Cyber Wizard - character project
polycounter lvl 9
I've had a character design bobbing around in my head for a while, so I'm gonna give it a go.
A clandestine looking dude up to some computer wizardry with lots of fancy looking equipment set up. Behind him is... well, himself. A sort of representation of himself in the digital space. I had Watch Dogs on the brain honestly, and all the things I would have done... differently. G̶o̶ ̶H̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶A̶i̶d̶e̶n̶!̶ ̶N̶o̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶!̶
It'll be a lot of fun! It's got a bit of everything. Some hard surface, some drapery, some human sculpting and some holography rendering trickery.
A clandestine looking dude up to some computer wizardry with lots of fancy looking equipment set up. Behind him is... well, himself. A sort of representation of himself in the digital space. I had Watch Dogs on the brain honestly, and all the things I would have done... differently. G̶o̶ ̶H̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶A̶i̶d̶e̶n̶!̶ ̶N̶o̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶!̶
It'll be a lot of fun! It's got a bit of everything. Some hard surface, some drapery, some human sculpting and some holography rendering trickery.
Replies
A laptop, a raspberry pi, a phone, a portable battery, and a portable satellite dish.All made in 3dsMax.
I may as well just go straight to Zbrush to do the clothes. It won't come out looking much different considering you always have to do a crap-load of cleanup and detailing in your preferred sculpting program anyway.
Sculpting fabric wrinkles is my zen state anyway, so I think my preferred method is to just skip MD.
I'm still not sure about the eyes. The brows cover the eye lids a bit too much considering this is meant to be a guy who's liiiiiiiike... I wanna say mid 20's?
Did anyone notice that problem in Three Souls? I mean, Beyond Two Souls? Why did five year old Ellen Page look like she had eye shadow on?
Haven't made the hair yet (so I just stole Joel's hair from The Last of Us so I can see what it looks like)
We-
-got sneakers!
...For sneaking...
In a talk given by the disgustingly talented folks at Naughty Dog, they said they had switched to handling stitching primarily in the texturing phase. I was going to try that with this project... then I forgot. I'll have to remember to try it for the clothes' seams.
What would make MD more attractive for your work process?
It really needs a way to position the garment to achieve certain wrinkles, and then tell MD to try and maintain those wrinkles to some degree even once returned to a relaxed pose.
And it needs options to set friction between garment and avatar. Trying to roll up sleeves and have them STAY rolled up is a nightmare.
I've retopologised based on the various pattern pieces, then subdivide and do my sculpting. When it's finished, I delete lower subdivisions (it can't be helped) then use the Panel Loops function to both add thickness and seperate the pieces. Then, once I've autogrouped the results, I can pull the pieces around painlessly with Automasking turned up (under the brush menu) get get overlapping fabric and what have you.
We'll see how it looks at the end. It might turn out it's still easier to just make the seams with regular brush strokes. Can't hurt to try though.
I was also thinking that it would be neat if there were something linking the real world and electronic costumes besides being worn by the same dude, so I thought perhaps the hoodie of the real world character and the neck tie of the electronic character could be made of the same fabric, perhaps with a nice techy looking pattern.
But which one to change? The red of the hoodie gives the scene a nice balance in the concept, whereas changing the tie to red would make it stick out too much.
I must meditate on this...
I'm sure I've forgotten something here or there. I'll think about improvements for a little while before moving on to the low poly and texturing phases.
If this guy is meant to be some humble hacker, and if I want there to be contrast between his real world appearance and his majestic, fancy, electronic persona, then maybe I should scuff his clothes a bit more.
Next I'll make the hair planes.
I've decided the eye brows aren't bushy enough to give them their own geometry, so I'll just bake them into the textures. Still unsure of how to handle the stubble. I want to be just thick enough that a smooth silhouette probably isn't going to cut it.
How dense props should be depends on a lot of things. In a first person game, you probably want stuff to be more detailed because you'll be getting up close to it, whereas in a third person sandbox, shit's tiny on the screen, so it doesn't need so much detail.
I want to show some of this stuff up close, so I've kept the silhouettes fairly smooth.
They said something to the effect of 'The people who make a best looking games are the ones who know all the cheats'. They were talking about optimisation and conserving memory at every chance, etc.
Naughty Dog are MASTERS at squeezing the most space out of their textures. It's insane! When it comes to clothes, they let the UV islands off without being as smooth as possible, but in exchange they get to fit them together a lot more tightly, meaning they get those few precious pixels of extra resolution stretched across their meshes.
Golly it's been a while. I walked away from this project for a month or two for Comicon Challenge 2016.
So what's news.... hrm....
After listening to a few more talks by Naughty Dog folk, I've redone some of the UV shells; the head UVs are not nearly as fractured now, and it was super obvious how one of the clothing UV sheets could be better spacially optimised.
I've got most of the maps baked, so it's about time to take Substance Painter for a spin
And that all sounds killer, but I'm working from reported values from Megascans and Dontnod's work, and to be blunt... I don't believe it yet.
Simpler materials like metals and plastics are straight forward enough, but when it comes to things like cotton and silk fabrics, the values I'm plugging in just don't look real in many lighting conditions.
I think things get a bit muddled up by the microsurface parametre. I don't know how you can really put a number to the roughness of a surface. You just have to play it by eye, I guess.
I went back and played a bit of Remember Me - Dontnod's first game - and the cutscenes do look awfully flat for the much touted photo-realism of PBR shaders (oh shut up, I liked Remember Me just fine!)
I think cotton looks right with pretty much zero specular and gloss. Oh but I hear the various writings on the subject screaming at me "But that's not realistic! Nothing has zero specular and gloss! All our research says that cotton needs the values x and y!"
Alright people, why then when I use those values do my clothing meshes look like bloody plastic?!
And here's an animated clip, at the end of my Reel:
Sam Leheny - Demo Reel 2016 from Sam Leheny on Vimeo.