Nia - Texturing & Engine

 21-25/03/22 - Week 11

This week, I moved onto texturing. This is something that I was quite looking forward to as texturing is one of my favourite parts of the process as I feel that it really helps the character to come to life. I also managed to get Nia into engine this week and create a hair shader that hopefully suffices.

I first started this week by unwrapping as I have not yet finished this for any of my characters due to retopping taking longer than expected. I decided to go with a plan for the maps much a like my previous character project though taking a couple more liberties. I plan for most sheets to be on a 1024 which should result with just under a 4k map for each character - our max budget being 2 4k maps but I do not feel this is reasonable at all for stylised characters. Hopefully this will make my characters visibly game ready. Noting this - I ended up with 4 sets of uv sheets - not counting hair - Eyes, skin, clothes 1 & 2.

I then began texturing, I really wanted to push the contrast and mystical nature of her outfit. I created a bit of a glittery effect on her clothing using a couple of grunges and hand painted a lot of shadows in. I also painted in the patterns on the sheer part of the top in substance too, which ended up taking a while.

This also brought to my attention that I didn't really plan the top correctly, I should have just baked in the folds onto the skin itself and then just created the patterns using height in painter, as I feel in the end the sheer top doesn't add too much depth as I'd hoped.

I slowly moved through the week and worked my way through each asset, then nearing the end of the week I went back and tried to improve certain parts after looking at it all together in marmoset. This is where I currently am though obviously I have left an extra week for texturing that I plan to go back over things if I see fit.

I then placed her into engine and started applying textures and lighting. I wanted to try to get a quick idea of how I was going to place the lighting and how it would effect the textures, so I just came up with some quick lighting placement. Some of the reference lighting was a bit unrealistic so I did have to make some small adjustments, looking at the screenshot now I think it is a bit too bright so I need to find a balance as I don't want things to be too dark to not be able to see the textures.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have also implemented a hair shader. I followed a tutorial from the same person - UIW 3D Animation and Game Design - that created the designer hair generator, you can find this & his channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQO-dV1fYw&t=633s

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtPWysj7NXUFvjqrnGGC9VQ

This hair shader includes the ability to change a lot of different options on the hair very easily without having to save out - a material instance - which was super helpful as it allowed me to get a close colour to the hair which is quite hard to pin down in the reference. I am thinking of swapping out the emissive to a texture that has multiple colours as the emissive I feel is a gradient of sorts. But for now I feel this works and is a good reference. It also uses a node that I haven't used before called DitherTemporalAA which in essence does the same thing as dither in marmoset - making some of the grey areas of the alpha map black and others white to create a gradient without having to use a more expensive method and I was also able to use the hair shader in unreal with this.

I ended up also using this node for the top too - I was originally struggling with this as I wanted it to be sheer to be able to see the skin texturing. This really made me think that I had done the wrong thing and I was considering deleting that part of the arms or top all together but I saw this as a bit of a time sink, instead I used dither to create the amount of sheerness that I wanted which was super helpful and saved me a bit. This shows that I need to think a lot more before I begin these sort of projects and understand the restrictions of unreal and how this will effect my project - if I'd have done this I could have solved this a lot easier and it wouldn't mean I have topology on top of itself for sake of shadow when this can just be faked - especially in stylised.

Next week I will continue texturing by moving on to my next character, this is my plan for next week. Now I have seen that I am able to texture a bit faster than I thought I am hoping that I will also be able to get this character in unreal to save time later on so I can focus a bit more on technical stuff if needed.

I have also left Monday for unwrapping.

Learning and Placing Hair Cards

 14-18/03/22 - Week 10

This week I focused on hair cards, as I lost the week that I was supposed to be learning them I needed to catch up and try to research and understand the method of hair cards as quick as possible so I had time to place them.

I firstly began trying to find tutorials that I understood, I saw several methods being used, the first being creating the hair strands for the haircard alpha itself using Xgen. Xgen was used to place a small amount of hair on a plane and then arranged to create segments of hair, these were then placed by hand. The next method was to place the Xgen strands by hand onto the scalp of the mesh and then generate the planes themselves that way, this would also include the first method. I saw another variation of this using designer to create the hair strands and then use Xgen to generate or Maya/Max to hand place these.

I first tried the second method mentioned, I followed a tutorial by UIW 3D Animation and Game Design which you can find here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1XwvcMTIfQ&list=PLklk5VvcgwJCTorNMvCWx_Faby5ZQ-3Wr&ab_channel=UIW3DAnimationandGameDesign

And find the channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtPWysj7NXUFvjqrnGGC9VQ

This tutorial followed setting up in Maya for Xgen and creating your scalp asset then drawing on curves to convert into strands for the hair to follow. This wasnt too difficult though I hadn't used Maya before so there was quite a bit to learn before I was ready to get into it properly. I initially did a test run using this method but maya ended up crashing and as I learnt it doesn't autosave unless you turn it on and most people don't use this due to Maya's limitations and heavy storage usage.

I then tried this method again the next day and came out with an interesting result, though I could already see this being somewhat difficult to understand and use to create the shapes that my character's hair has.

Initial testing,

With a few tweaks and trying to use masks and many other intricate methods I came out with this result which I was definitely not happy with. I found Xgen had a lot of limitations when trying to use it this way and this method overall was not the right one for the type of hair I was trying to create. With this in mind and not wanting to spend too much more time on trying to work with Xgen this way, I went back to the drawing board and tried to think of a better method. I ended up doing more research into haircards and asking some other character artists and found that it was more of a common thing to use Xgen purely for the hair strand generation and not for the hair cards themselves, these are usually hand placed. I thought this was quite surprising but once I had experienced Xgen this way I really understood why this was the case. I was very glad that I had learnt it in a very basic manner though as I thought it would be much more complicated than it in fact is.

I then debated my options on whether to create the hair cards using Xgen or designer, I think in terms of reliability and getting the effect you want Xgen is a much better choice and with the knowledge of Maya and Xgen that I now have I could definitely follow a tutorial and create Xgen hair strands. For sake of time as I had lost a lot trying a method that in the end just didn't work out, I decided to go down the designer root for my haircards. I used the tutorial mentioned above to direct me here and I was able to create a hair generator which I then created many different hair variations of my own want.

Once this was completed I went into Max and began to hand place the cards. At first I really struggled with this since it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me how the hair on my ref was actually working or would work in a 3D space. I found a lot of reference and tried as hard as I could but in the end it wasn't looking how I wanted it to and I was growing very impatient with it.

My first attempt.

I then tried again this time with more and better reference that mirrored the style of the hair on the reference a lot better so I could sort of understand what was happening. I was mainly struggling with the volume of the hair but I solved this by adding a lot more layers and faking it with the curve of the hair. I then added in a lot of flyaways and general detail to come up with a somewhat similar version of the hair as to the original reference. I did struggle mostly with the back of the hair and looking on it now I think I can think of a lot of better ways to have approached this, since I have never placed hair cards before I think my effort is alright and I know I can do better if given more time and another chance.

Here are the results in marmoset viewer, I think with the shader and colour applied to it it looks a lot better than it does in Max and I am actually quite happy with it. Seeing it on my character is really cool and I am happy that this is starting to come together now as I can finally see some progress again. If I get more time I do want to work further into the hair and add some more flyaways and work on the overall placement of the hair. 

Next week I will move onto texturing so I will be continuing on with Nia, I also want to try to create a hair shader for her in engine so I can start to plan how the character is going to look presentation wise. This will also direct me if I need to extensively change anything to do with the hair.

Here is my plan:

As you can see I hope to be finished around mid week so I can have time to make any adjustments and put Nia into engine to round off the week.

Blue - Retop

28-04/03/22 - Week 8

This week I have been retopping my third character. As I anticipated last week, this ended up taking me a long time and by the end of this week I haven't been able to finish as much as I wanted to initially.

The large majority of this retop was again similar to the previous two characters - creating a rough base and then using turbosmooth to get a good amount of loops. I did end up having to work around a few issues, one of them mainly being the wings which as first I wasn't sure quite how to approach, but I ended up using a very similar method except I just had to be very careful with the placement to make it make sense and work with turbosmooth properly. They are currently very high poly and this needs to be fixed, though I am hoping once I collapse the symmetry on it I will be able to remove unnecessary loops and lower the tri count here.

Another thing I struggled with was the hair, I tried to do some more research on stylised hair and how people usually approached this, though I found that the method that I used for my professional practice character was mostly correct, but I needed it to be tided up a lot more and more evenly spread out. This was a challenge as starting with a low amount of polys then adding loops in didn't appear to work since the geometry that the low poly was conforming to was so complicated and not at all smooth, so I decided to hand retop this. The issue with this is that it took me a very long time and I have now only managed to finish both ponytails, one side of the hair and the fringe. I decided to segment the fringe to try to make this a bit more logical and this really helped in comparison to ways I have done it before - trying to keep everything in a large lump. I also hope this will help with the hair looking more natural. I did consider hair cards for this but I thought as I'd already tried hard with the zbrush sculpt I wanted to keep these, though I am maybe going to make the fly aways into planes.

I have mostly finished everything but I just need to create the low poly petals and place them correctly and then finish off some bits and pieces, but for now I need to move on to hair cards as I have been told that these are very challenging and meticulous. Overall, I think I made good progress and I tried really hard to get as much done as I could this week.

I am away next week, so I will come back the week after and start haircards, I don't have much of a day by day plan as I'm unsure how long each step will take and what each one will be, but here are my theoretical goals for then: