FMP - Week 20 - Part 6 - Wrapping up my Final Major Project!

Conclusion - Reflections, learning outcomes and project analysis. 

As my final major project is reaching a close I'm inclined to look back over the project as a whole and note my improvements, lessons and anything I would change if I had the chance. 

The title of my FMP is 'Styles throughout genres: an exploration of character design', which was my fancy way of saying that I wanted to explore 3 very different videogame genres and character designs with my FMP, and I think from that perspective I suceeded. 

I like to think that when looking at all three characters side by side you can almost see an art style spectrum between them. On the one end you have the Cyclops character, pushing towards the realism of games like God of War, and on the other end you have the very stylised and fully hand painted Kael'thas character. All of his textures have little to no roughness variation in comparison, and its interesting to have to make sure that the textures look like they've been hand painted. 

In the middle of course lies the Overwatch character, as she is a combination of both in many ways. In terms of her proportions and the overall aesthetic she is very much stylised, just look at how impossibly thin her ankles are, but in terms of the actual texturing approach and the materials themselves they lean more towards realism as the hard surfaces have roughness variation and materials just like real plastic/metal. 

I've learned a lot during this project, often learning on the job as other than the artistic side, game art is very much problem solving. From unwrapping, baking, rigging and working in the brain melter that can be engine sometimes, it's always a learning experience. 

Some of the biggest things I've learned during my FMP would be: 

1. Refining my knowledge of the texturing pipeline and efficiency

2. More thorough understanding of the programs I work in, and navigation around them such as Substance Painter, Marmoset, Unreal Engine. 

3. UV smoothing group importance and efficiency in UV and multi-sub usage. 

4. The sheer importance of texturing and how much it impacts the overall character, prior to this project texturing was just slapping paint on the character to me and the model was what it was all about. Now I feel very differently, texturing while in the latter half of a character project is a large majority of whether the character looks good or not in the end. This is invaluable! 

However, as with all things, not everything is peachy in terms of how my FMP came out, and it's just as important to note the things I would change if I had the chance to go back and tweak them, as this is how I'll continue to learn and improve even outside of university. 

1. The scheduling of my FMP wasn't optimal, as aforementioned, my understanding of how important texturing is, and moreover how much time it would need to be done well, was not good. Therefore it didn't leave me as much time as I wanted, so if I could go back I would tweak the characters' textures. 

2. UV unwrapping is still not my strong suit in my opinion, having a character unwrapped in such a way that there aren't too many unecessary seams and yet it's still flat enough so that there is no warping or low resolution can still be tricky. The solution I think is to just put more time into it and if I had the chance I would definitely work more on the UV's to reduce the warping in some areas of my characters. 

3. Baking in marmoset was something I learned on the job during this project, and while it was an absolute holy grail to me at the time (struggling with baking in substance can feel like hell), there are still many things that I need to learn about baking. So less so something I would change, this pointer is more a note to my future self to go back and practice baking some more to get more aclimated to the process. 

This project has proven invaluable to me as I've learned so much during this time, and the ability to schedule my own FMP from the beginning allowed to me to see first hand how much time I need for each part of the project, and how important it is to keep myself on schedule throughout. To conclude, I'm pleased with how my FMP came out for both its pros and cons, as even the cons can be learned from. 

FMP - Week 20 - Part 5

Importing characters to engine and final presentation creation! 

As I'm nearing the finish line now, I'm working on putting all of my characters into engine and making sure that everything runs smoothly. For presentation purposes, I do prefer marmoset as the lighting is easier to setup, however the ability to have characters game ready is super important, and I need to showcase that I can make characters that could go straight into video games, and putting them into Unreal will help me do that! 

On the most part I'm just going to be imitating the lighting setups I have in Marmoset as I already did all of the hard work there, but my usual formula is this. 

3 Point lighting setup (with extras where necessary)

1. Top down or front facing light

2. Backlight harsh on one side

3. Support backlight, usually lower brightness to help bring the character out from the background

(Bonus lights)

4. Soft coloured light to help tie in character with background (deep sea blue for cyclops, green for Kael'thas etc)

5. Smal focal light on the face if not bright enough, to really draw the eye in.

But enough talking, here is how it looks!

FMP - Week 20 - Part 4

Character Turnarounds - Handin preparation

As part of my FMP submission I decided ahead of time that I would create video turnarounds of all of my finished characters, and now that I'm nearing the end of my FMP, here they are! 

Overwatch Character Turnaround

Cyclops Character Turnaround

Kael'thas Character Turnaround

FMP - Week 20 - Part 3

Final posing in marmoset and playing around with lighting

After lots of work, the character is finally ready to be put into marmoset and set up with lighting as a final piece! I actually had a lot of fun with this character, not only because Warcraft has a place in my heart but also because I learned a lot during this project. 

Quickly before I posed him, I put together a stylised stone texture for the alpha plane beneath his feet in marmoset and unreal, it was just a simple job in photoshop as I knew it would be low opacity anyway. 

Then with this done, I took the character into marmoset and began setting him up for lighting! This part is always lots of fun for me because its when all of your hard work finally starts to look good. 

Here is what I have for the lighting setup:

The pale yellow is a top down light to add some shadow and dimension to the character, the blue is a light from beneath him to lighten up the shadows caused by the top down light, and the green and red are backlights. The small green lights are also small omni or spot lights for the orbs on his shoulders and head. 

And thats everything, add in another camera and my ground plane and marmoset is good to go. Here is a screenshot from my setup camera: 

FMP - Week 20 - Part 2

Fire particle creation, step by step and outcome.

I'm excited about this because when I set out to create this character, these effects were always a stretch goal, only to be completed if I have enough time and my technology allows it, and luckily it does! 

Below is the step by step of how I created the fire for the characters orbs and the spell between his hands. 

1. Before anything else, back when the character was in Substance Painter, I made sure to paint the orbs around his head with an opacity mask to make the top half of them translucent, to help sell the idea that they were made of green fire further down the line. 

2. The next step I believe is up to personal preference to the artist, but I prefer to make the alpha map first, with less colours to confuse me I can work purely on what silhouettes I want for the fire/magic that I'm trying to make. So below is the alpha map for the textures, with small particles in the centre and the top left being a brighter glow that will go in the centre of the orbs.

Alpha texture

3. Next is taking that alpha map photoshop document and making a diffuse texture and emmissive texture from that same document so that they all align. Here you can see I added a bright yellow/orange to break up the green of the fire and make it look more realistic. Below that is also the emissive map with the black background.

Diffuse texture

Emissive texture

4. Lastly its time to make planes in 3Ds Max and lay these planes over the textures so that they can be placed around the character within the space. 

5. After this is done, I have the 9 particle textures on planes and ready to go, and name them accordingly A - I so that they can be cloned and put around the character and I can still track which alpha is where. I apply bend modifiers to the planes in both the X and Y axis to curve them and trick the eye into thinking there is thickness to them when the character is rotated around. 

6. This is the cleanup phase, I then take the character into marmoset and see how it looks in the preview, as I can only see so clearly in 3Ds. Below you can see the iterations I went through to get to the the final product. The first has no emissive map and there is one plane that cuts off at the top that I removed. The second has a strange sharpness to the front texture now that the emissive has been added, so I fixed that as well, and the last one is the final outcome!

Texture on the edges of the orb cuts off/looks repetitive and needs to be removed

Front texture looks strange and high contrast, needs to be fixed

Final orb models

7. The same process is needed for the spell between his hands then we're all done! 

FMP - Week 20 - Part 1

Rigging, skinning and posing

Time to post my progress so far. My time recently has just been taken up rigging and skinning the character so that he can be posed for my final presentation.

While I've rigged in Maya before, namely for my Overwatch character, I decided to rig in 3Ds for this character because he is fairly simple in terms of humanoid form and it shouldn't be too difficult to rig him with a normal 3Ds Max biped. Here is my biped:  

Those strange pale yellow shapes behind the biped are large tail bones that I've added in for his cape, and once his biped was all aligned up with the character it was time for skinning. 

Skinning is the process of attaching a mesh to a biped so that when you move the bones of the biped the mesh moves with it, and this is where the loops around the elbows, knees, hips etc come in handy as it is this stage when those loops are needed to support animation and deformation of those joints. 

After the skinning process is finished, its onto posing the character, which can be both the most fun and most frustrating part. The human eye can really easily tell when a pose doesn't 'work', but working out why is the tricky part, whether the weight is distributed wrong, or something simple like the fact that a human never holds its arms or legs out with straight joints unless its holding weight, but even then, overextending limbs can be painful, so if a human can't do it, a character shouldn't. 

Its little things like this that help sell poses, and in lieu of spending hours and hours studying the human form, a good tip I've found is to get a reference image of a real human in the pose I want my character to have so that I can reference the rotation of hips, shoulders, head etc. 

Here is my final pose: 

His hands are positioned to (hopefully) be holding a spell of a similar magic to the green orbs that will be over his shoulders and head, this will be done with alpha planes if I have enough time later.

FMP - Week 19 - Part 3

Finishing up textures & last details

I've been busy working away at these textures and I'm finally getting to a place where I'm comfortable with how they look. The back of his cape was looking a bit too bare, so I went in and added some low opacity detailing similar to his cape both in World of Warcraft and in one of his Heroes of the Storm skins. 

I also finally fixed his face, or at least got it to a place where I don't hate it anymore. It took some time and I think 4 complete redo's, but we're finally there, and I quite like how it looks. 

This as well as adding more details pretty much everywhere, his hair, shoulders, hands and the cloth between the pieces of armour, all makes for a nearly textured character!