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.