Calling all Character Artists across the globe, I came across this live talk and thought I would share the love.
Del Walkeris giving a live talk on Tuesday 26 November, 17:00 - 18:00 GMT.
Del is a seasoned Principal Character Artist with 14 years in the games industry, known for his work on The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Apex Legends, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
The teams at Deck nine were planning to do a group art blast for the release of Life is Strange double exposure. Unfortunately this is no longer happening so this will be my solo art blast haha. it.s been a while polycount :-)
Cheers to the lovely talented character team at D9 who continue to support all of my character after my departure all the way until the game shipped.
I fully agree with Kanni3d & Klunk, both on methods explained and how these are standards when it comes to manually unwrap your UVs. Like, it's normal to spend more time on things that can't be automated. The RizomUV result is quite poor for two reasons : - center edges are messed up (=will need later select>relax>straighten) - external app means more clicks. Always a thing you want to reduce and a problem if you need to do that on several models or refine the model's topology for some reasons
On 3dsmax you can also rely on the Peel mode, this one allows you to view unfold in realtime depending on pinned vertices, it starts with two, but you can add more simply by selct+drag them around and see how it behaves best.
Another way to do that would be using the projection method, I did that to project UVs from a flat model onto a more detailed one :
Hey! Two week later, back with quite a few changes 😊
I decided to take the plunge and re-make the hair from scratch, as I really started disliking it the more time went on.
I decided to get roughly inspired by a technique found here (used in Final Fantasy if I recall correctly), and tried making it work with my skill level.
Here's how it looks now!
I believe that looks quite a bit better than before, even though it could definitely be improved. I'm glad I went for it in any case!
I didn't just stick to the hair, but I also did some texturing tweaks here and there, more noticeably retouching the made-up blue material.
I fully embraced the fact it was made up and magical, so I added more colour variation (it was very monotone before), and more notably I added some veins, since it looks like this material is slowly engulfing the character. The veins are mostly noticeable when the light hits them just right, thanks to the roughness difference.
Before leaving, I of course tried Fabi's tip, and it gave a satisfactory result for those interested! The options that looked the best were "beauty", and "keep normals". Thank you so much for being so helpful, I'll definitely incorporate it into my workflow in the future. (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
With that, I'll finally move onto rigging and animating this little beast.
Feel free to drop any feedback even if I'm too far along the process to address it, I'm always eager to know how to improve for the next project!
Catch you later _(* ̄▽ ̄*)ブ
Edit: Whoops. I finally figured out why images in this thread have been disappearing! I had temporarily been using discord to host my screenshots, and it turns out that when you copy paste images from there it embeds a link. Meaning that when the images get deleted from discord, they stop displaying after a bit. Gonna try fetch the images again to restore the thread!
This was the first map that I got my own area of the map (Laundromat, and the Street with the Box Lift) to take from blockout all the way to final art pass (Thank you Jeff and Andy for all the feedback). I spent alot of long nights working on the Laundromat, modeling new props to make it look unique. Good times!