Embedded Files
Concept
Concept
For my first final major project, I was fortunate enough to be given permission to recreate the concept shown.
The shape language and fun shapes would read well in 3D space and this would be a fun challenge for me to tackle.
Another big reason for choosing this design is to add a bigger variety to my portfolio as it has plenty of hard surfaces and clean shapes. This will be a great challenge as the lack of detail in texture work means that it will be harder to hide seams and baking errors amongst many other mistakes that can happen along the way.
The simpler drawing style and way of rendering also allows me more freedom to pick which direction and way of stylizing I would like to go ahead with which is helpful for leaving more options open for me to choose from. It also allows me to choose draw calls for what materials I think would best fit each area.
Overall the design also perfectly overlaps with my own personal likes in terms of colour palette and theming which is great since motivation will play a big role in getting this project done to a professional standard.
Pioneer by Nicxx Zhao
Research
Research
Space Suits
Space Suits
These screw on locks on the sleeves makes it easy to take off for the wearer and it would be something nice to incorporate into my design for better functionality reasons, its likely why the wrist cuffs are there but I have also decided to make the sleeves be held down by these same cuffs instead of being open and floating fabric.
Helmets are made out of polycarbonates that are UV resistant, lightweight, and fire retardant to avoid any issues in space. The clothing would consist of multiple materials but the main one that is present happens to be nylon, spandex and synthetic polymers.
The garments are pressurised to protect them from many of the hazards that can be found in space. Many of these materials are helpful to control the temperatures and pressure at an optimal amount for the astronaut inside as overheating is a common concern. There also tend to be pull tabs attached to the suits that can be pulled to regulate the temp better.
With my character, I decided to add an extra layer of padding underneath the cloth to fill up the gap in the silhouette but also as another material instance of the padding since I was also planning to add it on the inside of the helmets so that the head would be more secure in place. Having the same material show up multiple times in my design makes it more cohesive and provides some extra protection.
I don't have a back view of the design but I thought it would make sense to use the same metal front plate on the back so that the jetpack can have some distance away from melting the back as it's something that definitely gets too warm when in use.
It also provides an even surface for the jetpack and allows the front strap of the chest plate in the front to have another plate in the back for it to link up to. I also made the metal place much shorter and compact as to give the character room to keep the mobility and range of motion for the legs unobstructed.
Chosen Artstyle - Overwatch
Chosen Artstyle - Overwatch
Many of the characters in Overwatch consist of really clean rendering in terms of having really smooth surfaces for curves and super sharp edges for things like panels and seams. With such a big diverse cast to pick from, this gives me a great selection to pick for referencing certain parts of my concept to better get it to match the same artwork style and make it convincingly fit the Overwatch universe.
This is further pushed by the fact that a lot of these designs purposefully avoid noisy textures and completely rely on these main forms and shapes to carry the character as they need to be extremely recognisable from a glance when used in-game.
Many heroes have similar mecha elements that I can directly take inspiration for in terms of texturing this information down like panels and seams and I know they are not information thats sculpted in early on due to the Overwatch Art Dump that shows most forms not going super small with the details.
Thanks to this talk , I found out about the usefulness and non-destructive workflows of using floaters to bake big seams down , which I will be applying to this character to try this method out, and that some tiling texture details are done with mesh maps that are projected on the mesh for optimisation reasons. I however, cannot do this so I will resort to texturing them in instead.
Juno - Hero from Overwatch 2
Juno - Hero from Overwatch 2
When showing off the chosen concept off to peers and lecturers, I asked whether there was a particular style they thought would best fit it to stick true to the concept and almost every response mentioned Overwatch.
This led me to make a closer analysis into the Overwatch art style and I had to agree that they would fit in the universe perfectly. I wanted to focus on the newer Overwatch 2 models but many of the character models from the previous game still adhere well to their own art style guides so they can still be just as useful for learning from and observing what was purposefully updated for the new game.
I also had seen a lot of similarities with the new Hero called Juno and they in particular will be the master reference for looking at how the forms and textures ended up looking like in-game.
3D assets
3D assets
For a better closeup of the technical and hard surface areas of Juno's model, I came across these 3D printable fan remakes of her gear which are meant for cosplayers, but they work as a perfect closeup reference thanks to the multitude of angles provided.
The way they have been broken down and split apart also helps me get a better and closeup look at the construction of these for me to better replicate later down the line when doing something similar like creating the boots for my character also. Of course there are some big differences in comparison with my actual concept to work from but it's informative enough to
Somewhat short lived use of a calendar since halfway through the project I kept forgetting to update it and found myself spending days going back and forth alot with small edits that weren't worth noting but then made it seem as if the day was wasted if nothing was screenshotted down. This kind of planning works better once I have a better grasp of how long things can reasonably take since we often forget to give room for errors and problem solving to be made which is what I found myself in often or kept changing things due to useful feedback from my lecturers and peers.
Sculpting
Sculpting
A lot of indecisiveness meant a lot of changes for the shape of the suit when blocking out and the only way I found that could help me clean things up was to ddo a clean retopology pass over everything and project the high poly details down. This way I can remove any muddiness in any areas and make sure that the final pass of the sleeves works with the correct animation loops put in place.
Something I did not realise early on was that Overwatch characters are sculpted with half of their eyelids semi closed, this is to give geometry and an eyelid for the animators to animate and work with since fully open eyes dont give that extra piece of mesh they would end up more limited in the range of expressions they can do. I had great feedback from my lecturer of how to make her face rounder and softer. I was initially making her look too young with too big eyes so I ended up settling for a more mature face of a young adult in her early 20s. I think I achieved this well and I really like how smooth and clean I got the face to look like in the end, the round shapes make her look friendly which was my intention from the get-go.
Hard Surface
Hard Surface
Sectioning off everything helped me decide on what tasks to tackle first and how to approach this complicated design, it also made me think of the material everything would consist of so I can be informed later on how to texture them and what to research ahead of time.
Hard surface workflow using Zmodeller
Hard surface workflow using Zmodeller
Proportions
Proportions
I wanted to compare the proportions between the two characters so that I can better map out what I'm replicating in the style effectively vs where I need more improvement.
By doing this draw over and side by side visual, it showed me that my character's head and helmet need to be much bigger, since the neck is obstructed in the block out. This was something that I easily overlooked when sculpting.
I was able to easily modify this, however so I'm glad i took a step back to do checks like this during the block out stage.
Some draw overs to show what bigger shapes for the sleeves and hood to better fit my concept's dimensions and for a more dramatic silhouette read.
However, I dont really like at all how wide her shoulders are becoming with this as it makes it seem as if she is a rugby player and would become super distracting. To remedy this I ended up making the sleeves attach to the body via screw on rings and thin out the top to allow for more arm movement.
The only way to achieve this without making her look like she is shrugging is by spacing the arms out more so I also have more room to do retopology later on.
I ended up deciding on making the top sides smaller and remove some of the button and small pouch details on the design since they weren't serving any functional purpose and added an inner padding layer to cushion the hard surface elements to the skin.
Padding in the helmet has been modified to allow more movement of the chin due to the added mouthbag.
The original jetpack design was hard to work from due to the limited visibility, as well as it being difficult to figure out how it would actually function. Because of this it seemed more reasonable to redesign it entirely yet still keep some elements true to the original and better adapt some areas to be more functional.
A bit struggle I initially had was trying to figure out how the harness and belts on the torso were connected to the jetpack, since it was implied to be a spherical shape. I don't have much to suggest how this piece of equipment stays on or gets taken off in the concept so I went ahead with thee idea of using seatbelts similar to the ones that babies would have with 2 belts meeting into one point. My lecturer pointed out that mountain climbing gear has the same design so I went ahead with these for inspiration as well due to the thickness of the bands being able to better carry this heavy jetpack. I also attached a button latch so it can be taken off individually.
Some feedback from my lecturer included adding another anchor point from the back so that the belts on the back don't have as much tension to hold up the jetpack in place.
Similar to the metal anchor that I've already added at the bottom of the strap, it would work really well if it were also attached to the back of the suit itself.
Hairstyle
Hairstyle
Here's how the mesh looks when put together with the helmet, its very likely clipping on the inside but its not something the player would ever see happening due to the thickness of the padding around the rim, so I am not concerned about this being an issue.
Overall, really happy with the silhouette that the hair has and the overall flow of the strands matches the strands you would see on an Overwatch hero.
Clothing
Clothing
American Illustration at Its Most Stylish - By Jerry Weiss
Sculpting Clothing Creases in Zbrush - Alfredo Baro
These close-ups and breakdowns of folds and tensions are incredibly helpful due to them being applied to sculpting as opposed to illustration so it's much easier to grasp the concept of.
My application of folds in order of the sleeves, waist and back of knees
Final Sculpt
Final Sculpt
The final highpoly sculpt ended up looking super clean, all thanks to using my retopology as a base mesh and pairing this with subdiv and the crease tool is a great combination for hard surface especially. I am purposefully keeping her sort of plain since texturing will later on add the extra embedded details in texturing since it would be hard to get rid of baked in data I may no longer want later down the line.
Retopology
Retopology
Thanks to this video, I can get a better grasp of what a reasonable tri count budget would be but I have a feeling I will regardless use a lot more geometry than most base models due to the amount of smooth big round shapes present on my characters design. So instead I will use the extra geometry and treat it as if it was one of the in store models that Overwatch would swap to that has higher details as opposed to the more optimized in-game model. This is so that the skins and textures can be higher resolution therefore more desirable to the playerbase.
Also using more geometry for an FMP is justifiable considering I want to impress with this portfolio piece so it was worth it in the end. This hand was also pretty easy to follow the example of and I'm pleased with the loops on it.
Hand Retop - Ioannis Markou
Head Retop - Ioannis Markou
Extra loops were added around the mouth and eyelids since those parts will deform the most for this model. I also did decide to add a mouth bag later to this project which is why I went back in around the mouth area and made sure to make it be super smooth.
One again pleased with this retop and I stopped the retop around the lower shoulders since you would see the full neck if the helmet was taken off and allows more extra geometry for the top to conform to when weightpainted.
How the face and eyebrows look when put together on the face, place holder colours in place to make sure that the necessary deformation loops are in place and that the extra geometry does line up with the face underneath.
Retop progress, I made sure to keep colour coding the loops main along the way so I can make sure it aligns with my retopology references from Ioannis Markou's examples.
Everything overall is super clean and every mesh is organised in layers which would later be merged down after everything is first unwrapped.
Used low poly cylinders and conformed them to the retopologised hands for the geometry on the gloves. I then extruded them and deleted the back faces for optimisation.
Removing the inner faces of the gloves since I used the extrude function in Zbrush to make them look thicker as opposed to be skin tight to the hand by being just a default hand retop. As for the neck piece I had to cover up the hole between the cuf collar and the helmet so I resorted to adding a rubber cuff to seamlessly cover the hole up.
Not enough room for belt strap to hold onto something so I ended up resorting to adding metal handles into the back of the top for support and holding the tension as needed for the jetpack.
Updated
The back of the shoes did not have the silhouette or the support my character needed, so I referenced these chunky trainers from Balenciaga and added them accordingly.
Some of the back heel is floating off the ground, but most of it is still grounded, similar to the rest of the shoe.
I have a wide base similar to a moon boot so that the shoes have more traction and hold better functionality on the moon.
The soles of the shoes were modified to conform to the flow of a regular shoe; this issue was likely due to me using the symmetry tool initially when creating the boots and only after feedback was this issue pointed out by my lecturers. I also end up later detaching the long pieces of the shoe as floating meshes so I can split them apart for a cleaner bake.
The first few placeholder attempts are always terrible but help me get the idea across to see whether it's functional and has a good silhouette for the design I need. Really simple and as optimised as I could get these pieces to be without using too much of my tri budget to get the idea across.
First tongue mesh attempt vs the final mesh I ended up going with. Unfortunately, online I cannot find much information on how mouth bags are created or what they should look like so the only thing I kept in mind for the back of the mouth and tongue was to keep the loop topology clean so it can deform for animation's sake.
Split off the top and bottom teeth for more movement opportunities and made sure that the mouth bag surrounding it went around the lips without clipping into the teeth. Likely when animated some pieces will clip regardless but since its inside the mouth the lips will hide a lot of those issues from the viewer.
71k tris used for everything, this is quite a high amount for an Overwatch character but as previously mentioned I am treating her as if she is a stored mesh that gets switched out into to display skins and textures at a higher resolution for purchase.
I find that it's more important that the silhouette of everything is great and no faceting is present so despite all of the optimisation I have done so far this is as low as I can get the tri count to be as well as keeping the smooth and round shapes
The cleanliness of the geometry and all of the even quads where animation loops are important is great to have and I am not as fussed with the hard surface helmet for example lacking loops in places as it doesn't need to move ,besides twisting left and right, and is basically a static mesh.
UV unwrapping
UV unwrapping
Baking
Baking
Tests and errors
Tests and errors
Baking was pretty straightforward, I only wanted to double check beforehand that the cuff detailing would bake on correctly and did a couple test passes to make sure this worked which, you can see above, gave me a clean result. As for the rest of the mesh, I explode baked each piece individually, except some of the chest pieces, to maintain the contact shadow. Super pleased with the results.
My material ID layout, the document itself is a 4k but everything will be exported as a 2048k besides the eyes which will be a 512 texture sheet when implemented in engine. Working at a higher res allows me to upscale for portfolio work later on but you cannot upscale a lower res file document.
Texturing
Texturing
The patterning has to be super clean and crisp lines so I utilized the straight lines in substance so I point and licked with the mouse to keep an even width brush. I replaced the back stickers idea with a hazard pattern instead since it was already a repeating pattern all throughout her design that an extra placement looked cohesive in this area. I do like how clean this all of these details ended up looking and I am glad I did not bake these details in when sculpting since it would have been so difficult to undo the placements if I was unhappy with them or if I went ahead with a different design instead.
Luckily in game there were colour ways in game that perfectly matched up with the ones in my concept and what I wanted to do. So because of this I want to fully recreate a similar roughness effect with a tiling texture masked out.
I first sketched out the pattern and then used point and click with my mouse to have consistently thick lines made in Subtance painter for a clean result. The tracksuit lines were made by stacking and projecting a tileable texture.
Overall really pleased with the result and how simple and effective the final result is.
Similar looking padding on a jacket so I can better visualise how this pattern would conform around the arm and how much depth to give my textures
Puff quilted jacket - From accessfashion.com
With the seamless texture below, creating the padding was really easy by using cylindrical projection and pairing this with some height for that extra depth.
Seamless Textures and Alphas by Bruno Camara
The initial textures were too intense and the harshness of the blush made my character look as if she was sick with a stuffy nose instead of youthful.
As soon as this was toned down she looked a lot better, I still kept the details on her face simple overall and also toned down the glossiness around the eyes so she doesn't look like she has been teary-eyed either.
Shaders + Considerations
Shaders + Considerations
Eyes
Eyes
From a close-up of the final highpoly sculpt, you can clearly see that there's a tear line mesh between the eyelashes and eyeballs. This helps to more seamlessly transition the edges of the mesh and makes everything look more lively due to this area generally blurring the mesh lines.
Hair
Hair
Stylized Hair PBR Shading in Unreal Engine 5 - Unreal Gems
Anisotropic Flow/Comb Map Painting | PBR - Unreal Gems
Anisotropic Hair - The Easiest Way - Piloto 3D Art
Overwatch uses an anisotropic hair shader which is how they get such stylized ways of rendering that also shows up in real time.
There are multiple ways to go about making the shader but it depends on its purpose, its much easier to present this inside of Marmoset Tool bag due to some features present in its renderer that supports this type of shading but this method is only good for my portfolio as it won't work inside of Unreal engine.
Anisotropic means that the properties vary based on direction, a good example would be how woodgrain on wood isn't the same in all directions and the same principle can be used when making a hair shader to force the light direction to follow the contours of a mesh.
We do however need an extra map called a flow map for this effect which functions similarly to a normal map, its a smooth gradient of colours that tells the Engine what the correct flow of the mesh is so that the highlight and any other reflective light can go down it accordingly.
[FREE] Hair Material - Mizu Games
Some examples
Some examples
Character Shaders - Jack Cook
Hair Workflow Tutorial - Kirill Senzu
Example of shader used & Breakdown - Candy Girl 1 - Alice J.
The shader work seen on Junos helmet can be very easy to replicate since most of it relies on using the Fresnel on the border of the helmet and has a texture overlayed on top to mask out where I don't want the effect to show through as much.
This is done using an opacity mask for the textures and in this particular case they end up using a hexagonal pattern, I can do something similar but with star or dot shapes instead since that would better match my character and the current motifs present in her design.
There also happens to be some emissive data on the inside areas of the helmet, I can do a similar effect but instead place it on the buttons that can be found on the helmet as a flicker instead.
Preview of the visor shader when applied to a sphere, it works based off the camera (or main view) and this is great because it won't obscure important areas like the face when looked at from multiple angles.
I also made both shader material instances so that the tiling size of the pattern can be adjusted amongst how intense the lights are, how strong the fresnel mask is and so on.
Scifi Hologram Shader Material by SF Studio
I was aiming for a similar effect as this hologram shader to create an effect similar to the way that things float in the cartoon The Jetsons, it's a fun and simple way to imply this without even any mesh movement needed.
Here's how the shaders end up previewing in Unreal engine, overall super pleased with the outcome as the visor shader does not obstruct the face due to it changing direction with the camera.
As for the hologram shader, this also works well but the smaller mesh within it doesn't end up super visible due to the hologram pattern syncing up it's timing and therefore tilling its panner at the same time.
Posing
Posing
In the few Mixamo tests I did, I found it hard to commit to any pose since a lot of the auto-placed bones happened to stretch and distort some areas a great deal. For example, you can see this issue on the helmet as it's being pulled down with the walk. I particularly had an issue with how cartoony it was, bending the joints almost like a rubber-hose character. However, I really liked the silhouettes provided and will be using them as a reference moving forward in my next attempt.
Due to the lack of prop some adjustments were made to the pose, I also referenced back the Mixamo poses since those would have been animated by professionals who have a better understanding of walk cycles than I would and it made it easier to apply to my manually placed pose since it had the same character in all examples. I also end up making the chest piece not fully rigid and move it to the side to allow room for the knee to bend forward and not clip when my character is walking, it can instead sway from left to right. Afterwards I ended up modifying and bending some of the fingers to better match a relaxed pose but other than that left the overall bulk of the pose as is, I'm content with how the result of posing in this method and would be applying this for my future projects since the amount of control you have over the character is incredible.
As a bonus, I also made her smile to match the concept since it was only fitting to do so after having gone through the effort of making her a functional mouthbag in the first place. Once again, pretty pleased with how simple yet effective this effect was and in this case, I just used the move tool too bring the corners of her mouth up as well as some of the bottom eyelids upwards too. I modified the position of the eyelashes later to better match this and ensure no clipping as well.
Set up in 3Ds Max with colour IDs slowly being adjusted on the posed model, rescaling also changed to fit with proper character height measurements.
Presentation
Presentation
Research
Research
Since I'm extremely visual, I found it a lot easier to create a Photoshop plan of what I would like my presentational layout to look like. I would love to bump the saturation in the scene with post processing or even create a LUT lookup table to apply the colour grading evenly throughout the character.
I also plan on adding extra effects such as dirt masks and bloom to make the final renders pop out more. Overwatch is well known for their brightly saturated characters so if the textures aren't bright enough I can always alter the colours of everything and temperatures when using the post processing volume.
Thankfully, there already is a space-themed map in Overwatch, which will be an incredibly useful reference to make half of the assets I had planned for the presentation.
Even some shots of the floor are useful for looking at what shapes were used to stylise the rocks and what the base textures look like for the ground planes.
Creating the Earth planet will have to be an extended goal if I have time for the hand-in or something to work on adding for the degree show presentation instead.
Concrete Wall 07 - From FreeStylized.com
I'm planning to borrow both of these assets for presentation reasons, mainly due to time constraints but also because it's a good temporary placeholder until
I can make make just as good assets to replace them with. I attempted to make a tileable flooring but was unhappy with the result since it was so rushed and lacked the depth for it to work well in my scene.
Player Cards
Player Cards
Having these Astronaut portraits gives me more pose ideas for presentation later down the line, something similar to a character profile card that you can see in Apex Legends. It's also incredibly useful reference material, since their arms are bent in a way that shows off the creases and folds in their suits that I would like to replicate within my sculpt.
The player cards are posed characters with a simple layout/ border surrounding them and looks like a really neat way to professionally display my character. I can replace the stats on the left and be inspired by the UI to add some information about the character instead for that extra bit of narrative charm. Although I have to keep in mind that all of this is extra work that would look really neat for the degree show, and in turn would be a stretch goal depending on how much time I have left to complete this project.
Blueprints + Particles
Blueprints + Particles
Star Particles
Star Particles
To make my life easier, I borrowed my previous material and particle set up I had for my previous project's dust system and adapted it to work for stars instead. It seamlessly blends in with the HDRI but I wish I could get the emissive to glow more without bumping up the bloom in my post processing.
Floating Jets Blueprint
Floating Jets Blueprint
I thought it would be really cool if I could get both of the jetpacks to bop up and down towards the jetpack cavity to make it seem as if they were floating. This however did not work out the way I intended, and it instead moves my mesh so far away that it becomes out of bounds.
I also thought it would make more sense to have the meshes separate with a pivot point that's set to its local direction, but the tutorial only showed me how to apply this moving effect to only one mesh and not two, so I need to figure out how to apply the data to both meshes also.
This in the end is only a small detail that can be done without for this hand in, but it would be great to have set up for the degree show as soon as I can have some help from my lecturers to see where I have gone wrong.
Lighting + Post Processing
Lighting + Post Processing
Using the 3 point lighting setup mainly covers all of the lights needed to make my character visible, in the end I also add an extra fill light just to soften things up and also at this stage is where I realise that the background elements are swallowing the character whole due to the similar values being shared all over their body.
The colour combination goes well since the low value blue tint is not overwhelming its complementary orange light and orange objects we can see on the character. The purple backlight is the best of both worlds and can be used to infer the purple galaxy light bouncing back if we ignore the fact that wouldn't be the way light would be projected in space if we were thinking realistically.
To amend this, I have brightened up my final shots in the end since I also want to reuse these photos for the brochure and they wouldn't be visible when printed if it's too dark.
My shots have all been set up with the rule of thirds grid open so that they are all pleasing angles. For the fullbody side profile view I did not want to have another shot with too much negative space on the left so I made the full body fill up the entire middle row of squares.
Out of all of these, my favourites are the 3/4 closeup and full body views so I will be working on pushing these shots further as my they are my money shots.
In this take you can tell the textures were also not fully done and it's more obvious that some of the textures that are meant to be symmetrical, like the indent in the helmet on the front on shot are bent so I went back in to fix this alongside finishing up my texture work.
Final Shots
Final Shots
This final shot is my absolute favourite since it just looks so cinematic and beautiful, the emissive and light setup is so visually appealing when finally put together and looked at close up. The additional dirt mask and bloom combination make things shine even more to further exagerrate the lovely rimlight around the helmet in a way that isn't overwhelming but adds a feeling of wonder instead. Also the way the shadows are placed in the corners of the mouth help the smile pose look so much more natural and I am grateful for this outcome as well. As a whole I am really proud of how many things I have tried out for this character for the first time and ended up with such a beautiful result.
Post Mortem
Post Mortem
When I come back to this project to finish up for the degree show, I have a list of tweaks and changes I wish I could have done for this hand in to help enhance and make her fully live up to the expectations I have in mind for this project so I decided to bullet point my thoughts down below and how I would tackle these.
What went well and what have I learned from this project
Hard Surface Modelling
This is an element of modelling I have never tackled to this extent and I have learnt so much from it as a result, I found a workflow that works well for me and allowed me to create really clean outcomes and also gained more confidence with the Zmodeller tool in Zbrush. Blocking out then retopologising your cleanest block out and bringing the entire retopology back into Zbrush allowed me to have meshes that had the same scale and lined up from the get go, the use of the crease tool from Zmodeller left me with really crisp edges from my subdivided meshes as well.
Adhering to an Artstyle
The Overwatch artstyle is extremely well known and documented due to the franchise being around for so long, this helped me be better informed on how to match their style of sculpting and rendering due to the various amount of resources available. I am incredibly pleased with the outcome of how both her sculpt and current texturing has ended up looking like since even as early as her sculpting stages my classmates were confusing as an official model when I had my project and the references side by side. Overall a great attempt thanks to all of the hard work in making her as perfect as I could currently make her be.
It could have been better if...
Hair Mesh
Whilst sculpting the strands individually allowed me to have a cleaner bake and straightened UVs for an easier time texturing (and in preparation for an anisitropic shader) I found myself having to move the meshes multiple times due to the high poly mesh never aligning with my low poly mesh after subdividing enough times in Zbrush. Although my lowpoly mesh did have the roots line up, the sub divisions allowed more gaps to open up within my mesh and this led me to purposefully make some strands clip into each other to avoid this issue. Next time I would sculpt this hair as usual but combine the strands down early on to avoid the fiddly sharp ends and the gaps in the head I had to deal with.
Revising Textures
Some areas of the texturing I can tell have been rushed and can have some tweaks made to better resemble the Overwatch style I want to replicate. In particular, my model is too polished for an astronaut who would be constantly moving about, more wear and tear and minor detailing to add narrative elements is needed to further push this and is something Blizzard is known for putting detail into. So I can absolutely push this for the degree show and spend more time on this aspect for this.
What I would like to go back to implement and why
More shader work
Implementing an eye, skin and anisotropic hair shader would help better match the Overwatch 2 style. For the hair in particular, I would like to opacity mask out the ends for the thinned-out hair strands, similar to Juno's model. The eyes would not need to have textured in highlight and with an eye shader paired with a cap placed on top, they will look more lifelike when viewed from multiple angles. As for the skin, implementing ambient occlusion would help areas like the nose react and glow accordingly to the bright, warm light set up I have placed my character in.
Flag Prop
I would love to have a one by one comparison of the original pose with her holding the flag and this can only be done with the prop in place. It would also be great if there was some wind physics so that the flag could fly in the wind. Just ignore the fact that it won't make too much sense to happen in space but the rule of cool prevails logic in this case.
Player card
This idea would not only be extremely fun but would also really help to sell the believability of this being a playable in-game character, it can also have the custom pose with the helmet taken off as initially planned as well. I would also make custom player card graphic design elements to add as well to really sell this idea despite the player cards being more of an Apex thing as opposed to Overwatch.
Conclusion
Conclusion
So many skills and techniques were learnt in a small period of time and my knowledge from previous projects allowed me to really push this concept to be the best character I could currently get it to be. I am certain I can push it further with a little bit more technical research and help as the shader elements was something I stayed more busy discussing as opposed to figuring how to create due to me not being a technical artist. Regardless of this I would still like to have a go regardless and see how far I end up getting on with it. I am really happy with the outcome for the time being and it's something I can say I'm proud to have on my portfolio and also have so thoroughly documented for me to look back on and see the improvement.
Degree Show Updates
Degree Show Updates
Wireframe renders in Unreal
Wireframe renders in Unreal
Wireframe preview inside of Unreal Engine by itself is super messy looking and it looks even busier visually due to the engine triangulating my mesh and it showing both the front and back simultaneously. A workaround for this would be the wireframe material being stacked right on top so you can still see the colours below and have a more legible view of the model due to the colours still being beneath it. This also fixed the issue of the wireframe showing us the front and back and it instead only shows us the front due to the Original mesh underneath it not being transparent. I do however need to zoom in for any wireframe shots on the face due to the high amount of density making it hard to discern what to look at from afar.
The wireframe with a glow effect stacked on top helps it stand out more against the harsh background. I am, however, not a big fan of the way that Unreal by default triangulates my wireframe and thus makes it harder to see that my mesh is quaded correctly to the human eye. This happens in the engine because it's easier to compute for any calculations and is the most efficient shape for hardware acceleration but we as humans can understand the topology flow better if we were to look at quads. Our pattern recognition skills pick up the flow more naturally this way as the triangles can easily confuse the eyes about where to look or what direction something could be facing.
It's great that my duplicate mesh can just stack right on top of the original, and this means that it follows the rotational movement as well.
It's a super simple setup that can also control the intensity of the emission or the colour value with a Material Instance. I do, however, still have an issue with the triangulation on the mesh, so I will have a look and see if there are any better solutions to this issue.
Tip: Rendering Quad Wireframes in Unreal Engine! By Berenika Zemanek
After doing a bit more research on possible ways to get rid of the triangulation, most of the methods to do it ended up being too complicated for me, unlike Unity, which has a couple of tutorials of how to quad the wireframe. I did, however, stumble upon this great documentation, which is both simple and highly effective.
It's simply exporting the UV mesh from 3ds Max and using the islands as a mask, which can then be stacked on top of textures. By making these parts a separate material, you can also adjust the emission strength to give it an overall glow or change colours. And we won't have to worry about altering any textures since these wireframe grid textures will only be placed on the duplicate mesh.
Creating the Prop
Creating the Prop
Traced silhouette without perspective
Scaling and stretching the base to better fit the concept.
I initially wanted to shape the flag into the Pennon shape you can see in the concept but I had concerns of how this would animate in engine later down the line, so the better solution would be to just mask out that triangle area with an alpha and use an opacity mask to give the same shape and work with the flag shader. This also works just because the mesh does not need to have thickness as it looks really thin in the concept and the mesh can easily be made to be double sided too.
For flags that have been erected in space, there has always been a metal rod that held up the cloth so it can stay swaying in space and not be blown away.I think a similar principle is being used by the concept artist when they designed this flag in the first place but with extra supports in the frame from the top and bottom.
This way it works almost as if they were clipping down the flag so it would not blow away and also for a game asset this makes the movement easier to create with better believability.
The mesh is dense in geometry as I plan to use vertex painting later on inside of Unreal Engine to mask out any areas that I would like to keep still, like the area of cloth being held by the frame in particular.
Because of this in the end, it ended up accumulating 2k tris alone whereas my entire pole prop only needed 1k tris, so it's definetly more dense but its necessary for it to wave more smoothly in engine.
3,912k tris
Initial unwrap and packing sheet, I'm pretty happy with how the pole got wrapped, but I would have loved to also have the flag be better packed. Unfortunately, if I cut it in half a big seam would show up down the middle, so this was the only way to make it take up as much UV space as possible.
Baking
Baking
After the first bake, I noticed some areas of stretching which was mainly due to me not cutting in enough seams for the unwrap. These were easy enough to fix however especially when I have a pattern to tile all over everything.
This also exposed how some pieces held more texel density than they needed to match the rest of the prop so I went ahead and fixed this as well when re-unwrapping and packing the pieces back in.
I'm still unsure why this bake error was occurring on my plane as I had ticked ignore back faces and only used the LP mesh to bake onto itself. I also checked that there were no overlapping vertices either so I dont know what caused it.
I managed to amend this simply by remaking the plane mesh and replacing it which then gave me a correct AO bake,
Texturing
Texturing
I could not use my simple diffuse smart material for a base layer as effectively here likely due to me using the LP to bake onto itself, I instead tried to mask out certain sections and started off colourblocking from there.
Simple star shape made using the preset shapes in Substance painter, I initially liked the more chunky star shape but it ends up not matching the concept and straying abit too far, so there's a good change I will go back in to thin out the width a bit more later down the line. Other than that it's a good start and I'm happy with the placement.
Due to the high amount of emboss details, I decided to break it down by shapes and work in folders for one shape at a time, for example I first placed all the circle shapes in only a red base colour so I could see where they were easily and then added height accordingly for the desired effect.
It was the easiest option to draw out the wireframe in Photoshop using the symmetry tool, I ended up thickening the inner lines more so they're more visible from afar and better suit the Overwatch chunky shapes they like to often use.
I was really unhappy with the initial diamond shape and I was quite limited with the substance painter scales so I ended up hand painting the edges to be thinner and I'm much happier with the result now since it matches a lot better. Once the wireframe design was added into the background, I also intially was not a fan of how ive made the center part of it thicker but after colouring it lighter with gradients it looked a lot better and I was much happier with the way it matches the concept as well.
Animated Flag Shader
Animated Flag Shader
One thing to keep in mind is that my mesh needs to have a lot of topology for me to be able to have a really smooth flowing flag. So because of this, the flag area will be detached from the rest of the holder and that allows me to also create a black mask later on so I can restrict what areas need to be animated and which parts should stay more still due to the cloth being stretched by the pole holding it.
For this shader we are using the X Y Z position in our colour node to control the strength and some of the direction of the waves. Even more control over this is available when converted into a parameter so I got to mess around with it more but its easier to input the constants manually since the paramater only lets you pick a new colour on the colour wheel.
Local position
Text Cord
The tutorial above was most likely using an older version of Unreal Engine and thus it seemed like using local position as they mentioned gave me this very serrated and jagged flow to my flag's wave. This is odd considering both meshes have the same amount of geometry which is what I thought was causing this issue in the first place. I also found that this shader works based off the mesh's facing direction in the scene, so if I were to rotate it the strength of the wave would be altered as well
Using the colour red as my vertex paint mask so that the most consentrated areas of the flag wont move with the wind and the lighter shades can move but with less intensity.
Re-using the previoous pose and only adjusting the hand placement to hold the new prop in the scene. I made the hand hold the object a bit loosely just incase the object needed to be rescaled more in engine so I can avoid any unecessary clipping.
Updating my Artstation post
Updating my Artstation post
Rendered in Marmoset
New edited Video
New edited Video
Google Sites
Report abuse