Game Production

Character Sculpting

Concept

Quick Recap of Tools

Transpose tool by clicking Y when using the gizmo tool then click and drag (ULT to move orange circles)
X - turn Symmetry tool on
N - Quick Access to Sub tools
Ctrl + Click Negative Space - Invert masked area
Ctrl + Drag in Negative Space - remove mask
Subtool > Extract (0.0~) > Accept > Geometry > Dynamesh
Polish by features in Deformation
Brush = (HP) High Polish
Alt to get move tool back
in moving gismo tool (W) CTRL + Shift + Alt + Click in negative space - Deselect everything
CTRL+ Shift to reselect things
Ctrl + Shift ( + Alt ) to Hide / Solo selected

Ctrl + W for grouping the entire mesh into one poly group.
Subdividing??
Shift F to turn
Alt + Home
Polish by features to polish edges of selected clothing.
zRemesh makes clean topology, not retaining details.
b >z > m
hover over a face + spacebar > extrude > all polygons
Ctrl w - Export > 3DS max
When you import geometry into Zbrush, that item always replaces the piece selected so always duplicate it beforehand.
shift + crtl + alt > knife cut
How to delete selection?
how to save your work properly? how to get that model to be editable?

Blocking & Refining Base Mesh

Week 1

I imported the base mesh given to us to save time from adding primitives into our scene. I then used Dynamesh to reduce the resolution to have an easier time editing this, and clicked X so that the symmetry is on. I know I get distracted from pre-made base meshes so I softened the entire model to get rid of the details using the smoothen tool. This way I will only have the basic shapes to work with so I am more in control of personalisation.

I changed the stroke path of the Standard Brush from Dots to DragRect to make drastic changes quickly to the torso. Also added legs to check proportions. I forgot how to separate IMM primitives so here is a quick recap: go to Subtool > Split > Split Unmasked. From here, I want to focus on her head and hands because they require a lot of refinement (and will be the most fun to do).

once I separated the head from the body, The symmetry tool wasn't working properly. This was because the center of the symmetry tool was offset. To fix this click on the move gizmo (W) and click on the location symbol whilst holding Alt. to get rid of the harsh centre line go to: Geometry > Modify Topology > Mirror & Weld > Dynamesh.

I need to work on her hands. Add hair....

I need to work on her hands. Add hair.... How do you delete a selection?

(I like seeing my sculpt with the wood material because it has a more realistic lighting setup where I can observe my sculpt better.)

here you can see I added more of her lower body, feet which are on tip toes for heels, and hair.

Reflecting on Head

She was looking too soft to be a villain so I looked at a closer version of my concept to re-evaluate on my sculpt. I found that adding eyebrows really helped to give her an angrier and devilish appearance.

The braids are just placeholders for now. I will be giving her proper braids later on when refining by using ZSpheres. The loose hair piece looks like a pringle hehe...

Week 2 - Monday Session

I masked out the shape of her top from her torso and then Extracted it at 0.02 ( Subtool > Extract > Accept )

Geometry > ZRemesher

Deform > Polish By Features

You can see that on the right, the geometry underneath is clipping through. This is because the symmetry tool wasn't in the center which proves the importance of blocking in before committing to details.

I had to keep fixing the symmetry of my sculpt and Dynamesh it so that the centre line would go away. I have no idea why everything was offset and would LOVE to find out how to avoid this because it sucks to have to keep correcting it but hopefully by the end of this all, I will be able to remember how to do it off by heart... because I had to look at my notes for more than I would like to count.

Subtool > Split > Split Masked

Extracted it

Geometry > ZRemesher

Deform > Polish By Features

trying to add trousers here. I duplicated and merged the three pieces that were making up the leg to see if it would work but... lets forget about how that turned out... Instead I added cylinders to make up the trousers.

(I used Squeeze in deformation on her hair to give them a natural curl because they are meant to be curled when still)

The trousers where difficult. I'm not really sure how I should approach it.

I duplicated the torso and legs so that I could merge them into one mesh to work on the waist and have a seamless transition between the torso & legs. I duplicated them so that I have a backup just incase I mess up.

Now that I had them as one mesh, I could isolate them. This helped me notice how her top was diminishing the exaggerated proportion and instead of helping make her legs look long, it was balancing them out with her torso so now I know to bring it up. I also brought her feet slightly forward so that she isn't unbalanced (when looking at her from a side profile).

Working Between Programs

Week 2 - Friday

I moved into 3DS Max to start working on the items / hard surface decorations that embellish her clothing, shoes, and hands. Things like rings with clocks, watches, and clock hands

I used Splines to outline the clock hand shape. It looked like a mess at first because I forgot the buttons I had to press to make them 'Smooth' or 'Bezier' so I just dotted a bunch of vertices onto the grid and edited them after by right clicking on each one, moving them into place, and editing them into 'smooth' 'corner' or 'bezier'. I used the Symmetry Modifier to mirrored the shape over to the other side which was very helpful. I didn't expect me to get it right on the first go so I didn't take any screenshots before this : |

It turned into an editable poly once I collapsed the Symmetry modifier down, so I needed to delete the excessive vertices that didn't contribute to it's silhouette. On the image above, you can see how on the left side I have started deleting unnecessary verticies, and on the right side you can see how it looked before.

I then added vertices within the shape I created so that I could add cool details to it, and connected these vertices using the cut tool. In the picture above you can see that some faces are black. This is because there where a few double vertices dotted around the piece which I had to go in and manually delete and correct. This might have been because the symmetry tool duplicated a few of them near the center.

I deleted the faces I wanted and then added thickness to it by selecting all the faces and using Shift. I am quite happy with how this is looking and impressed that it only takes up 118 tris. (of course this will add up when I duplicate it everywhere across her clothes so I will have to see how many I can add whilst still remaining within our budget).

Here I used the Array modifier to make them splay out like this. I used the Radial option because it created an outcome closest to what I wanted but it also showed me very interesting alternate options which looked really cool, I might want to use the other options somewhere else in my project.

I need to go back into 3DS Max to cap the hole on the bottom. I only noticed this once I imported it into ZBrush to see how it would look together with my character.

Again, I tried creating a new clock hand design so that I can have variants to use throughout her design. This one was more difficult to do because I didn't want this one to be symmetrical. Right now it doesn't even look like a clock hand.

I tried to render the spline with 0 height but the program didn't like that very much. EVERY SINGLE VIRTICES was DOUBLED and the Collapse, Target Weld OR Weld wouldn't combine them all. It turned into a black and grey mess so I decided to scrap this one and start again.

I was looking through the options other than 'Line' which I have been using and saw an option to freehand. So I drew out the shape I wanted. Once I was done, I didn't know how to merge the separate lines and such so I just decided to use it as a guideline.

I used the Line Spline to dot the boundaries just like I did for the past two attempts.

I used Corners, Bezier, and Bezier Corners for this and meticulously edited each verticies to match my sketch.

I didn't want to 'Render' The Splines because it requires a height for it to be entered which isn't what I want because I need to make it flat first. It's also what I did for the failed attemt so I just used Symmetry like my succesfull attempt but since this is an assymetrical design, I just pushed the mirror to the side.

Started to delete excess vertices on the boarder and then created new vertices within the face using the cut tool. Once I was happy with the shapes, I deleted the excess faces within.

used the 'connect' tool and 'cut' tool to connect the vertices together and got rid of all N-Gons

164 Tris (Flat) I ended up not using this for my final sculpt because it is too expensive for our budget

I left the clock hands and began modelling the start of the clocks and watch rings. These are meant to be much smaller than the clock hands so they can be low poly.

Box > Inset > Chamfer

Fixed some of the geometry using Target Weld. Inset some of the sides and extruded them out manually. Made sure the center was clean so that I could paint it without any deformation.

I added the ring but I think I will remove it to fit my Villain's hand better. I will add the ring / strap in ZBrush to make it fit better.

Back in ZBrush...

merged the full body with the feet (after duplicating both) to get a seamless transition in the ankles. Then masked the area for shoes, Ctrl + Shift + Click on this new PolyGroup to hide the rest. Deleted hidden, and then Polished By Features.

ZRemeshed them & used ZModeler to extrude them out. I didn't close the holes on the top because I was having issues with it (seen on the right).

I don't know why ZRemesher was doing this when I tried to clean up the covered holes. Instead of cleaning it up within one PolyGroup, it would constantly divide it in two. So I just removed it entirely and worked on thickening the boot with a hole inside anyways.

Now that I look at my sculpt again, I think that I should keep her shoes small (how they where before) so that her trousers look big without having to blown it up to a ridiculous size. Here I also cleaned up the trousers, adjusted the length of the top so it's shorter (to make her look taller), and played around with the deformation tools for the hair (it's looking quite thin right now but I will work on it later). AND added the Clock hand details to see how it looks all together. I am liking the top half of my sculpt because she is starting to look like my villain! but I can't say the same is true for the bottom half unfortunately. Even though her legs are really long, she looks short and unintimidating the second I add her badly done trousers. Perhaps I need to make her shoes shorter so that her legs can look longer in comparison...OR lengthen her trousers so they go beyond the ankle! yes I think these will help.

I decided to try the trousers again from scratch because it wasn't looking good. I added cylinders and then tapered it at the top. Instead of trying to grow that cylinder up and around the base body I sculpted, I duplicated a selection of the base body and merged it down to the cylinder where I could paint directly over it. On the top right ^ you can see that the rim of the trousers had a defect, probably caused when trying to create holes on the bottom of them which thinned it out too much. To get rid of it, I selected Ctrl + Shift + Drag to separate the bottom selection into a different subgroup. (Ctrl + Shift + Click) and Delete Hidden. Then I masked the rim leftover, and dragged it down.

After fixing that issue, I went in with a DamStandard brush to create the folds seen at the knee. I also used HighPolish to get extra smooth and straight sides further down. I still need to work on the folds around the crotch because it isn't as effective as the folds seen at the knee.

The hands were tough to sculpt because they are very thin and easily effectied when touching fingers close to one another. I put the brushes I was using to automatic backface mask and mostly used the inflate brush. I inserted a sphere for the nails and squashed them into place. And finally added the clock rings and straps by masking parts of the mesh, smoothening the selection, Zremeshing at the lowest poly count, and extruding with ZModeller.

Refining Sculpt + Prepping For Retop

Week 3

Mask Lasso to outline shape, Ctrl + Click on negative space to invert masking, Ctrl + W + Click To put the selection into a different subgroup. Then Ctrl + Shift + Click to solo the top. Then Polish By Features, and Delete Hidden

Then Polish By Features, Delete Hidden, Close Holes, and ZRemesh. Here I realised I forgot to cut out a hole in the back of her Tshirt so I had to go back and redo this process.

I went back and was mindful of the hole at her back. clearly closing holes here wont work now that I have a hole I want to keep but this is just to show the difference more clearly in the image.

I realised I needed to shorten the top so I used the Ctrl + Shift + Drag to select a clean bit off the bottom and solo the blue group (Ctrl + Shift + Click) and Delete Hidden.

Then I divided it three times to get it looking really smooth.

Braids

This is showing the process of me making a cleaner version of her braids. I used a Zsphere whilst following along with a Youtube tutorial: https://youtu.be/VYQdkCnuKrI?si=lBRc7Q4UBEyP8txR

To get the grid : Draw > Floor (X,Y,Z)

...

Adaptive Skin > Density (2) > Make Adaptive Skin. This makes the Zsphere into a seperate mesh. Then duplicate the mesh and place them roughly into place. Dynamesh, ZRemesher, Polish

Duplicated & moved up x2

Then merged down & squashed them to look narrower.

Deformation > Inflate + Taper (Y)

Bend Curve

^ Before & After ^

sK_crease

decimated

dishonored 2 georgian avasilcute

Zplugin - 380k > Custom (Duplicate before)

My Lecturer advised that I split this piece up into two so that the seam across them are cleaner. I also thought this would be a good idea because it would help add interest to a rather plain design. The process was quite straightforward but I did get some strange polys that didn't want to smoothen out with the Smoothen By Features so I used the Knife Lasso (Ctrl + Shift + Drag) to cut cleanly across it without eating into too much of the material. Capped Holes, and Zremeshed everything. I use the Inflate brush to push the purple side ontop of the green.

^ Before & After ^

I needed to start thinking about how I was going to add the clocks onto her shoes. I tried Extruding out some straps to kind of imitate watch straps but their silhouettes didn't look very interesting. I also needed to work on the shoes themselves because they were looking like lotus feet. I wanted them to look stylised and characteristic but it wasn't going very well since it didn't match the believability / style seen across the rest of the sculpt.

I decided to try and experiment with Zspheres to add chains to the shoes. I know I could do them in 3DS Max but I wanted to see if I remembered what I learnt from following the braid tutorial. I turned on X, Y, & Z Grid in Draw, Then drew out three extra spheres and moved them into a C shape.

Then I made it into an Adaptive Skin with a density of 1. I Duplicated it and, using Shift, moved it 180 degrees. Then I used Dynamesh to fuse them together after having Merged them down. Then I duplicated the 'O's and moved and turned them into place.

I finally imported them to my character's layer and used the Bend Curve Transformation type to wrap them around her shoes. Zbrush was lagging like crazy here because I hadn't noticed that each strand of these chains where around 22 million Tris... so I ZRemeshed them to take it down to 10k. I also imported the clock I had previously made in 3DS Max and scattered them in different sizes.

It looks really cool with the 'Droplet' material...

I brought her legs and feet up so that she would have a shorter torso which in turn would make her look less 50/50 split which, although is nice proportionately, often makes for a boring design.

Used the DamStandard brush to bring out edges in the braids to not only make it more styalised, but to follow the sharp shape language that is consistent throughout her design. I also inserted spheres to bend and squash into eyelashes, and a loose hair strand. Here you can also see the earrings I put in (as placeholders since I haven't fixed the issue of it not being capped on the back.

I have never taken my own sculpt to fully textured / rendered / lit before so I wasn't fully confident on whether I had managed to sculpt proportions I wanted. I had tried to paint in ZBrush to check proportions but I don't know how people get it looking clean. Mine always come out soo fuzzy and I can't prevent the colours from bleeding past lines so the colour block out always ends up looking monstrous. Instead, I used the screenshot to paint over on Procreate. I'm glad I did this because now I'm more confident with my sculpt and excited to continue.

I wanted to work on the metallic decorations across her arm but the blockout I had made was too round to be considered menacing, so I tried again by masking out shapes that matched my design more closely. This one looked a little more interesting than the last but I was having issues with trying to get sharp edges, and if I did manage to retain them they would bring with them strange deformations.

I used the Knife Lasso tool to cut them off, which mostly worked, but there were still floating piece that refused to be deleted so I messed around with the other options and finally managed to get rid of them for good using TrimRect.

I went to get some help from my lecturers because The Mask Tool and ZRemesher discriminate against sharp edges >:[ To combat against this, we got rid of the extruded bit to bring it back to a flat plain. Then, separated the three pieces from one another to reduce the possibility of ZRemeshing out details from certain areas etc by going to PolyGroups > Auto Groups > Ctrl + Shift + Click on top section. From here we reduced the resolution down a lot so that we can move singular vertices to make a crisp point. Then - whilst masking the corners - using Polish By Features

Once happy with the shape, use ZModeler to extrude back in, and to invert go to Display Properties > Flip

MoveInfinateDepth - Brush > FiberMesh

Had to move into 3DS Max after being kicked out of Labs ;(

I used splines to just dot the 'E' shape I wanted. This is meant to be the small symbol seen on the small of her back which is meant to be like a superhero's symbol but for a villain which is a little more inconspicuous (E for Entropy).

I then added a triangle based cylinder and moved it around so that it matched my outline. Top half is what it looked like before, bottom is how I changed it by using Target Weld. I could have used Collapse here which would have made it cleaner and faster.

This is me fixing the Chamfer to even out the spacing. Then I mirrored it (Symmetry)

Top View

Bottom View

I Chamfered a few more corners to give visual interest. Then I needed to get rid of N-Gons and clean up the geometry. I used Target Weld and Collapse for this as well as Cut.

From there, I used the Symmetry tool again but this time I moved the mirror's location so that the center corner would be disrupted to create this squiggly 'W ' shape. I also wanted to add a bit of asymmetry to the silhouette so I worked on that after collapsing Symmetry down. I also assigned each face to their correct Smoothing Group. Hopefully I managed to make the symbol hold resemblance to an hour glass, the number 3, and the letter E for Entropy - all which are meant to direct back to the concept of time.

I Imported it into ZBrush to see how it looked on my sculpt. It was looking spindly so I Inflated it slightly, which made it look much better.

Looking at such clean and simple geometry on the metallic symbol made me think about redoing the chains (on the shoes) in 3DS Max to make it easier to unwrap. It shouldn't need this many polys for such a small detail. I would have done this if I decided to bring the full body to completion, but due to our close deadline, I decided to focus on just the torso from here.

Hair

I refined the details on her hair by using brushes High Polish (HP) and DamStandard (DS). I also Imported the other ClockHands from 3DS Max into Zbrush but I later found that these new clock hands are too dense and expensive so I stuck with the symmetrical clock hands for her entire design because they are cheaper.

Final Sculpt

(Before reposing Hair for Retop)

Retopology

Weel 4 & 5

To decimate meshes; ZPlugin > Decimation . Before importing my high poly meshes into 3DS Max I needed to check that the units of my scene were in centimeters (recap; Customize > Unite Setup > (Metric) Centimeters. I scaled my HP decimated meshes from Zbrush by 100. (it went from 100 to 10,000)

Blog Task; Highlight the five-poles and explain their purpose

The purpose of five poles within a retop is to redirect edge flow. The 'three-poles' (or funnels :] ) is used more for introducing and reducing polys from one area to the next; two polys are fed into it but only one comes out and vice versa.

Face

Retopping the face this time round was sooooo much easier and faster than in block 3 because I knew what I was doing and what to be mindful of. I also found it easier to create 'Funnels' buy using the cut tool, that way I start with less polys which I only introduce more of after I got the general edge flow established. There isn't really much to say here other than the fact I slightly struggled with filling the negative area around the eye - just like last time - and that the ear was slightly daunting because it's a strange shape which is very different to the ear we retopped last block.

Correcting Cheek Silhouette

Ear

here I noticed a strange dip on her cheeks so I moved the five-pole further down to get rid of it. The ear was quite strange so I used materials on it to see the edgeflow and improve it. below are the finished head, and arm I started.

Hands

The hands were very difficult. I tried doing them without following the example poly by poly - which was working at first - but this caused me to misinterpret the example which caused a lot of problems later. In my attempt, I hadn't directed the edge flow evenly across the hand so the thumb was extreamly dense whilst the other fingers were left with very little polys to share between them.

You can see above where the thumb was very dense in comparison to the rest of the fingers. I corrected this by connecting less polys to the thumb. In the meantime, I also finished up the torso, shirt, and started on the hair because they were far easier to work with than the small spaces between the fingers. the easiest way to rotate around the hand rather than the entire torso is to get out of edge select and select a face / edge/ vertices close to the area you are working at. This selected area will now be the new center of rotation.

Braids

I moved onto the braids and it was so difficult. I tried using cylinders in different ways. At first I tried to add cylinders to each of the plup braid sections but that didn't work. I then tried stretching a cylinder across the entire braid, using the edges to rotate it. This also didn't work because it didn't show the braid's silhouette and even if I did start cutting into it, it would be too messy. And my final attempt was simply doing it the hard way using step buildup to create a grid pattern across the braid (using the inspiration from the ref image below). This approach was much better at capturing the silhouette but it takes so much time and it is a lot messier than how industry probably does it. They retop the hair strands seperately but I have mine erged together so I cant do that.

Ref

My suffering (only the left side... I gotta do the other which isn't symmetrical)

Hair Tails

This was so difficult. much better at covering space than the braid but still so confusing because of the gaps. My lecturer said they would ideally be straight for retop because of animation but because of this being my very fist sculpt to retop and rigging, I wasn't so keen on making it straight if I didn't have enough time to bend if for submission so I sculpted it the way I would want it to be seen in the final. I should keep this in mind for the future though. I should also NOT merge the hair down on each other because they need to be flowy and loose not glued to one another. This would have made the braids far easier to retop as well. I could have retopped all three sections separately without the need to connect them, they could just be loose geometry.

I duplicated the mesh and split the hair into two chunks. This was a lot more difficult than it should have been because instead of conforming to a stationary mesh, I was guessing the form that was now merged. I should have left the hair pieces seperate in Zbrush instead of merging them down...

I was over the budget by 1,500 Tris due to the expensive clock hand details. The clock hands weren't even capped on the back and I hadn't even finished the braids...

After I showed my lecturer, he advised I merge the low poly hair tails back down again because there could be clipping issues if left like on the left <

... so back we go.. but I'm glad I split them off like this because when I merged them, the gaps were so much cleaner! (which would have ben imposible to achieve with having them merged together). Lesson learnt; DONT merge high poly meshes if it will make it easier to retop but DO merge low poly meshes if required AFTER using separate HPs to reduce clipping.

Metallic Arm Pieces

following the grid of her arms

more tri efficient.

Moving onto re-topping the arm details, these were much easier than retopping the hair. The pieces with curled tips were a little harder because I wasn't sure if these also had to follow the edgeflow of her arm . I tried retopping these pieces twice, one which followed the grid / edgeflow of her arm more strictly, and another that was more tri efficient which imitated ontl the virtical lines of the arm. I soon realised there won't be any deformation in this area because forearms and upperarms never bend (unless you break the bones) I would only have to mind the edgeflow of these objects if it came close to her elbow and were obsrtucted and stretched along with it but thankfully that isn't the case so I can opt for the more tri efficent and cleaner option that helps stay within budget :)

Unwrapping

Week 5 - 6

I focused on unwrapped each mesh seperately. Once all pieces were unwrapped, I could pack it all together easily.

Adding seams to and around the ears. I added a seam across the bottom to make the texture lie flat.

Before cutting across the bottom of the ear

after cutting across the bottom of the ear

When unwrapping the ears I also realised the silhouette was looking funky because the polys twist across it so I added some diagonal edges across vertices to fix this and force the tris to bend the way I want them to.

Head - 2048 TGA

face + neck ✓
ears ✓
eyelashes (I added them after I took this screenshot) ✓

Eyes - 1024 TGA

I couldn't overlap the eyes because they are different colours so I had to use half the map for each. I don't think this will be too problematic because it will be styalised PLUS I will get to hand paint highlights which was an issue last block where the highlights where mirrored and unnatural.

Accessories - 1024 TGA

rings (x5) ✓
earrings (x4) ✓

torso spikes (x3) ✓

Hair - 2048 TGA

buns ✓
tails (Three pieces x 2 different colour varients) ✓
braids x2 ✓

Before separating the hair tails

loose curl ✓
roots ✓

After - The hardest part about this section were the massive hair tails. Packing was made difficult because both sides are asymmetrical!!!

Body - 2048 TGA

arms + hands ✓
clothes (x3 pieces) ✓
nails ✓

arm metalic rings ✓
hips ✓

I hid the seam underneath her clothes.

Before Packing

FInished packing

SUBSTANCE PAINTER TIME!!! FINALLYYY

Week 7 - (It was mostly correcting mistakes time -___- )

The low poly was looking great in substance painter!! until I found a hole in the braid nooooo. I have to go back to 3DS max to fix it -__-

another problem was that the clock rings looked very unflattering in the low poly boxes when they are meant to be rounded edges so I went back in to chamfer the edges. This allowed the illusion to work far better. After getting that sorted, the nails where my next focus. The overlap of skin to nails were causing black marks to form so I went back and moved both the high and low poly further out from the skin - which reduced the problem.

I also had to fix the smoothing groups of the high poly clock hand details (seen as earings and top spikes). I also had to fix the top and hair by moving the retop out a little to allow it to capture more of the high poly forms.

Every single one then caused the unwraps to overreact so had to fix and repack those.... just an all round exhausting process after believing I was free of it and being so ready to start painting... alas it was all a lie.

After re-importing the new meshes and re-baking, I spotted the unflattering silhouette of the hair from above. The pointy edges were throwing the illusion off so I went back to Max to add loops and edges by connecting vertices to create a smoother silhouette. I didn't have many tris left at all (5 to be exact) so I couldn't make it as nice as I would have wanted it but it improved the outcome greatly despite them being very minor changes.

I waited so long for my sculpt to be baked (over an hour), only to find new errors that needed fixing. I should ALWAYS bake at the lowest resolution to sketch in some really rough colour tests across the entire character. This will make sure I scan and check the entire sculpt. It will help me see all the errors in one go rather than having to re-import the new meshes a hundred separate times...... and will make sure every area is easy to access etc. When I find I am FINALY ready to bake after ALL the checking and correcting, I can use the hour of waiting to plan more of my colours, patterns and materials (or work on my other projects and blog..)

The crude paint-over I did to make sure I checked EVERY spot on my model. This was so helpful and will definitely be something I do in the future to check for errors more effectively - making notes on what needs fixing whilst I sketch.

Things I need to fix:

re-import HP mesh (there where changes I didn't re-import when baking) ✓

separate and fix hair tail unwraps (the are sharing UVs when I mirrored them after altering their retops) ✓
clean up maps using photoshop (mainly for hands and hair)
Back in Zbrush tighten up her top to not leave a hole + fix unwrap after conforming retop ✓

an error on her back which was caused after trying to correct the retop of her top. This caused the unwrap to go funky and cross over other parts of the unwrapp.

Alphas?

Eyelashes
ripped trousers?
back strings

First pass of texturing. Was really messy with it but I like to have everything put down so that I can judge colours together.

Used some generators to get material variety ... also added some pink to her face... All the colours are clashing horribly and nothing is looking good together at this stage.

Wayfinder

I was really struggling with colours.

before and after screenshots from correcting the ambient occlusion maps of the body and head by painting over them in Photoshop.

Unreal Lighting & Presentation

Week 8

Emissive is making her look grey and washed out instead of making it glow.

F2 - to rename folders quickly in UE

I chose a Female Standing Pose in Mixamo. I removed the hair when exporting it out into Mixamo because it would freak out when I kept them on. I also used a cylinder to make Mixamo think my torso had legs which worked quite well. Back in 3ds Max I moved her eyes up, moved her hair into place, and corrected her earrings - which bent weirdly in Mixamo. Having my character posed lookes 100x better than unposed but I'm still unhappy with the texturing.

Post-Mortem

Week 8

This Post mortem will really be a disection of a dead body, my work has aged like milk because each 3d project only gets worse and worse...hopefully this won't be too negative but it probably will be because I straight out am not happy with it and this project is now dead to me I can't wait to make another character to redeem myself.

Starting off strong, I am happy with my sculpt. I think it matches the concept well and I had high hopes for it. I spent hours on the splines and really trying to get used to the software, and trying to carve in as much personality in it as possible. The hair could have been done differently to easy my life in the future but I would have never known if I never failed so I have no regrets there. The clock hand splines could have been much more sinister and cold looking (my outcome looks generic and neutral ) and I should have refined the metalic rings on her arm before I tried to sculpt it because it ate up a lot of time trying to figure out nice shapes withought an established design.

moving onto retopping, I found retopping the face quite fast and easy compared to block 3 now that I knew the process but the rest of the body was quite confusing to me. The hands were the hardest and this also made me realise the lack of attention to sculpting the form in the fingers since I covered it with rings so i didn't really think about sculpting joint. the end result has strange deformations in the fingers but this is because the rig isn't the greatest and bends in the wrong places. The hardest to retopp was all that hair. the braid was a nightmare.

Unwrapping is such a breeze I choose it over retopping any day... unless its those darn clock hands..

I'm really disappointed with my handpainted textures. I was struggling so much to just get basic colours to work together and the overwhelming amount of layers didn't help me get into refining details stage. I was just constantly changing colours and the longer I spent on it the worse it looked. Unfortunately, I prefer my sculpt before I painted over it but I wish I could have brought it to a cleaner quality.

and if painting isn't my worst trick then lighting certainly is. i think lighting and post processing should be a fun thing where you are just trying to enhance the mood of your sculpt / model but trying to light something you aren't happy with is torture. I would love to get to know Unreal engine well because it's got a nice UI design! and that is all i need... but nodes scare me and i wish they didn't because they also look cool.

I am proud I worked hard on this but it is demotivating to see that I have never put in so much time into a project only for it to be my worst project outcome all year.

I liked that I used Splines for details like her earrings and pins but I feel they could look more sinister like in my concept.

Previously :

☆*Go back to Digital Art*☆

Up Next :

☆*Go to Year 1*☆

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