Making a character editor-WIP-

Anitlunia

Hi Polycount
This is my  personal project I am making a character editor with Unity 5:
So far I made my first base male model and I'm designing some clothes now.
The main theme for my project is fantasy theme, because I love fantasy clothes.
This will be a PC application and my objective is to make  nice stylized 3D art, I will update this thread with my progress, here I leave some images C&C are welcomed.



Some style concepts exploration, with expressions and hairstyle


Base male model with textures and normals


Idle animation in Unity 5



Some shirt light armor concepts, with greyscale values.

Anitlunia

So by far I made my base Female model. The underwear is inspired from bloof elves from WOW
Here I leave the low poly with normals and AO, next step, texturing with Substance Painter.

kanga

I think your proportions/musculature need work. You have concave curves here and there that can make a figure look odd. The base mesh wire shows edge loops that run against the deformation needed for animation.

Anitlunia

So I updated the wireframe to be more animation friendly and checked proportions.  I didnt change drastically  the model, because I want to try again to make a diffferent model. Textures are hand painted style, or at least that is what I intent.

Time for screenshots! Unfortunately the model hasn't got eyes
    
I added some edge loops to the wireframe on wrists, elbow, knees and neck.


(Normal + Albedo +Metallic Smoothness + AO) 
This texture sheet uses three maps, as Unity 5 uses the Metallic smoothnes with alpha channel, unlike other software with PBR shading. The yellow color is for viewing the map, it's not actually the like that.

So I need the eyes, teeth and tongue to complete the model and begin rigging and animating!

Anitlunia

So I use Blender for my modelling pipeline, and used the rigify addon to make the rig of the character. Also in the female model I made the eyelashes to move with the eyelids.


Trying some expressions also, but they're waaaaay to creepy

Okey, I didn't want to sleep anyway. Time to get some references.

With that also in Unity I can rotate the model and change the armor

When drag and dropping the mouse button I use negative X axis, because it's more intuitive for rotating the model

KingKellogg

That eye movement is great.

killnpc

Great project. How long have you used Unity and Blender?
I'd suggest looking up "character model sheets" for facial expression reference and loop construction ideas.
The next time you see an interesting stylized character anatomy you like, look closely to simplify the figure's base forms - to guess how the artist pieced together their design. Anatomy can have very different rules with stylized characters, which is always fun.

Anitlunia

@KingKellogg Thank you!
@killnpc I have used Blender for 3 years now, and 2 years for Unity. Next time I definitely look for character sheets.

Here is my latest update
I have made some animations for the characters when the cloth changes. (I'm just beggining at animation so these are not perfect and need to be polished)



I can now change the models skin tone and also change the gender in the editor.  I'm grateful to Allegoritmic's substance painter  because it saved me a lot of time when I changed the skin tones. 


Next step finalizing all the animations and import them into Unity

killnpc

Are you using a tinting shader for skin color or are you swapping textures?

Anitlunia

@killnpc I swap textures for the skin tone because they were hand painted and I thought that maybe the shader could make incorrect colors.

More progress!
I made a toon shader with rim light, ramp texture and comb texture (or lightning anisotropic texture)
I can change hairstyle and colors! Here I only change the material color on unity to achieve hair colors
http://i.imgur.com/WyysVFI.gifv

 

Also I got the demo of the Nature stylized pack for Unity and made a sunset background and updated the UI icons where I got them from http://game-icons.net/ Check the site it's very complete

KingKellogg

Keep it up man! Glad to see you still working.

Leinadien

No sliders for the body? Not sure if you've ever used zbrush but upon discovering the layer's feature I thought of what kind of character editor you could make with it.

What you would do is create a very slim sculpture of a male/female, then you create a new layer and you keep sculpting on the same model and make him/her stronger or change the face or whatever. When you're done you can scale back the new layer similar to how you would scale back a layer in photoshop and you could create tons of similar models but with different body shapes etc.

It's like shape keys only that it actually changes the normal map as well as the geometry. Shape keys only changes the geometry not the normal map. The uv map and topology would still be the same you would just gain the benefit of a normal map that is appropiate to the body shape.

But it's more work since then you would also have to do what they're doing in games like Skyrim and Fallout, create two sizes for every armor in the game. One that fits the smallest character and one that fits the biggest character and then it would scale to the appropiate size depending on what scale you've chosen. But if done correctly I reckon it would make a great difference.

But this is looking good, keep up the good work.

Anitlunia

@KingKellogg Thank you very much!
@Leinadien I would like to try that in Zbrush, but this project is made only with blender, I would like to try that normal technique though >.<

My project is finally done! Just some tiiiny little trouble that I don't know how to solve.
This is the final look of the character editor (I made a tiny lore):
 

Trees are not actually like in the image, instead I used the tree creator from Unity, It's a very cool feature and makes procedular and optimized trees.

Also I tried to make a tree in Blender with create sapling curve addon that has Blender, and it was succesful, very optimized an low Poly. For the leaves I created my own leaves asset atlas. I'll drop them here to anyone who wants to use it, feel free

Green and red set of leaves

About the grass, it was easy! Just paint the grass as it were alpha textures and get the nice stylized look. Also the grass has the Billboar effect that Unity's Terrain has so it works wonders. (I can also share these )


FInally I made some pose animations! In the editor you can take screenshots So why not making a shot with a cool pose?

 Animation and poses are nice, but I have a major problem. My animations are not imported properly in Unity. I don't know if it's my fault, Blender's or Unitys. Here I leave the forum thread where I ask for help to the issue: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/blender-animations-not-importing-correctly-in-unity.412799/
If someone knows how to solve it, please contact me inmediately! It's very important for me to get this working.

Finally! Yes! I have sliders and change proportions to sizes that are hillarious 
Here are some gifs!


Also some cloths! (Yay clipping)


Bonus: You can add cute elf ears :>

Note: This also works on the male model. 

Aaand I need some tweaking on the UI (first changing the text to be more visible)

Double Bonus: Boob tweaking 


And that's (almost) all! This was a reaaally challenging project. Feel free to ask me any questions

KingKellogg

Thats actually really cool!