Main Character Progress: Face

For the first iteration of our project, my goal for the main character (the third person player) was to get a basic first pass of the full character into UE4- that means full sculpt and textures. I didn’t work on any rigging for her, which will be a priority in the second iteration. At the moment I only wanted to get a good grasp of how long it would take me to get all the assets done and how the first pass would look in the engine.

First pass sculpt of the the main character head. I will be using hair cards for her bun, but for now I’m just playing around with the basic shapes of how the hair will sit on her head/frame her face. I didn’t bother with any tertiary details yet, like pores or wrinkles, because I wanted to first really nail down her bone structure and defining features.

Some draw-overs done by one of my team members. Some other feedback I received included: ears need more work/attention, eye sockets seem to be turning inwards, face needs to curve more (the eyes seem to be set on a flat plane), head is too small overall (when seen with the rest of the body), do some research on the muscles surrounding the mouth.

Here was my first attempt at her skin texture on the first pass sculpt in Substance Painter—I’m a total newb when it comes to Substance so I followed Magdalena Dadela’s Character Texturing tutorials to get caught up to speed.

Eyebrows!!! Huzzah!! I debated trying to do her eyebrows with hair cards, but I decided to draw them on inside Substance as a texture to simplify the workflow. I simply used a basic brush with some height to create the hair-like strokes. Eyebrow makeup tutorials on Youtube are actually incredible resources for learning how to draw eyebrows (which I am rather well-versed in, being someone who grew up consuming sooo many makeup tutorials on YT ha!).

In UE4—the holes are due to normals facing the wrong way near her mouth and tear ducts. A simple import into Maya to flip the normals fixed this.

The textures seem to appear darker inside UE4 compared to inside Substance so it is something I will need to keep in mind and adjust for when texturing.

I went back and did some more refining on her face after the first iteration deadline, incorporating some of the feedback that I got from my teammates. I worked a lot on the secondary forms, and also brought her ears closer to the front of her face which you’ll notice in the profile photo.