If you got any tips and tricks for the best rendering in cryengine, I'm taking everything.
use vertex colors on everything the hair and fur can use the vertex color both for shading and for fixing which points shouldn't move, you can use it on the cloth to determine how much it should flap around and in general you can bake the entire AO into Vertex Colors and see how it looks. Hair, Cloth and Vegetation shader have specific vertex settings but you can always just use the Vertex Deformation below the Shader Generation Parameters to give it some cool effects!
Are you using the latest Eye-Shader as well? It's great for dynamic lighting and highlights in and around the iris - same goes for the HumanSkin Shader (which gives best results if you have at least one shadow-casting light placed close to your character).
You can use on all her body tessellation (screenspace optimized, so no worries about polycount in most cases) - keep everything on one smoothing group (no hard edges) for it to perform best though. Support edges where you want crevices and distinct edging.
See her in different lighting conditions and place her next to stock assets to tweak the materials. An often mistake is to make the Diffuse and Specular Multipliers too dark for a specific light setup and then causing bending later. Try indoor (visarea) and outdoor (time of day) lighting and see what you like best for presenting her!
- I'm still not happy with the fur so far, so I'll keep tweaking. I'll give a try to vertex paint as well, it sounds interesting
- I'm using the eye shader indeed, a lot of cool function that I need to learn to understanding it better. Same for the HumanSkin shader
- Unfortunately I skipped the tessellation thing for this project. I was a little bit worried it would have been too much to learn for a first project with cryengine. But I'll definitelay use it for the next one, for sure !
- Good point about the lighting ! I didn't thought about that working in both indoor and outdoor, it should help me to avoid a lot of issues indeed. And thanks for the visarea insight. More material to learn about
I'm planning to rig this as well as the frog, and try a couple of poses.
Tessellation doesn't require any additional setup - it's really just a tickbox and you can check if it works with your current setup ) [note: Tessellation is not Displacement Mapping. It just helps getting rid of some Poly jaggies for rendering]
If you're playing around with the fur - try to play with these settings:
Illum Shader with Opacity at 99%
Illum Shader with Alpha Test at ~25% or whatever suits you
Hair Shader with Soft-Alpha Test enabled and then use Alpha Test at ~25%. (Soft Alpha Test might create a "smearing" overlay on the skin in some cases, not sure right now how to fix that)
Play with other Shaders as well (like Vegetation and Cloth) to see what suits you best.
What can help with Transparency (but might be too much work/change for your setup now and not specifically useful to the fur situation):
Add more polygons to transparent surfaces and cut around the transparent outline to reduce the amount of pixels that overlay each other with transparency.
If you have large "filling" polygons applying a duplicate of the "hair" material to them with the exact same look but no alpha-test can help as well.
Use r_MeasureOverdraw 1 (don't have CryEngine open right now, might be slightly different command) to see the overdraw created by transparent pixels and shaders.
Thanks a lot e-freak. I just tried the tesselate button, it just works like it was magic !
Thanks again for all your precious help, that was exactly what I was looking for
Loving this piece so far (had to hunt down the original thread from the weekly recap)
I'm an environment artist but I've always wanted to go towards character... Your style is exactly the type of stuff I'd see myself one day sculpting up, very inspirational work
Would it be possible to have a look at the wires and perhaps a texture sheet or two if i'm not being too demanding n_n
I'm using 3DSMax, with cages. For some reasons, I got some strange behavior with x-normal, especially around the seams. I must be doing something wrong since everyone else seems to have perfect bake with xnormal
I'm using 3DSMax, with cages. For some reasons, I got some strange behavior with x-normal, especially around the seams. I must be doing something wrong since everyone else seems to have perfect bake with xnormal
Have you tried altering the cage within xNormal? Or using blockers to prevent projection issues?
Well crud. I should start using 3dsmax (or maya) to bake. To be honest, in my experience I never had any issues with baking in maya back in the day. But everyone recommended xnormal, so expected it to be better somehow. I guess it's just faster.
It might not seem like it, but that small response really made a difference for me, and is going to solve a lot of problems. Thank you.
@Scythe : It's definitely on my to-do list as soon as this character is done
@e-freak : Thanks again for your help my friend ! Here's my settings for shaders and time of day rollout. Just one thing, if I switch to an illum shader instead of the hair shader, everything works well.
Oh you are not setting the HairColor up in the Shader Params. With all other shaders you are using the Diffuse and Specular Color in the Lighting Settings, but the Hair Shader is foremost set up using the specific Shader Params. Try lowering the Hair color and work out the highlights using Primary and Secondary Spec Color.
In general - take all the time and go crazy on those Params. I can't seem anything wrong with the Time of Day setting from a quick look.
Alright guys, this is where I am so far, but unfortunately I need to put this on a hold for a couple of weeks . But I'll definitely finish this as soon as I can ! :
I'm back to work. I took a break from the frog and took the opportunity to participate at the CGHub Mass Effect challenge.I hope I'll be able to make it in time.
@e-freak : Thank you too, I'll try to post bigger version for my next WIPs, but cryengine is a bit crashy when I play with high end spec and big resolution
Replies
great work :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
THAT
plus super great work on the lowpoly! how many tris on the girl??
use vertex colors on everything
Are you using the latest Eye-Shader as well? It's great for dynamic lighting and highlights in and around the iris - same goes for the HumanSkin Shader (which gives best results if you have at least one shadow-casting light placed close to your character).
You can use on all her body tessellation (screenspace optimized, so no worries about polycount in most cases) - keep everything on one smoothing group (no hard edges) for it to perform best though. Support edges where you want crevices and distinct edging.
See her in different lighting conditions and place her next to stock assets to tweak the materials. An often mistake is to make the Diffuse and Specular Multipliers too dark for a specific light setup and then causing bending later. Try indoor (visarea) and outdoor (time of day) lighting and see what you like best for presenting her!
Are you planning to have her rigged as well?
- I'm still not happy with the fur so far, so I'll keep tweaking. I'll give a try to vertex paint as well, it sounds interesting
- I'm using the eye shader indeed, a lot of cool function that I need to learn to understanding it better. Same for the HumanSkin shader
- Unfortunately I skipped the tessellation thing for this project. I was a little bit worried it would have been too much to learn for a first project with cryengine. But I'll definitelay use it for the next one, for sure !
- Good point about the lighting ! I didn't thought about that working in both indoor and outdoor, it should help me to avoid a lot of issues indeed. And thanks for the visarea insight. More material to learn about
I'm planning to rig this as well as the frog, and try a couple of poses.
Here's what I've got so far for face :
If you're playing around with the fur - try to play with these settings:
Illum Shader with Opacity at 99%
Illum Shader with Alpha Test at ~25% or whatever suits you
Hair Shader with Soft-Alpha Test enabled and then use Alpha Test at ~25%. (Soft Alpha Test might create a "smearing" overlay on the skin in some cases, not sure right now how to fix that)
Play with other Shaders as well (like Vegetation and Cloth) to see what suits you best.
What can help with Transparency (but might be too much work/change for your setup now and not specifically useful to the fur situation):
Add more polygons to transparent surfaces and cut around the transparent outline to reduce the amount of pixels that overlay each other with transparency.
If you have large "filling" polygons applying a duplicate of the "hair" material to them with the exact same look but no alpha-test can help as well.
Use r_MeasureOverdraw 1 (don't have CryEngine open right now, might be slightly different command) to see the overdraw created by transparent pixels and shaders.
Thanks again for all your precious help, that was exactly what I was looking for
Loving this piece so far (had to hunt down the original thread from the weekly recap)
I'm an environment artist but I've always wanted to go towards character... Your style is exactly the type of stuff I'd see myself one day sculpting up, very inspirational work
Would it be possible to have a look at the wires and perhaps a texture sheet or two if i'm not being too demanding n_n
Keep it up!
Des.
Here's a anothe wip shot :
edit. Nevermind, i read back a few posts and saw what your using... Very nice man
@Crazyfool : You may be right. I'll try to make different shots of her, thanks.
Here's the wires as requested :
Have you tried altering the cage within xNormal? Or using blockers to prevent projection issues?
btw flippin nice progress man!
I tried to create a quick setup to check how the model react with different lighting, but it appears the hair and fur doesn't receive any shadows
The weirdest thing is, when I try to tweak the sky color multiplier to add more ambient light, it seems to only affect the hair and fur
If anyone here can give me some helps, it would be really appreciated
It might not seem like it, but that small response really made a difference for me, and is going to solve a lot of problems. Thank you.
@Scythe : It's definitely on my to-do list as soon as this character is done
@e-freak : Thanks again for your help my friend ! Here's my settings for shaders and time of day rollout. Just one thing, if I switch to an illum shader instead of the hair shader, everything works well.
In general - take all the time and go crazy on those Params. I can't seem anything wrong with the Time of Day setting from a quick look.
http://www.livestream.com/Guedin?t=727040
I'll go with a cook chief Volus :
this has my vote for sure tho lol!! love it! :d
Keep up the good work!
@Torch : I just wanted to test myself with CryEngine, no real reason there
@Scudz : Thanks again man
@e-freak : Thank you too, I'll try to post bigger version for my next WIPs, but cryengine is a bit crashy when I play with high end spec and big resolution