Presenting the Character

 03-04/01/22 - Week 14

Now I've posed the character and given her a bit of life, I moved onto presenting her in primarily unreal with some work in marmoset for portfolio pieces.

I firstly imported everything into unreal and set up the animations, this was quite basic as it was just a case of selecting the correct timing for the pose then adding on the morph target by adding another animation cycle. 

I wanted to work with my lighting to connotate the sea and the fact that she is a captain. To achieve this I did some research on artstation for the sort of lighting I wanted. I found a lot of pirate/ship captains had at least one strong blue light on a deep coloured background.

I thought to contrast the blue lighting with a warm yellow/orange as I thought this would be like the reflection of sand or light from the sun.

I chose the blue to be the strongest light on the left side as I wasn't a big fan of the large shadow from the hand being casted onto the face as it was distracting and the shadow itself was rather blotchy. My lighting ended up consisting of 4 point lights and exponential height fog to add bloom to the lights, making them softer and adding some depth to the lighting in the background.

I'm quite happy with the lighting I created in unreal as I think it highlights a lot of the best features of the character such as the clothing and also gives a sort of spotlight effect which I feel speaks for the captain side.

To add a little bit more depth to the project, I wanted to add a small particle sequence that resembled dust or fireflies which I managed just through changing some basic cascade settings, the lifetime, spawn and location being the most important. This really added some nice ambience to the scene and filled a lot of empty space, adding more interest to the scene.

I am a bit worried that they look a bit like stars or don't really relate to the scene, but I made them blue to try to make it like sea spray or something of the sort.

The final result with the lighting and particle fx is something I'm quite pleased with but I do worry that I have not made it "sea-like" or related enough to the character itself. I do still feel that it displays the textures and pose of the character nicely though, and the supporting meshes help to fill out the scene and tell you more about the character, putting some context in.

I tried to recreate this quickly in marmoset, with some slightly adjusted colours/lighting positioning as I wanted the a-pose to be displayed so the lighting wouldn't have translated too well. I went for a more tones down lighting scene that looked a bit more like she was perhaps on a boat at night, with the oranges being much more rich and the blues having a bit. more green in it. This is mainly for marmoset viewer use so I didn't spend too much time adjusting things here.