Forest environment and hairy character

supremedalek925

Hello. I thought I'd show off what I've got so far in the environment I'll be working on for quite a while I think. It's an American national park type environment set in the 1950's with ranger cabins, streams, trees, etc. This scene is also featuring the first character I've created that uses hair cards, and I'm having quite a bit of trouble with it so some advice would be helpful.

I created a material that lets me vertex paint terrain details using the red channel. From black to white, it ranges from wet mud, dry mud, dirt, to grass; and transitions naturally between states using masks.
Proper PBR for hair and furry bodies is something I haven't figured out yet and by this picture you can see where I'm at now, and how it should look, rendered in Maya.
Any feedback or advice would be great. Thanks.

skodone

jsut went through the same problems just 2 days ago
for me it worked out to have more fur cards and make them more loose (theyre rly dense here) and i disabled shadows for them so one card wont cast a shadow on the next card which makes them look really weird...
as for ue4 i sadly cant help have to learn it still but it looks like your guy could use 2-3tiems the cards he has now and what i also did is make a good hair-clump like combining 4-6 cards crosshatchstyle until it looks good and then placed the clump instead of single cards. the fur will get more dense and also varied. u could also think of adding a bit more different colors to your hairs, hes really looking flat with that 1shade - fur

supremedalek925

Good advice. I cleaned up my hair cards to a much better level and I'm working on some hair clumps.

supremedalek925

I think it's looking a bit nicer.

Joshua Stubbles

I think the environment is off to an okay start. The trees look decent, but the grass and ground textures could definitely use some love.

I'm not a character artist, so someone else could probably give you finer points. But for me, the anatomy looks really off. The torso is extremely long and the legs are very tiny. Apes have a similar structure, but their body proportions are still suited to work for four legged movement.



Bear in mind, apes don't typically walk upright all that much. Your character is very human looking, but with almost ape-like proportions. I think you need a more solid understanding of what you're going for (more human, or apelike) and build out the anatomy from there. Right now, it's a very odd hybrid of the two and doesn't make sense from a biological or functional standpoint.