I apologize for not regularly updating this blog, I'm sure my two followers are really upset about it ;).
Anyway, all jokes aside there's a lot to cover. I have my thesis date in two weeks so I need to "Do my paperwork" so to speak."
Spring break was marginally successful in working, tons of stuff has been interrupting my progress since then and continues to plague me. For example, as all the school has until April 26th to submit for spring show, us game design kids got until the 5th. Gee, that's so swell. It would have been perfect, my thesis would have been done and I could have just submitted the final work, but instead I took (and wasted) an entire week to fudge out and cut corners on this project that I've been working on for almost 3 years. It was kind of a buzzkill, to say the least. Here are the stills from that:
Anyway, all jokes aside there's a lot to cover. I have my thesis date in two weeks so I need to "Do my paperwork" so to speak."
Spring break was marginally successful in working, tons of stuff has been interrupting my progress since then and continues to plague me. For example, as all the school has until April 26th to submit for spring show, us game design kids got until the 5th. Gee, that's so swell. It would have been perfect, my thesis would have been done and I could have just submitted the final work, but instead I took (and wasted) an entire week to fudge out and cut corners on this project that I've been working on for almost 3 years. It was kind of a buzzkill, to say the least. Here are the stills from that:
So, the first image is the High poly rex from Keyshot, followed by a (terrible) Marmoset render. Low poly is around 40k Tris. It's so high because I really wanted the geo to hug the forms to get the best normal map fidelity and quality. The beginning of my project was influenced by a presentation from the creators of Ryse, so I wanted to push the limits in everything. Low poly is great for hard surface forms, but organic needs a bit more help to sell the realism, alongside better subsurface handling in engine, but that's something entirely different. That one was oddly my most successful in my opinion, and it was just added one week as sort of an add on. Wasn't described in my original document, but it may save me. We'll see. He was again, hand sculpted and hand painted, I didn't use alphas or stencils, and the brush I used for paint was a custom color sampling spray in Zbrush I made last semester.
Then it's Lucy, depending on when I crank out the other human characters, I really need to add more paint details to her. As the first one finished, she's going to be a lower quality, so a revisit is in order. Depending on if I pass this review, which to me seems unlikely at the moment, will determine my fixes to her. She looks pretty good in engine though. I lerped in a detail map to add scales to her elephant skin. apparently we've found skin imprints of Sauropods, so I did my best to mimic the scales.
The raptor has been a royal pain. As you can see, the feather prototypes were very messy and unreliable. I'd really need a nice Anisotropic specular for this, but Unreal doesn't handle it all that well, so it has to be cheated. A metalness value of 0.212 is the best hack that I've found to get the striations in the feathers so far. I've also tried a new method for feather placement. It's super expensive for polycount, but I'm still well under my allowance so far.
Then it's Lucy, depending on when I crank out the other human characters, I really need to add more paint details to her. As the first one finished, she's going to be a lower quality, so a revisit is in order. Depending on if I pass this review, which to me seems unlikely at the moment, will determine my fixes to her. She looks pretty good in engine though. I lerped in a detail map to add scales to her elephant skin. apparently we've found skin imprints of Sauropods, so I did my best to mimic the scales.
The raptor has been a royal pain. As you can see, the feather prototypes were very messy and unreliable. I'd really need a nice Anisotropic specular for this, but Unreal doesn't handle it all that well, so it has to be cheated. A metalness value of 0.212 is the best hack that I've found to get the striations in the feathers so far. I've also tried a new method for feather placement. It's super expensive for polycount, but I'm still well under my allowance so far.
It's certainly been a challenge, I didn't pick anything easy in this project, and it's becoming clear as I see my classmates finishing their projects that I may have taken on a little too much.
Also, a note before I continue, the dinosaurs and humans are fully rigged in Maya with FK/IK controls and proper weighting. It took me about a day to Rig the 3 dinos, and then another for both characters (I borrowed the rig from class for them ;) ). So, posing is all done within maya, then those poses are sent back to Zbrush for blendshaping/wrinkle maps. This functionality won't be seen in my thesis, it's more for my own practice. Also, I've written all my shaders in Unreal for these too, I'll go into that more when I talk about Ailus.
Which I will do right now.
So, my main character as of last week went through some heavy redesigns, and here are some updated screens as of April 14th.
Also, a note before I continue, the dinosaurs and humans are fully rigged in Maya with FK/IK controls and proper weighting. It took me about a day to Rig the 3 dinos, and then another for both characters (I borrowed the rig from class for them ;) ). So, posing is all done within maya, then those poses are sent back to Zbrush for blendshaping/wrinkle maps. This functionality won't be seen in my thesis, it's more for my own practice. Also, I've written all my shaders in Unreal for these too, I'll go into that more when I talk about Ailus.
Which I will do right now.
So, my main character as of last week went through some heavy redesigns, and here are some updated screens as of April 14th.
It's been a super quick process getting her done through Zmodeler. It's way more efficient for me to work in Zbrush than Maya for shapes, and block-ins. Cleanup and UVs is basically the only thing I don't do in Zbrush. I should have her on the texturing floor by next week, and Garret will follow. I will probably update once more just for him later once he has more progress done.
Some hurdles to jump through is multiple material handling in Unreal.
Some hurdles to jump through is multiple material handling in Unreal.
So here's Ailus nude in Unreal, it's really freaky when materials don't apply correctly, but I think the skin as of now looks as good as any game. It's a pretty simple subsurface profile with some polypaint, and about 2k for the head and body. Eyes and mouth are on a 1k and hair (not shown) is on a 512.
Some more assorted renders of pre-vis texturing. Legs and arms in these shots are way outdated. All things considered though, I'm hoping I can pull this off.
Some more assorted renders of pre-vis texturing. Legs and arms in these shots are way outdated. All things considered though, I'm hoping I can pull this off.
I'm content in the direction of Ailus though, seen here is the version I left off at before I deleted it and redesigned. It's gross.
And this is the base of redesign for Garrett. This guy is gonna take some work to get going, but when the raptor is done, it'll be far easier. 2 weeks and counting!