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! 

FMP - Week 19 - Part 2

Hand painted textures: Colour buildup part 2

I've continued to work on building up depth and detail in the textures on my Kael'thas character, and I've made another gif of the process, this time on the jewel on his chest. As a side note, it seems to be up for debate as to whether the jewel on his chest is red or green, as depending on the artwork or source you're looking at it differs. In his Heroes of the Storm model, its red, however on his original character model in World of Warcraft its green, so that is what I've decided to go with. 

Its the same process before but a little clearer as its on a smaller surface area now, but you can see how I add shadows, a little bit of an orangy-green tone to add depth, some shine alone the ridges of the gemstone and then finally some bright white shine. 

FMP - Week 19 - Part 1

Hand painted textures: Colour buildup

Short post for today, just to document how I've been approaching the hand paitned textures on my Kael'thas character. 

I start with a base colour that is around a midtone of what I want the final colour to be, then I add some basic shadows and some depth in a complimentary colour (green → orange, red → purple), then add some highlights all over the mesh, before lastly adding some pin point spots of shine, as the material in question was a golden metal. 

But all of that sounds very convoluted in text, so here is a GIF of the process which is much more fun: 

FMP - Week 18 - Part 3

Working on textures, base colours and hand painting 

As stated earlier, I set myself some guidelines for making this character to make sure that it stays cohesive even when combining two different art styles, and one of those rules was keeping in line with the handpainted texture style of World of Warcraft. So to stay true to that I will be hand painting all of my textures.

That being said, I've made the decision to still texture my character in Substance Painter even if it is hand painted for two reasons. 1. Even though most of World of Warcrafts textures look hand painted there are still some roughness and metallic variations to the textures and weapons that I wanted more control over in an environment like Substance. 2. Having not hand painted in the old school way in a long time, I attempted texturing straight over the UV maps in photoshop and the dissonance between working on this 2D plane and where the paint would be on the character was too much for my brain after working in Substance for so long. 

And so I began texturing in Substance! 

Here is how he looks with all of the base colours down: 

Don't mind the face, I'm still playing around with how to texture his face and I still haven't nailed it, but I'll get there eventually. 

As for the base colours I do really like how they look so far, the beige will be the gold trim on his armour once I'm done with it, and as you can see in the bottom screenshot I've started to play around with the gold trim pattern on the back of his cape as well. 

I find that its a delicate balance with hand painted textures between making sure the textures look stylised and hand painted and making sure they don't look messy. 

FMP - Week 18 - Part 2

Non destructive workflow and minor setbacks 

I began texturing yesterday, and working in programs staring at the screen all day can sometimes skew your perception of your work, however when working on the character's face I couldn't shake the feeling that he looked more than a little bit like an alien. 

Convinced that maybe I was being too hard on myself and before I went back and changed any mesh geometry, I took a break and decided to come back to the model with fresh eyes.

However, this morning I looked at it once again and noticed a few things. First of all, here is a screenshot of the face: 

See what I mean now? However all isn't lost just yet, I had a few tricks up my sleeve that I was still willing to try before I went to change the geometry. Firstly, I was trying to go for glowing green eyes similar to those in World of Warcraft (shown below), however I don't think that it is going to work with the enlarged eyes inspired by Zelda games. So I attempted to make the eyes look more like eyes from the Zelda games and it helped a little but still not enough. 

(Reference for the eyes of Blood Elves in World of Warcraft, the same that Kael'Thas has)

Below is my attempt at fixing the green eyes to look more like a Zelda character, but it still wasn't looking right at this point. 

Finally I made the executive decision that his face geometry simply needed to change. His jaw was too slim, and his eyes were lifted up too much at the sides, only further accentuated by how big I'd made his eyelashes. So with all of these things in mind, I went back to my high poly, then my low poly, and fixed everything one step at a time.

This is a good time to take a moment to remind my future self that the non-destructive workflow that our tutors teach us definitely feels like an annoying waste of time, but it's like insurance, you never need it or think its useful until you most definitely do. 

The fact that all of my meshes both high poly and low poly were still able to be edited easily without causing any major issues meant that the editing of his face geometry wasn't actually as daunting as I thought it was going to be, and here is what it looks like now: 

As you might be able to tell, I edited the eyes to make them work more with the Zelda style and I scrapped his face textures because they were making his cheeks look too gaunt, and overall I'm much happier with how it looks. I probably won't keep the amount of darkness that is around his eyes currently but thats okay, we'll revisit it. 

FMP - Week 18 - Part 1

Cyclops final render and ArtStation link

I finally managed to do it, here is my Seaclops in all of his glory along with the link to my ArtStation post! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RYP4zE

FMP - Week 17 - Part 4

Final posing and beauty shots! 

I say final but pretty much everything is subject to change before I hand in my work, but with that aside I decided to pose the Cyclops in a menacing slight lean.

 My tutor reccomended I make him stand with one shoulder slightly sloped to imply the weight of his giant lobster claw hand and I liked that coupled with his other hand clenched as if he was ready to murder som adventurer at any minute!

Here is my pose: 

This is obviously just with textures on in 3Ds Max and looks a lot better in Marmoset, which brings my to my next point! 

I've now taken him into marmoset and have been playing around with some fun scenes to put him into to make him look extra menacing and here is what I have so far: 

This is just the result of some black alpha planes with the silhouette of the boat and branches, some well placed fog and a plane with a random normal map from my character on it to look almost like water! 

Here's a peek behind the scenes:

Doesn't look as impressive from an alternate perspective but I guess thats the whole point. After this I took some good screenshots and then posed him normally for 360 inspection and made a marmoset viewer of it. 

Here are my beauty shots for it:

FMP - Week 17 - Part 3

Cyclops finalising textures & beginning to rig the character

Today I fixed the skin texture issues I spoke about in my last post, and I'm quite happy with where the textures are now, so I've decided to call it here for now and begin with rigging so that I can pose him and be done! 

Here is a before and after screenshot about his skin texture, I decided to go for a slightly geometric scaley pattern to add interest and juxtapose with the semi-circular fish scales he has

Before

After

Before

After

 Its subtle but I do think it makes a big difference in how the colour blends back into his blue skin and I really like it. 

Onto rigging! I started with a biped in 3ds as its what I'm most comfortable with, and just altered the default bones to suit my needs with the character rigging. 

As for the pose, thats a little more complicated because I knew that I didn't want him too bent out of shape so that he looked large and stoic, but I didn't want him to be mistaken for still being in a T-pose! 

As you can see he even has a little thumb on his claw hand in case I need to move the smaller part of his claw for the pose! 

FMP - Week 17 - Part 2

Microsoft Teams Tutor feedback and character revisions

Today we had another Microsoft Teams drop in session with our tutors and I sought some more feedback on my characters and definitely got it! 

We had a talk about most of my characters and they're for the most part on the right track, I was just advised to change some things here and there. 

My cyclops recieved the most feedback by far and it was because I was rather confused about how to approach the colour breakup that my tutor kept suggesting. 

I'd been sending screenshots to my tutor and the general consesus was that he'd become a little too bland since I'd cranked down the saturation on everything, and that I should add some colour break up throughout him so that he wasn't all one dull shade of blue. 

I understood this in theory, but in practice it seemed I just wasn't getting it in the way I wanted because nothing looked right, so in today's feedback session I think I properly understood. I tried adding some red tones in as shown in the screenshot below, and my tutors told me that its definitely the right direction but they can't just be thrown on with a soft brush, and that I should do some research to see how I can make them look like fish or lizard scales to blend them back in with his body. 

Here you can see the orange tones I'd added in, and now I'm going to work out how I can blend them in with his skin more to make them look scaley and cool! 

FMP - Week 17 - Part 1

Unwrap process, working with multiple texture sheets and multi-sub objects in 3Ds Max

I've begun to unwrap my character and have some orthographic screenshots of the final retop as well. The green of the character,(so his body and the orbs around him) are on one texture sheet and the deep red is another texture sheet. These are coloured differently because I've used the multi-sub material in 3DS max to allow two different texture sheets to be applied to the same mesh and I like to colour them differently as to not confuse myself in the unwrapping process. 

It took me a little while to work out what parts of him to put on which texture sheet, because it seems strange to have his whole body on one texture sheet and all of the little accessories and face on another, but I worked out that with how much space on the texture sheet his face needs to have, that coupled with his cape more than makes up for the amount of space taken up by his body on the other texture sheet. 

Anyway, here is what my unwraps look like now: 

Face/Cape/Accessories

Body/Green Orbs