When creating my characters, I was unsure about what my pipeline would be, I knew Maya and substance painter would be involved in all the pipelines as I use these two softwares the most for modelling and feel comfortable with them.
Pipeline 1 My first pipeline that I use to create the horror survival character started of using Maya for creating the block out and low poly, I found using the edge loop tool and extrude worked the best for me in Maya when creating the block out and low poly as it added more geometry to my model. I also used Maya to create the UV for this, the unfold and smooth tool helped me loads in this section as it made the UV flat and reduced overlapping. Also, the sew and move tool was extremely useful when combining the shells together. The next part of the pipeline for this character was to take it into Mudbox and sculpt the character once I made it high-poly, I chose this over ZBrush as I have used mudbox in the past. The grab and wax tool is what I used the most in mudbox, I used the grab tool to pull the geometry in the position I wanted and then I used the wax tool to add extra definition to the model. I also found that using displacement maps worked really well for me adding fine detail such as wrinkles and nails. After sculpting I used substance painter as my low to high poly baker and for projection texturing. I found this one of the most useful software I have used, I cuts out the need to make normal maps in mudbox or Maya and saves time transferring between the two as I just open my low poly in substance and bake all the texture sets with my high poly attached. It has a live preview window so I could see the results straight away and fix any bake issues if any came up. After the bake, I could texture straight away this was straight forward as it was similar to photoshop with layers and mask. I found mask extremely useful as well as the polygon selection for selecting certain parts of the model. I then took the textures into photoshop and made sure there was no problems and to slightly adjust colour balances as well. After this I applied the textures in Maya and used the render tools to get a quick look dev to see if the textures look right / normal maps were working and adjusted these in substance if they were off and reapplied. Then for the final part of the pipeline I took it into unreal engine and used its real time rendering and applied the materials and created hair using the Neofur plugin, as I was using unreal engine to use the models I wanted to use this as my look dev to see how they looked in the engine. The final pipeline for this character was Maya > Mudbox > Substance painter > Photoshop/Maya > Unreal engine Conclusion I found this pipeline quite easy to use and once I got up to the bake and texturing I found this process was extremely quick, I would use this pipeline again but maybe look at changing Mudbox to Zbrush I this is the most wildly used sculpting software at the moment. Pipeline 2 My second pipeline was very similar to the first one, I started of using Maya to create the block out of the war machine, which started from a cube and using extrude and edge loop to speed up the process of creating the block out after this I created the low poly by adding more edge loops and moving the edges and vertex to move the geometry, I also created the UV in Maya as well finding the tools previously stated really helpful. I also created a high poly in Maya by using the smooth tools as well as the sculpt tools to make more rounded edges/sharp edges. The next part of the pipeline was using substance painter, I used this like in the other pipeline to bake my high and low poly models and then create the textures for the model. I found adding extra texture channels useful as I could create emissive light maps in substance painter. After this I did a quick look dev check using the substance painter render and tidy up the errors either in Maya or photoshop and updating the model in substance painter. For the next part of my pipeline before I took it into unreal engine was to use Marmoset Toolbag 3 as my render to use as a look dev, I chose this as it was a real-time render and I could add light systems to optimize my textures and I could apply all my textures (such as roughness, emissive, etc) to my model and take renders in seconds making it extremely quick The final pipeline for this was Maya > Substance painter > photoshop/Maya (for errors) > Marmoset Toolbag 3 > unreal engine Conclusion I found this pipeline a little easier than the first pipeline as I mainly worked with two software and most of the work was done inside of Maya and then finished in substance painter before been tested in Marmoset Toolbag 3. Pipeline 3 For this pipeline, I wanted to try something different and try a new software that is slowly coming into the game industry. I wanted to create realistic cloths for my character as I felt this was my weakest point in my first model so I decided to use Marvelous Designer 6 to create my outfits for my character, I took some time to learn but once I got my head around the tools it was a quick and straight process for creating an outfit. The next part of my pipeline was to take the model into Maya from here I can to additional sculpting on the outfit if needed, I decided to smooth some of the creases with the smooth/relax tool as I felt they were to hard edge. Then after this I used the quaddraw tool to retopologize the outfit, this tool made it a quick process, I made the quads quite large and then used the smooth tool to add more geometry then back in the quad tool I used the relax tool to make it flush to the mesh. After this I reused the old had by importing the other character and combined the head to the body using the combine tool. I then used substance painter like I did in all my other characters and baked the high and low poly maps for the outfits and then applied textures, the next part of the pipeline was creating hair in photoshop, I used the brush tool and made wavy lines over the exported UV maps using assorted colours and built up the hair. I then created an opacity map using the magic wand tool and creating an alpha channel and filling in the selected in the alpha channel white and exported this. I then used Maya as a look dev by using the rendering tools to do quick renders. The final pipeline for this was: Marvelous Designer 6 > Maya > Substance painter > Photoshop > Maya Conclusion This pipeline seems easier but I need to take in the fact I left the sculpting out as I reused my head from previous character, so I need to take in account the time it would to create that as well. Creating the body was quick using Marvelous Designer 6 and yielded great results, a lot quicker than sculpting, creating the low poly version was also quick using the quad draw tools as well. Problems/issues Character 1 The main problem I had with this character was the sculpting of the face, I found sculpting the facial features extremely difficult and I spent a lot of time undo and redoing certain parts of the face till I got it looking kind of human. I practically found the mouth and lips hard to sculpt as well as the ears. But I found advice on the internet about using the grab tool to pull out basic features and take it back into Maya at the low level and physically move edges/vertex and delete faces for mouth/eye opening and move the edges around. Doing it this way helped me a lot and from this I used it as a base to sculpt from. NPC This was a straight forward process for me as it was modelling from scratch my biggest problem was the UV, the sheer amount of work that went into getting the UV correct and layout nicely took days and a lot of time was spent on doing this and I found during the texturing process I was doing a lot of doing back to the UV to correct them as I found more error with them along the way. Character 2 Getting use to using Marvelous Designer took some time but once I learned how to use it, it was a quick process the main problem was getting the hair to look natural and took a few attempts at doing it as it look thin on the first few tries and I had to add more planes to make it thicker.
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1/3/2024 05:39:18 am
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