add stitches and seams with the textures too. 

At this stage, I am ready to start the low poly. I only have a few objects to retop completely, as most of them I've made as low poly models from the start. Hopefully, I will be able to finish the low poly in one week, and then unwrap and pack everything in a few more days. This way, I would have 2 weeks left to do the textures, hair, rig and put it in the engine, which is still quite a bit of work but I hope I'll manage. 

FMP Biker -Sculpt 2

Spent the start of the second week finishing the block-in, I tried to add all the remaining elements before moving on to detailing everything. I still have a few more objects to add but they are mostly small details, just accessories, so I'm leaving them for now.

After I had most of the things in place I could start going over them and sculpt the details. While doing this I was mostly looking at my references to get the shapes right, folds and other details. I tried sculpting mostly everything on layers, so it would be easy to change and I could compare how things looked before and after. 

For the objects which would be repeated in more places, I tried making the low poly first and the subdividing it and sculpting it, so I would save some time later down the line and wouldn't have to sculpt the same thing over and over (for example, the spikes, chains, belts, buckles). 

By the end of the week, I managed to get some sculpted details on everything and things were starting to look good. I still have quite a few things to add and fix, the body, head, arms and hands need more work, and the fabrics as well. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't manage to completely finish sculpting in two weeks as I planned, mainly because I was quite sick the first week. Still, I am hoping to finish the sculpt with another 2-3 days of work and save some time on the other parts of the project. I am trying not to get too stressed so soon and take my time with everything to make it look good, rather than just finish everything very quickly. 

This how the model was looking at the end of the second week, hopefully by the middle of the next week I'll be able to start working on the low poly. 

FMP Biker -Sculpt 1

Started working on the first character for my FMP on Tuesday, the first week after the holiday, as Monday was mostly spent handing in the first term projects. I spent some time during the holidays gathering references for my characters so I knew quite well what I wanted to do with this one. I didn't do some proper concepts for it, only some simple sketches in which I mixed outfits from my references, just to visualise the character a bit better. In terms of clothing style, the main idea for the character was to make him quite punk, biker looking but also show somehow the fact that he is religious, which I thought would make an interesting contrast for the character and also with my other character, who should be a demon. One of my main goals for these characters is to show their personalities through their designs and tell a story with everything, so I am trying to keep this in mind when making decisions on their design. What I was looking for when gathering references were mainly things that looked interesting visually, would match together and the idea of my character and would be difficult to make, as I want to push myself and do more complex models which would also be functional, just as in the real world. Also, I want to present my character in two ways at the end, one with the scarf and sunglasses and one without those, so I am trying to make it look good in both ways.

I started with a body block in to get the proportions right and then exported that to Marvelous Designer to start making the clothes. I only used Marvelous for the vest and scarf, and everything else I did directly in Zbrush, except the boots, glasses, buckles, and some belts which I made in 3dsMax because I wanted to get some clean bases to work on. In Zbrush, I made everything in a similar way as I did with my previous characters, mainly extracting shapes, cleaning their topology and moving them in place, or just inserted primitives to work from. I used Zmodeler quite a lot this time to clean the geometry because I wanted to start from clean, low poly bases for everything. I hope this will help me save some time with the retopology as well. 

This first week was mostly spent only working on the block-in, as I had a bit of trouble getting back to speed after the holidays, especially because I was sick the entire week and couldn't concentrate very well. Also, I wanted to take my time with everything so I would have a good start, rather than rushing and having to do a lot of fixing later on. 

This is everything that I managed to do in the first week, there is still a lot more stuff to add and fix but I hope I can finish everything in the next week, as I planned to spend 2 weeks on the sculpt. 

Hidatsa Character -Update

Applying the feedback that I got for this project, I went back and packaged the textures a bit better, so I had the metalness and roughness map in one texture. Also, I checked the textures again and made some slight tweaks, especially for the hair. I changed the material settings for the hair in Marmoset, and worked a bit more on the texture for the hair strands and made the more subtle, as I thought that they were too obvious and I wanted them to blend in the hair mesh, rather than stand out on top of it. I made some slight changes to the lighting as well, toned down the colours and the intensity a little bit and changed some angles.
Overall, I am quite pleased with this character and I feel like I managed to improve a little bit from my previous one, but for the FMP I need to take a bigger step forward and improve all parts of the process, the sculpt, retopology, texture, hair and presentation.

SO Character -Update

The first thing I did after the formative hand in was to finish the rig and pose the character. In the end, I used 3ds Max to do the rig because I am more used to the tools in there and I would need to learn a bit more before doing it in Maya as well as I would in Max.
After getting the feedback, I went back and made a few changes to the character to take it a bit further. Firstly, I changed the white pattern on the T-shirt, I took the old one to Photoshop and hand-painted on top of it to make it look crisper and higher res to match the rest of the character. Also, I added more wear to the clothing, added some discoloured stains and a few clumps to the T-shirt and the pants. For the coat, I added larger, more visible slashes and more dirt, especially in the lower part of it. For the rest, I just checked everything again and only made very subtle changes.
In Marmoset, I changed the material settings for the hair as the light was reflecting a bit weird in some areas, mainly because of the SSS settings. I didn't make a lot of changes to the lighting, just toned down some of the lights and adjusted the others. Also, I added a very simple backdrop so the background wouldn't just be a flat colour. Initially, I planned to add some kind of smoke alpha to the sword (as it had in the concept) but gave up on the idea because the sword is bright enough as it is and another emissive surface in that area would draw the attention too much from the character.

Helmeted Character -Update

After getting the formative feedback and carefully reading it, I made some changes based on it to improve the character. Firstly, I changed the scarf texture completely, I kept the same pattern on it but worked on the wear of the cloth more to try and make it more believable (changed the fabric texture, added clumps, stains with colour and roughness variation). Also, made the wear on the other materials more visible from a distance, changed the wear on the skin to a few big slashes, rather than more smaller ones. I changed the values and saturation of the colours a bit as well, made the red gradient on the legs and arms stronger, changed the base colour of the scarf to a desaturated purple/pink (from brown) and made the pink edges on her top more saturated. I tried to change the overall roughness of the different body parts to make them stand out more from each other. Worked a bit more on the belts and pouch, added more details and wear to make them a little more interesting, and changed their base colour too. Also, I spent some more time working on the AO map to try and make the transition between the materials and body parts nicer.
In Marmoset, I changed the lighting setup completely as I thought it wasn't working that well for my character as it previously was. I added a simple backdrop to frame the character from the background better and more butterflies because I wanted to use their emission to bring out some reflections in the metal parts.

Hidatsa Character - Presentation & Hand-in

After I finished rigging the character and the pose, I imported everything into Marmoset Toolbag and set up the final lighting. I still find this part quite difficult and it takes me a lot of experimentation to find the right balance between interesting lighting and showing off my textures. I've looking a lot at how other people set up their lighting and I found some really good process breakdowns on Marmoset's website which really helped me a lot. I wanted to try something different for this character, and instead of heaving the main light illuminating the side of the character which is facing the camera, have it on the other side. I think this gave me some really nice shadows on her face and body but I feel like some parts are too dark and it doesn't quite show all the details on the materials. I tried compensating this with some fill lights and rim lights which colored my shadows a little, but I think I'll still have to adjust the intensities a bit. Also, I'd like to find a way to have some lights reflect in the eyes a little more, so the character wouldn't look so dead.
For now, I am quite happy that I managed to finish everything that I wanted before the hand-in and even though there are more adjustments I need to make, I want to take a break from this character, wait for feedback and then come back with fresh eyes to finish it.

Hidatsa Character - Rig & pose

I rigged the character in 3ds Max using the biped. I kept it very simple so I could finish it in time for the hand in so only added some more bones for the hanging pieces of clothing and the props. The most difficult part was to not get any clipping, as I have multiple layers of clothing but I managed to get it to look fine in the pose of my character. Skinning took the most time of the process as usual, and it's far from perfect but I was only focused to make it look good in the pose that I am making because I didn't have time for anything else before the deadline and I will need to go back and adjust it a little more.
I had some trouble deciding on the pose of the character, as I didn't want to make something very dynamic, like her drawing the bow, but didn't want to have it very static and stiff either. I looked up some archery poses to get some inspiration and tried out a few poses until I got something that I was fine with. I still think that the pose is still quite stiff but I don't have time for more adjustments at this point, as I've got one more day until the deadline and I still have to set up the lighting in Marmoset Toolbag and I want to add some hair cards as well.

After I set up the Marmoset scene I cam back to add some hair cards. At first I wanted to cover the whole head with them but I thought that the hair mesh was looking quite decent on it's own, and covering the whole head and braids would take a lot of time and it would probably make me go over the budget as well, I decided to only add a few thin strands to make some variation.  I hand painted some simple hair strands in Photoshop, made 3 types of long strands for the head and 3 types of very short ones to add on the braids. Also, made some eyelashes and eyebrows. Spent the last day before the hand in placing them on the head but I had to rush a little so it's not looking that great yet. I am planning to go back and change them a little, and maybe add some more fly aways. I am glad that I didn't go over the budget with them, the entire character with the props and hair should be around 23k tris, so I still have some tris to spare to adjust the hair. 

Hidatsa Character - Textures 2

Next day, I went over all the materials again and added more definition to them. I tried stopping myself from adding wear and dirt for now so I could have some nice bases to work on. At this point everything was still looking quite generic but I am quite happy with the variations I got from just the bases. Also, after getting some feedback I tweaked some of the colors, like the saturated red on her belt because it was drawing too much attention.

For the patterns that I added on the clothing, I tried to replicate some native american motifs. I knew that all the patterns have a particular meaning in their culture and tried to keep that in mind when adding them, but it isn't completely historically accurate. The symbols on her dress, armguard, bracelets and accessories are taken from resources I could find online and I tried keeping them relevant in away to the theme of this character, so most of them would symbolise something like a life journey for freedom and happiness, encountering difficulties and heading towards a future goal while keeping in touch with a past home. Everything is very rough but those were main meaning of the symbols that I added, even though the story would be a bit of a stretch. Also, for the face paint I wanted to keep it really simple, as I thought that covering her face too much wouldn't look that good. The only thing that I added were red paint where her hair parts, which I read was a common thing native american women would do and it was just something considered aesthetically beautiful (like make up for modern women), the red line on her chin which is more warrior like and white dots near her eyes, again just for the aesthetic. 

Now that I had all the bases in place, I could move on and add wear to her clothes. I went over all the materials again and added things like, dirt, scratches, edge wear, stains, material discoloration and such. I had all of those on multiple layers which I stacked together to get the effect that I wanted. Also, added more details with a height map to the materials, to refine the material texture better. 

Also, I added some dirt to her skin as well, as I though that it would make sense that some areas wouldn't be completely clean, like her hands for example. At the end, I added a sharpening filter over all the materials, to get the details to show a little better, and a fill layer to reinforce the AO map, then went on and hand painted the transition between the materials where the AO wasn't showing enough.

For the quiver I looked up some native american designs to try and make it more interesting, and added a fabric pattern and some dream catchers, on which I will add more feathers and hanging pieces strands directly in 3ds Max, because I will just recycle the parts that I already have. I kept the bow quite simple and only added some fabrics where the grip would be and some carvings. 

Also, added some patterns on the shoes but kept them quite subtle so they wouldn't draw the attention over there. 

At this point I was overall pleased with how the textures were looking and the only changes that I made were after I set up the lighting in Marmoset, which were small color and roughness changes. 

In total, it took me roughly 3 days to get to this look.

My next focus is rigging and skinning, which is more time consuming rather than complicated. I also want to add some hair cards to give more variation to the hair if I have time before the deadline. 

Hidatsa Character - Textures 1

At the start of the third week I began working on the textures. I approached them the same way I did with my previous character because it worked well for me that time, which was creating only the base materials at first and then add wear, damage and other details at the end. This way I am preventing myself for relying on the wear to make the materials interesting and force myself to create more accurate materials that would look good without any particular details ( basically some generic material which looks brand new, which would still have variation just from its base properties).
The most challenging part for this character was to make the materials look accurate so I spent some time reading about the way native american people made their clothing, what materials they used and what gave those their particular look. So, I decided to make the dress, pants and shoes out of buckskin, some rough cloth around her waist, another type of fabric for the belt, leather for the bracelets and wood accessories.
I gathered some real life references for the materials and started building them up with multiple layers, trying to imitate the look they have in reality. This wasn't a very complicated process, what I basically did was make layers with different colors and roughness values, add a black mask and grunges to apply them, then corrected them as I go, changed layers blending modes, or tiling, tone them down, break them up, it was just a lot of experimentation until I got the effect that I wanted. I did this for all the materials.

This is how the character was looking with only the bases, after roughly one day of work. I had some troubles deciding on the color palette so I tried out different colors until I got something that looked fin to me. I did this directly in Substance with color layers, as it was the quickest way for me to do it, and it would allow me to change them as much as I want to in a non destructive way. The colors that I have now are the results of layering multiple color fill layers on very low opacity. 

Apart from the clothing, I spent some time working on the skin as well. I did it in the same way as until now, and just hand painted mottling, freckles, redness, white/black pores, discolorations and such on multiple fill layers and adjusting them as I go. I tried to make the skin show the age of the character so I used a lot of references of old people to get the skin looking more accurate. 

Now the next step, is the go through each of the materials again and add more definition and wear to them. 

Hidatsa Character - Bake

As before, I baked the character in marmoset Toolbag. I set up 2 different bakers for my 2 textures sheets and multiple baking groups for all of the objects which I would influence each other. Before exporting my models I deleted the parts which would have overlapping textures, like the hands, quiver details, feathers, eyes, earrings.
I didn't get a lot of issues while baking and most of them I could fix directly in Marmoset. I am not completely happy with the AO map but I will fix it in Substance Painter so I can see exactly what I'm doing and how it's working with the textures, since there aren't any major errors anyway.

I've exported the bakes and imported everything in Substance Painter, I've split all the different materials in separate folders so now I am ready to start the textures, which I will be working on in the first half of the third week. 

Hidatsa Character - Low Poly & UV

I spent most of the second week working on the low poly. Before starting, I rescaled everything in Zbrush, decimated my subtools and exported them. As before, I made the low poly for some models directly in Zbrush with Zremesh and adjusted them with Zmodeler, this is how I made the belts and bracelets. For the quiver, I already had the low poly I imported from 3ds Max so I only had to adjust it a little. All the other parts of the model I retoped in Maya. Another one of my main goals for this project was to learn how to retopo in Maya, instead of 3D Coat which I've been using until now, and I found it quite easy and much more quicker than 3D Coat because of some additional tools it had.

The way that I built the the topology was by keeping it very low at the start to get the flow of the loops right and keep them clean, then slowly added more loops to smooth it out. When I made it I was mainly thinking about how it would deform and if it would maintain the silhouette and main shapes of my sculpt, but overall the topology is quite similar to the ones of my previous characters, as I was quite happy with how those were looking and bending (especially the hands). 

Retoping the character was quite straight-forward and I didn't have many troubles with it, the only thing which was a bit more challenging were the braids. In their case, I made a cylinder in 3ds max which I aligned on top of them with splines and tried having it follow the shape of the braid as much as possible; then I attached the cylinders to the hair cap which was retoped in Maya. I made them like this because I didn't want to go over budget (which would have been the case if I had 3 separate cylinders for one braid, like the way I built them), even though with one cylinder wouldn't perfectly keep the silhouette. This isn't that much of a problem because I am planning to add hair cards on top of them to add some variation and hide the cylinders. 

Also, I decided to give up on the beaded bracelet on her right hand because I wanted to keep each bead as a separate object, and in total I think that the bracelet was taking to much budget for being such a small object ( it had around 1.5k tris).  I remade the necklace as well to reduce the number of tris it had at the start because it was too much (around 3k tris) and managed to get it down to 1.3k tris which is still not great but acceptable. 

In total, together with the props, the character has around 19.4k tris, which would leave me with 5.5k tris to add hair cards and duplicate some feathers and arrows.

For the Unwrap, I split the character on two texture sheets, and I will add another separate one for the eyes, because I want to try and make a realistic material for them, and another sheet for the hair cards. I am still not sure how to split the budget between them but I will figure it out. 

I'm still not happy with the way I packed the UV islands because I couldn't find a way to have no empty spaces left, I tried out different layouts and in the end went with the best of those. I gave more space to the all the parts which would be skin, also made some small accessories a bit bigger so I could have some detail on them as well, like the beads, earrings and bird necklace.

Making the low poly and UVs took me most of the second week, the next thing that I want to get done as quickly as possible is the bake and then start the textures.