What have I been up to? One big update . . .
As the semester winds down and the end of our one-year-and-a-half long thesis project draws near, I thought I’d write up one massive update on all the work my team and I have accomplished thus far.
It has been one heck of a year — between incessant Zoom meetings, late nights and early mornings, countless hours of R&D and technical troubleshooting, and perpetual streams of Discord messaging, my team and I have put a tremendous amount of effort into creating this world.
Last semester we created all our assets and ran them down the pipeline as fast as we could multiple times. That way, we were able to get a good grasp of how long things would take, and it would clear up a lot of the qualms we held about certain processes and workflows.
I had already created two versions of our player character Kaia (from her sculpt all the way to her being animated and blueprinted in UE4) before I made her third and final pass. This allowed me to figure out a lot of my questions early on, and then I was able to dive right into her final pass this semester without (mostly) any hesitations. It also got rid of a lot of the “perfectionist” mentality that artists get stuck in. Because I knew I’d be working iteratively, I didn’t feel the pressure to get her perfect on the first try. In other words, I wasn’t spending precious time sculpting out every single little wrinkle in her clothing until it was the RIGHT time to finally do so.
Because our team embraced this iterative process, I had the opportunity to iterate on her sculpt/textures three times over the course of the semester. This allowed me to work quickly without getting too attached to my work. By the third iteration, Kaia had visually developed tremendously.
A look at Kaia’s reference board. I always had this pulled up when sculpting and texturing, and continuously added images along the way.
As you can see with Kaia’s face, with each iteration I tuned in a little bit more to the finer details. So what did I do differently the last time around? Well for starters, I used very specific head shots to reference from.
Rather than creating my own made-up face, my team thought it would be helpful to purchase 360° shots of an actual reference model’s head. This allowed me to get as close as I could to photoreal, because there was no room to “make stuff up.”
Although her face texturing workflow stayed relatively consistent throughout each iteration, I was able to improve my own skills each time I went back to Substance Painter and yield better-looking results.
Additionally, her pore and wrinkle detail was sculpted directly onto her face in Zbrush, rather than trying to do it entirely with textures in Substance Painter.
For the first couple of passes, I only used a piece of geo as a placeholder for the hair. The final hair cards are not made from scratch, but modified from Jansen Turk’s real time bun assets from ArtStation marketplace.
Kaia’s bodysuit and accessories also saw improvements with each iteration. By iteration 3, her sculpt had all the finer details like wrinkles, accessories, stitching designs, and fabric folds that I didn’t put into the first few passes. Doing a few different color passes helped me figure out that I wanted more contrast in values and hues, so I added the pop of orange to her suit design as well as more variation to the muted grays, greens, and blues. Utilizing a wide range of roughness on her outfit helped create the more realistic look I was going for.
With the third iteration, I adjusted her proportions a lot. We wanted her to look athletic and strong—because of her military background—but without losing her femininity. Her first two iterations felt a bit lanky, for lack of a better word. Her limbs were just way too long, which didn’t translate well when she was rigged and animated.
FIRST ITERATION OF KAIA’s RIGGING/ANIMATION
Yikes…With the first pass at rigging, I realized a lot of Kaia’s proportions were strange…Her arms and legs were too long and skinny—and not by stylistic choice— which translated very oddly when she was rigged and animated.
There was also definitely a steep learning curve to the rigging process, which I was rather rusty on.
FINAL ITERATION OF KAIA’s RIGGING/ANIMATION
Here is a look at Kaia’s final iteration in each stage of the the character workflow.
A look at Kaia in each stage of the character workflow that I was responsible for: sculpting, retopology, rigging, and texturing.
The leviaseal also went through a a big evolution through the iterative process. As you can see, he’s sprouted legs! We thought legs gave the more ferocious look we were aiming for.
Using cards then painting out the opacity allowed me to achieve the webbed feet and fins without tons of geometry.
In the final pass, I painted with a UE4 LUT, which allowed me to more accurately see what the textures would look like inside Unreal.
A look at the leviaseal’s reference board. Again, this was pulled up every time I worked on the sculpt or the textures.
Here are some final passes of the leviaseal’s animations.
The sky ray probably had the least amount of change throughout the process, but small tweaks were made here and there along the way in the sculpt, texturing, and rig.
First pass of sky ray animation.