Pilot Girl - Noob Challenge continued...
polycounter lvl 14
I took part in the PC Noob Character challenge throughout March, the subject of which was the Pilot Girl concept. During that month I managed to just about complete my high res sculpt.
Since then I've been going back to it when time has allowed, in amongst building a new PC, learning bits and bobs in UE4, my day job and life in general.
Recently made some proper progress so thought I'd get a thread going so that with your help I can really polish this to a final presentation piece.
The game mesh is now done at just over 22k tris (22,152 to be precise) and over the weekend I got my normal and AO maps baked out. The head/eyes/hair are already textured, just need to crack on with the body and accessories and will update here with progress.
For now, here's a high res grab from UE4.
Since then I've been going back to it when time has allowed, in amongst building a new PC, learning bits and bobs in UE4, my day job and life in general.
Recently made some proper progress so thought I'd get a thread going so that with your help I can really polish this to a final presentation piece.
The game mesh is now done at just over 22k tris (22,152 to be precise) and over the weekend I got my normal and AO maps baked out. The head/eyes/hair are already textured, just need to crack on with the body and accessories and will update here with progress.
For now, here's a high res grab from UE4.
Replies
Further details will be added during texturing.
The image on the left is the UE4 viewport, middle if the UE4 material preview and right is from Substance Designer. Only the screwheads and yellow logos have been added; textures remain unchanged from SD otherwise.
If anyone has any idea why things look so different I'd appreciate some insight.
I hope you get it solved Paul!
Will have to try again when I get home tonight.
1 rgb into diffuse slot
1 rgb for (r) AO / (g) metallic / (b) roughness into their respective slots.
1 rgb into normal slot
Reflection capture nearby.
And yeah, in SD I had PBR metallic/roughness for the outputs then flipped my metallic map IIRC. I tried all combinations of flipping metallic/roughness, but I know how they're supposed to work in UE4.
I'll post my setup and texture thumbnails this evening if I get chance.
Cheers all for the suggestions so far.
Will try disabling sRGB in UE4 on the textures as has been suggested and see how that goes.
It's certainly better though I'm surprised that this needs doing as I presumed PBR textures/materials would look very similar wherever they've used.
A friend said this kind of operation was always needed on gloss maps in UDK and that this might be a bit of a legacy issue?
(sRGB turned off on diffuse map and AO/metal/rough map, then rougnness lerped as explained above):
I do have a feeling I'm missing a trick with the reflection spheres though so if anyone can give me a quick overview on their use I'd appreciate it (The reflection in the visor is setup in the material due to the transparency).
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/Showcases/Reflections/index.html#reflectionconsiderations
Still a screenshot of the material editor would help because we could also see thumbnail images of the textures along with what they are plugged into.
So the reflection spheres don't need anything more than just being placed nearby to work I take it?
There is certainly more of a range in the metalness map than I would expect, but that's how it came out of Substance Designer so I guess their PBR diffuse/metal/rough outputs setup is quite different to UE4 (you also have the option of PBR diffuse/spec/gloss as your outputs).
That said, the outer helmet part is the white section on the metallic map.
I wonder if SD is producing a metallic map more like I think Toolbag2 would use that includes colour as in this example - http://www.marmoset.co/wp-content/uploads/lenstextures01.jpg
(Btw, the above is me rambling 'out loud', all the help and suggestions so far are greatly appreciated. I'll load up SD when I get home and see what's happening as there's every chance I don't have my base materials setup correctly as this is the first time I've tried to use the software)
For anyone who is more used to the PBR workflow, how would you interpret the swatches in this image for use in UE4?
If you are struggling with the metalness workflow you can take a look at this thread:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134475
Also this video is fairly helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7HgIMv4Qo
So tonight I went back to the drawing board and scrapped my multimaterial in Substance Designer which made use of presets with huge graphs and actually spent the time learning how to make a basic metal with a level of wear and some additional tarnishing on edges, the whole time making sure that my outputs remained consistent with the kind of maps UE4 expects.
I realised after a lot of faff that I HAD to add a skylight into UE4 to avoid the metal going extremely black, but I'm now fairly sure that all differences seen are purely due to lighting setups/skydomes/post-processing/etc.
Now that I'm a lot happier finding my way around in SD I can add in the rest of the materials.
Only made a couple more materials so far and they're not that advanced, but gotto start somewhere!
Left is UE4 / Right is Substance Designer
Looking good so far man, looking forward to the end result. Would love to see some variation/dirt and scratches on that metal
Learnt a lot on this piece... time to start applying it all to the character :S
I just tried the demo, I'm so lost #_#
A quick suggestion for the helmet is to give it a simple 2 tone on the panels, nothing crazy, just a slightly darker diffuse or some such, maybe along that band type panel that runs up from the ears over the head. Nice way to break up all that shiny metal
Cheers for the feedback klown. For now I'm going to stick to the concept and keep it all the same metal, otherwise I'm going to risk never texturing the character. When everything is finished (if anything every really is finished) and rigged up I'll bear it in mind. Can always come back to things like that if I feel like it's needed after seeing everything in context.
Thanks for the feedback Torch. If you didn't see it in the original thread there's a textured version of the head here - http://i.imgur.com/q38aJJh.jpg - which hopefully helps in that regard (she does have strong features but that's something I wanted as I felt she read as quite a dominant character in the concept). That said I'm going to have to revisit the head anyway now that I better understand the PBR workflow. As with the helmet I'll certainly be looking at the early assets again once everything can be seen in context. Chances are I'll be re-doing the hair completely as well.
EDIT: Wanted to add that whilst I'm not making excuses, this will be my first ever complete character, so I know there will be things to improve upon in future projects. Improvements to anatomy/face will certainly be top of the list.
(SubDesigner viewport grabs)
Also made a start on rigging her up..... this looks painful, I should probably finish that....
Hands still to texture and the face/hair to sort out.
Yike. What software you use for rigging, btw ?
Can't remember if you use Maya or Max or ZB for that.
I use max for rigging.
if not no big problem awesome work man
Joking aside, whilst she's become known as Pilot Girl due to how she was referred to in the original noob character thread, I pictured her not as a plane/jet pilot, but possibly piloting some kind of mech (think the giant mechs used in the Attack on the Dock scene in Matrix Revolutions). I also assumed she would see some on foot combat and wanted to make her look a little more knocked about. Possibly it's a bit OTT at the minute.
I can't do anything until I get home and I'm away this weekend but soon as I get chance I'll give you a guide/breakdown of how I made my carbon fibre; rather than me giving you a completed substance I think you'd get far more out of it creating it yourself. This project is the first time I've used SD and trial and error has given me a great introduction to the program. It will certainly help your understanding for creating your own substances in future. FYI, the carbon fibre is completely procedural.
As a general tip though, just think about how you would create the textures in Photoshop through layering (in SD think of your first node as your bottom layer, and each one after that as a new layer on top) and blend modes, masks, etc. At any point you can double click a node or even the individual inputs/outputs on a node to see exactly what is happening at that stage in the node chain (in the 2D view).
Miiiight get chance to put something up about it tonight but if I haven't by Monday/Tuesday then feel free to bug me about it over PM
Cheers Tobbo!
Still lots to fix up on the rigging so a distance shot will have to suffice for now (posed in the vehicle game UE4 example).