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: