Sorry for the silence, I went on a long party weekend in Berlin! My hands were itching to get back at it though, and here I am
@Mateus, @PyrZern and @tda; -The hair so far has been built with spheres per "blob" and dynamesh, then clayBuildup for the right volumes, a lot of pushing and pulling in the right shapes (silhouette curves from EACH angle must be nice). - Then some ClayTubes for a general direction, feeling of strands, overlap of those strands, and some relief of the surface. This was quite soft and smooth, nothing fancy just a soft base to guide me later. - TrimDynamic and claypolish to define more planes, things staring to look more planar. - then going over everything again with OrbCracks, adding soft creases and ridges with a big brush and low intensity. These will add even more planar-ity. (is that a word?) - second pass of OrbCracks, this time smaller brush, harder intensity. This for adding smaller creases, which are seen on the concept and I'm trying to match. At this time the hair should look like nicely curved blobs, with a planar surface and some curvily drawn, intentionally put creases. Variety in crease length, depth and inensity are important too. - to finish the look, I go over the whole thing again with OrbCracks on zAdd, soft intensity, big brush size. This should pop up the planar surfaces between the sharp, thinner creases.
Now I know this wall of text isn't very clear for people that need visuals (hello, all of us artists), but I didn't save different steps out. I will, however, make a tutorial later since I've been asked about the hair by a lot of peeps.
The lowpoly and baking I still have to figure out. Right now I think I'll make a low poly blob for each one of the volumes, then in zbrush split up the high poly in the same way and clean it up a bit, then bake each volume seperately. Might be a bit time consuming, but I don't want it to look melted or blobby.
@future-fiction: thanks a bunch for the overpaint, even though it looks like I didn't look at it too much I tried to put a lot of the subtleties from your overpaint in. Yes I placed the eyes a bit closer, I softened/changed the shape of the jaw, added in that beautifull lip-corner... Very helpfull stuff man.
@leslievdb thanks again for the feedback earlier. You really helped me with the hair and how far I could push the detail on the clothing
@lotet I understand you feel that way, I see it too. I'll try to tweak it one last time!
Thanks so much for the kind words, it's really cool to see all of you following and rooting for me haha. Update coming soon!
It's great to see your progress through the workshop Shanana and how you character has developed and come together. Very inspiring! You mentioned in your first post that the model would be going into Unreal. It would be great to see the finished project working in a Unreal environment and your development doing that.
But first; @jessicajanerule1 Thanks girl, this project sure is meant to be realtime (and animation ready) in the end, might go to Unreal or if I aim lower only Marmoset. In any case that's the goal I have for eyes atm, but we'll see where I go with it. Since the whole making it realtime and taking it to an engine or at least practicing those skills is what I personally wanted to get out of this project, I will definitely keep you guys up to date with that when I arrive there.
For now, sculpt only. Finished sculpt, however. This is the final and last high poly version. On to retopping, UVing and baking... Note; the polypaint I will redo in Substance, this was just blocking out of colors...
Aaaand I couldn't resist but make her some decent underwear as well. I know it was a waste of time making this completely because you can't see it underneath her clothes but it might be an idea for some poses or renders later. And isn't it all about having fun? Well I sure had some fun with this.
Awesome sculpt! I particularly love everything on it. Thanks for the breakdown on the hair, really looking forward for the tutorial. I'm trying to sculpt/model a hair right now and it's very very tough hehe.
Heheh @Mateus, keep it simple. Fewer brush strokes are better. The curves in the silhouette are also more important than the detail. Try long, hair-strand-like-strokes with clayTubes or buildup. (up the roll distance under stroke, though ). Think of layering....
Hey Guys... I've been working on the retop for a while now. Still not 100% there, but today I finished the big chunk of hair, so I thought it was time for an update...
I started out thinking about what parts I would have on separate UV's and what parts I wanted in one mesh for baking and skinning. Some carefully considered decisions had to made. I figured, the body, underwear, shoes and horns could go on one texture, then the dress and bows'n'ribbons, the hair, eyes and muffin could each have a texture as well.
I decimated a lower polycount mesh of all items and got it into max. For the retop I started either from a plane, or from the lowest SubDiv out of Zbrush. As a guide to get me started I chose the upper curve of the folds and worked my way out. From there I focussed on the silhouette of the folds, and filled everything up towards the middle. The hair got a similar approach; starting by following a strand of hair down, then changing direction to the width.
There's still a lot of smaller stuff that needs to be done, and quite some refining needed as well... After that, it's unwrap time
Ps: I dream of topological curves at night. Weird right?
overall I thin k it looks great, I know you probably dont wanna touch the retop any longer, but I would suggest closing the hair spirals in a star or triangle shape rather then a quads to be honest.
also, this is really nitpicky and wont really effect anything major, but sometimes you have loops closing in triangels parallel to each other (like on the dress), but on different steps, if you know what I mean. its mostly aesthetics but I would make sure they align on the same polygon ring =P
Ps: I dream of topological curves at night. Weird right?
Haha, that's strange, I remember having dreams about doing retopology too, though I dreamt I were retopoing something infinite, like a mandelbrot or something.
It looks really good I'd say, the only thing, and this is nitpicky, but the neck seems very dense in poly count compared to some other areas but that's a pretty minor. Good work!
@lotet the stuff that you see in the images right now has 34k together, but quite some elements still need to be added. I don't really understand what you mean with the triangles going in parallel... The hair is on the list of stuff that needs to be done, both reducing and adding polys...
@Maxilator, aaah a little bit more you say. I already took some away there. Will adjust some areas anyway, so this can go on the list as well.
Thanks for the pointers guys. I won't finish it anytime this week. Got some more urgent bussiness atm
@Shanana Looks fantastic so far. That is one hell of a retopo, and probably unwrapping the hair would be quite complex too. Can't wait to see this finished!
Woop woop! Finally finished the retop. It took some time since I redid some things such as the skirt and dress, and also had some RSI complaints so couldn't work as much as I wanted to... But here it is!
60k All combined 21k Body (+underwear & shoes welded in the mesh) 10k Hair 5,5k Muffin
Hiya guys. OMG it's been so long. I've worked on this project on and off, in between other projects, and so the year has almost turned
Finally I'm posting an update again! A lot has happened since october: UV's, normals,... Lemme show you!
Before I got started with the UV's I planned ahead a bit. How would I organize my UV's, what parts belonged together according to material (cloth with cloth), what parts could be mirrored to save space and avoid unwrapping similar parts twice, ...
I divided per cloth material, hair and horns, skin (and teeth), eyes, and the muffin. So 5 UVs, merged into one. I used a MultiSub material with 5 materials, and applied the MatID to the right polygons. This is useful in the Unwrap modifier (you can view each MatID separately and switch between them without leaving the UV editor), but also useful in Substance Painter since the MatID will create the Texture Sets I want. I deleted half of the parts that I wanted mirrored after UV's, but the head was an exception. I have half the head here in this image but after unwrapping the legs and arms, I applied the symmetry and only then unwrapped the face. So the faces' UV's are unique in the end.
After all that retopping and prepping I started my UV's. I'm a Max user (however I love Maya's UV tools too) so I had to work with what I had... Usually this means putting down seams (from the peel menu) and pelting or peeling the patches one by one. The seams go on places where they are least visible, or where the surface has a big normal-transition (corners). For the body this means seams on the inside of the leg, the side of the arm that's closest to the body, back of the head. The hands have a seam on the wrist and going over the fingers, splitting up the back of the hand and front of the hand. The finished UV's can be viewed if you scroll down.
Here's how most of my workflow goes, shown on the hair:
(Creating seams on the back of the strands of hair with the options in the peel menu) (Dividing the hair in separate chunks, putting the seams in least visible places/ where the normals take a sharp turn) (selecting one poly, expanding the selection to the seams) (using the pelt tool) Peel works great in a lot of cases, where with pelt it would need relaxing more often. However I usually do a quick pelt before using peel because it stitches all seams from the default UV. Peel would take these green seams that you did not add yourself into consideration as well; the pelt welds these and only looks at your blue seams. (Using soft selection to relax some bits some more - preferably in UV space, here still in XY space) (Using the Relax tool, switching the type of relaxing a lot since none are perfect. It can be - and was in this case - a copious thing to get it right, so some patience and trial and error are necessary) After unwrapping all parts I packed them into the UV square and put a symmetry on the halved parts. With the symmetry I had to offset the "double" UV patches by 1 unit.
Now, on to the normals. I had some difficulty figuring this out... Mostly the method of exporting was unclear to me. I knew Painter was really great at batching normals, and I didn't feel like exporting all intersecting parts separately (which was the old way of doing things in Xnormal). With Painters' functionality all you need are good naming conventions, and it will cast its rays only onto the correct mesh. Here's what I came up with:
Max: I had 2 meshes, of which one (the Body_Original) I used to apply fixes and changes. This mesh contained all parts attached into one EditPoly, and I exported it as FBX for use in Toolbag to visualize the normals on. This is also the mesh I will use later to start texturing. From this mesh I selected each time the parts I had to export separately, detached these parts as clone and renamed them accordingly. These detached meshes I used to bake normals in Painter. They still had the material with different MatID's on them, so Painter would still have the correct TextureSets. When I had made a fix or change on Body_Original I replaced that part again. This way the mesh I used for baking and the mesh I used for visualising both got the fixes. The reason I split these two up is because I had to separate intersecting parts, and because if you have everything attached into one mesh there's no way to rename all parts. One mesh = one name. This boggled my mind a bit, but by grouping the separate parts(Baker it's called here) I could export one thing but with lots of names. (Thanks Sanna for pointing this out )
Zbrush: I renamed all subtools in the same manner as in Max. This is super important since Painter will look for matching names. Some focus was required here, haha! I could have exported all of them into one FBX as I did in Max (the Baker group was exported as one FBX) but I didn't get it to work in Painter. I never figured out why not, but splitting the exports per MatID had positive baking results. I simply had all subtools hidden except for one group (the Cloth_ID parts, for example) and exported visible as FBX.
Substance Painter: I imported the Baker FBX (all separate meshes but together in a group) and used these bake settings: I could simply select the different FBXes out of Zbrush at High Definition Meshes, change the Match option to Mesh name and adjust the suffixes. In a single click I could bake all texture sets. Of course some areas would still have intersecting issues (think between the fingers, lips, ...) and I just baked again but with different distances. Then masked out the wanted areas in Photoshop and viewed everything in Marmoset. Here's the result!!!
I also did a quick blockout of the colors and roughness in Substance. I colorpicked from the concept image to have a good start (except the shoes, which you can clearly tell :'D ) but a lot of tweaking and balancing will be necessary.
Now onto the real texturing fun. I've never done this kind of character/style before (not in realtime anyway), and I don't have much experience with realtime stuff, so I'm a bit uncertain of how to tackle this or what style I should go for. Any ideas on style are more than welcome!!!
And Happy New Year guys! Lets make 2017 great again!
Wow. what a breakdown! I saw a sneak peek of this on your Facebook but this is beyond awesome bakes and everything looks super smooth as well, great work! as for texturing I think something along the lines of Disney/Pixar should probably fit well.
Nice job on the bake, the breakdown is insightful as well. I myself bake out multiple low poly meshes all at the same time and one way I do it is I name the high poly mesh_high_01, mesh_high_02, etc. and it'll bake on mesh_low and doesnt need a number after, and it'll bake fine, I dont know if you know that. Good job tho, keep it up.
Somebody gave me the tip to start by texturing the shoes and see how far I could get them, then apply the same level of detail and same style to the rest. What a great tip!
So here's the progress on the shoes so far. I love polka dots and they fit well on the shoes, but I'm still figuring out wether it will fit the rest of the dress. I might change them again after doing the dress ^^.
Have you Looked at any Lola Ramona shoes? if not ,you absolutely should! They are usually a lot more shiney though, not sure if thats the look ur going for, but I think it could really make em pop.
Oooh, yeah those look super cool! I was going for a soft velvet feel like here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/489133209512412979/ However the dress has a lot of silky elements, which don't match very will with the fabric of the shoes. I might have to make them leathery afterall... So many choices. This is a bad setup for my personality XD
I think that reference of yours looks a bit more modern and "classy" rather then pin-up. Id definitely go for a patent leather look if I where you, and as you said yourself, it would break up from all the other cloth pretty well.
Ok so I left the shoes for what they are and have returned to them a bunch of times all ready. I'm still figuring out which material goes where and which fits together or not. So I moved on to the parts that I was more certain of how I wanted them to look.
Little update, the skirt is OK imo, probably not gonna tweak it much more.
I'm a bit stuck with the ribbons/bows/dark green stitching on the dress. I tried something silky, something velvety, I don't know what I tried to do yesterday night but this is how I found it this mornin This is the kind of thing I think would look cool in combination with the rough silk of the skirt and maybe the leather I'm thinking of for the shoes: This is how the silk looked btw. I feel like it's too much of the same, and that I'd better try to break things up with something more matte. What do you think?
Looking good, love the shirt pattern like you said, you can always move materials around to different places, but I love the material itself. the sleeves are cool too, but I think the tiling is a bithigh, making the pattern look a bit small, noisy and hard to read.
anyways, would love to see some full body screenshots, also, are you looking at this only in Substance painter/designer? I really suggest setting up a marmoset scene with some nice lighting, AO, that kinda stuff.
This looks fantastic so far! The pattern on the skirt looks almost stitched. How did you handle making it look stitched? Is that a Substance Painter thing, NDO, or sculpted?
Hey @slosh, thanks! I just layered some weave kinds of patterns with directional noises, and a lot of roughness variations ^^. The pattern I got from Zapolzun I changed into an alpha in PS and used it as a mask on the material. Basically I've been putting together the materials in Painter from scratch. Come to think of it, designer could've come handy there...
So here's another update: I feel like I finally got in a place where I can see the end in sight and the perceverance is paying off! Cool!
Great work! I noticed some of the skin showing through where the skirt meets the corset (It's probably not what it's would be called but I'm not to well versed in women's clothing I'm afraid) So make sure to move the verts a bit to connect the parts there.
Okiiii guys. Update time! Last one about the cloth I promise!!!
I made the jump to Marmoset and had to tweak a lot. Lesson learned - go Marmoset rightaway! The mesh is fixed where it didn't align well, and I added a fuzz map to make the fabrics a bit fuzzier. Especially the velvet from the shoes needed it. It's a small difference though.
Now I've tried to make everything is physically accurate as possible, but the silky bits (a lot of the fabric types are silky) couldn't be done accurately. Since the idea behind PBR is to make the maps work well under every lighting condition I just tested the maps out with different environments and tried to author them to work with all of them. Is that.....acceptable?
I made the jump to Marmoset and had to tweak a lot. Lesson learned - go Marmoset rightaway!
haha, told yah
as for the material stuff being acceptable, sure, why not? does it look good? In the end everything looks different in different engines anyway. as for certain specific materials like silk or metallic paint or something, unless you want to write your own specific shader for that, Its certainly good enough.
I started the hair texture but decided to do the skin texture first. This way it's easier to tweak the hair, since this is the part I have the least solid idea of how it should look. Skin is skin, not so much design doubts there. Solve the problems you know how to solve first, right?
I tried to focus on getting a quick result that's easily adjusted; so I worked mostly with fill layers and masks for both the color, roughness and height. I could quickly tweak ALL my values without having to redo a single brushstroke, or I could adjust the mask a bit in areas where it didn't work out. Having a lot of layering for color and roughness did the most work; I got 4 colors blended together and about 4 roughness procedurals blended together. I mainly used spots brushes to create the masks as these gave a good, slightly grungy result. Here's a part of my layerstructure with the colors and roughness maps I used:
As you can see there's also a base layer containing a base color and base roughness. If it turns out too glossy or something I can simly adjust this one slider instead of going through all other layers. I'm trying to work as non destructive/art director friendly as possible ^^.
Another note that I feel I need to make is about the make up. Depending on how you wanna interpret the concept I could go in different directions with it. As a former make up artist I hate to see whore-make up on every pretty 3D girl so I tried to tone it down to something natural, even though she's wearing a really heavy eyeliner and has deep red lips. I also tried to match the colors as much as possible to keep it simpler for the eyes to interpret. It's not a coloring book, but a carefully picked out color palette imo, which I should respect.
The hair, horns, eyebrows and lashes are not done yet - barely blockout!
Bey
More updates coming soon! Hope to finish this project asap
I think the skin is looking a bit too realistic at the moment, maybe its not because the other textures are as detailed yet. but I would consider removing all the tiny speckles, Im getting a slight uncanny valley feeling.
the overall skin tones look great! except for the hands. since the red paint/tattoo thing is already cutting of the hand from the arm, the pink tones in the hands is making it look a tad weird. I would either move the pink up on the arm more, so it fades above the red band, or below it, but now its creating a strange looking tangent.
Replies
Sorry for the silence, I went on a long party weekend in Berlin! My hands were itching to get back at it though, and here I am
@Mateus, @PyrZern and @tda;
-The hair so far has been built with spheres per "blob" and dynamesh, then clayBuildup for the right volumes, a lot of pushing and pulling in the right shapes (silhouette curves from EACH angle must be nice).
- Then some ClayTubes for a general direction, feeling of strands, overlap of those strands, and some relief of the surface. This was quite soft and smooth, nothing fancy just a soft base to guide me later.
- TrimDynamic and claypolish to define more planes, things staring to look more planar.
- then going over everything again with OrbCracks, adding soft creases and ridges with a big brush and low intensity. These will add even more planar-ity. (is that a word?)
- second pass of OrbCracks, this time smaller brush, harder intensity. This for adding smaller creases, which are seen on the concept and I'm trying to match. At this time the hair should look like nicely curved blobs, with a planar surface and some curvily drawn, intentionally put creases. Variety in crease length, depth and inensity are important too.
- to finish the look, I go over the whole thing again with OrbCracks on zAdd, soft intensity, big brush size. This should pop up the planar surfaces between the sharp, thinner creases.
Now I know this wall of text isn't very clear for people that need visuals (hello, all of us artists), but I didn't save different steps out. I will, however, make a tutorial later since I've been asked about the hair by a lot of peeps.
The lowpoly and baking I still have to figure out. Right now I think I'll make a low poly blob for each one of the volumes, then in zbrush split up the high poly in the same way and clean it up a bit, then bake each volume seperately. Might be a bit time consuming, but I don't want it to look melted or blobby.
@future-fiction: thanks a bunch for the overpaint, even though it looks like I didn't look at it too much I tried to put a lot of the subtleties from your overpaint in. Yes I placed the eyes a bit closer, I softened/changed the shape of the jaw, added in that beautifull lip-corner... Very helpfull stuff man.
@leslievdb thanks again for the feedback earlier. You really helped me with the hair and how far I could push the detail on the clothing
@lotet I understand you feel that way, I see it too. I'll try to tweak it one last time!
Thanks so much for the kind words, it's really cool to see all of you following and rooting for me haha.
Update coming soon!
Shhh
But first; @jessicajanerule1 Thanks girl, this project sure is meant to be realtime (and animation ready) in the end, might go to Unreal or if I aim lower only Marmoset. In any case that's the goal I have for eyes atm, but we'll see where I go with it.
Since the whole making it realtime and taking it to an engine or at least practicing those skills is what I personally wanted to get out of this project, I will definitely keep you guys up to date with that when I arrive there.
For now, sculpt only. Finished sculpt, however.
This is the final and last high poly version. On to retopping, UVing and baking...
Note; the polypaint I will redo in Substance, this was just blocking out of colors...
Aaaand I couldn't resist but make her some decent underwear as well. I know it was a waste of time making this completely because you can't see it underneath her clothes but it might be an idea for some poses or renders later. And isn't it all about having fun? Well I sure had some fun with this.
I forgot this!!!
she looks even better without clothes...ermn, you know what I mean =P
shes turning out great.
I started out thinking about what parts I would have on separate UV's and what parts I wanted in one mesh for baking and skinning. Some carefully considered decisions had to made. I figured, the body, underwear, shoes and horns could go on one texture, then the dress and bows'n'ribbons, the hair, eyes and muffin could each have a texture as well.
I decimated a lower polycount mesh of all items and got it into max. For the retop I started either from a plane, or from the lowest SubDiv out of Zbrush.
As a guide to get me started I chose the upper curve of the folds and worked my way out. From there I focussed on the silhouette of the folds, and filled everything up towards the middle.
The hair got a similar approach; starting by following a strand of hair down, then changing direction to the width.
There's still a lot of smaller stuff that needs to be done, and quite some refining needed as well...
After that, it's unwrap time
Ps: I dream of topological curves at night. Weird right?
overall I thin k it looks great, I know you probably dont wanna touch the retop any longer, but I would suggest closing the hair spirals in a star or triangle shape rather then a quads to be honest.
also, this is really nitpicky and wont really effect anything major, but sometimes you have loops closing in triangels parallel to each other (like on the dress), but on different steps, if you know what I mean. its mostly aesthetics but I would make sure they align on the same polygon ring =P
whats the tris count btw?
It looks really good I'd say, the only thing, and this is nitpicky, but the neck seems very dense in poly count compared to some other areas but that's a pretty minor. Good work!
@Maxilator, aaah a little bit more you say. I already took some away there. Will adjust some areas anyway, so this can go on the list as well.
Thanks for the pointers guys.
I won't finish it anytime this week. Got some more urgent bussiness atm
its really nitpicky though, but it feels a bit more organized and clean I think.
It took some time since I redid some things such as the skirt and dress, and also had some RSI complaints so couldn't work as much as I wanted to...
But here it is!
60k All combined
21k Body (+underwear & shoes welded in the mesh)
10k Hair
5,5k Muffin
Off to UVing! Yeey
And now I can feel better with my tricount as well ^_^
new edge flow is looking waay better, well done!
Finally I'm posting an update again! A lot has happened since october: UV's, normals,... Lemme show you!
Before I got started with the UV's I planned ahead a bit. How would I organize my UV's, what parts belonged together according to material (cloth with cloth), what parts could be mirrored to save space and avoid unwrapping similar parts twice, ...
I divided per cloth material, hair and horns, skin (and teeth), eyes, and the muffin. So 5 UVs, merged into one.
I used a MultiSub material with 5 materials, and applied the MatID to the right polygons.
This is useful in the Unwrap modifier (you can view each MatID separately and switch between them without leaving the UV editor), but also useful in Substance Painter since the MatID will create the Texture Sets I want.
I deleted half of the parts that I wanted mirrored after UV's, but the head was an exception. I have half the head here in this image but after unwrapping the legs and arms, I applied the symmetry and only then unwrapped the face. So the faces' UV's are unique in the end.
After all that retopping and prepping I started my UV's.
I'm a Max user (however I love Maya's UV tools too) so I had to work with what I had... Usually this means putting down seams (from the peel menu) and pelting or peeling the patches one by one. The seams go on places where they are least visible, or where the surface has a big normal-transition (corners).
For the body this means seams on the inside of the leg, the side of the arm that's closest to the body, back of the head. The hands have a seam on the wrist and going over the fingers, splitting up the back of the hand and front of the hand. The finished UV's can be viewed if you scroll down.
Here's how most of my workflow goes, shown on the hair:
(Creating seams on the back of the strands of hair with the options in the peel menu)
(Dividing the hair in separate chunks, putting the seams in least visible places/ where the normals take a sharp turn)
(selecting one poly, expanding the selection to the seams)
(Using soft selection to relax some bits some more - preferably in UV space, here still in XY space)
(Using the Relax tool, switching the type of relaxing a lot since none are perfect. It can be - and was in this case - a copious thing to get it right, so some patience and trial and error are necessary)
After unwrapping all parts I packed them into the UV square and put a symmetry on the halved parts. With the symmetry I had to offset the "double" UV patches by 1 unit.
Now, on to the normals. I had some difficulty figuring this out... Mostly the method of exporting was unclear to me. I knew Painter was really great at batching normals, and I didn't feel like exporting all intersecting parts separately (which was the old way of doing things in Xnormal). With Painters' functionality all you need are good naming conventions, and it will cast its rays only onto the correct mesh. Here's what I came up with:
Max:
I had 2 meshes, of which one (the Body_Original) I used to apply fixes and changes. This mesh contained all parts attached into one EditPoly, and I exported it as FBX for use in Toolbag to visualize the normals on. This is also the mesh I will use later to start texturing.
From this mesh I selected each time the parts I had to export separately, detached these parts as clone and renamed them accordingly. These detached meshes I used to bake normals in Painter. They still had the material with different MatID's on them, so Painter would still have the correct TextureSets.
When I had made a fix or change on Body_Original I replaced that part again. This way the mesh I used for baking and the mesh I used for visualising both got the fixes.
The reason I split these two up is because I had to separate intersecting parts, and because if you have everything attached into one mesh there's no way to rename all parts. One mesh = one name. This boggled my mind a bit, but by grouping the separate parts(Baker it's called here) I could export one thing but with lots of names. (Thanks Sanna for pointing this out
Zbrush:
I renamed all subtools in the same manner as in Max. This is super important since Painter will look for matching names. Some focus was required here, haha!
I could have exported all of them into one FBX as I did in Max (the Baker group was exported as one FBX) but I didn't get it to work in Painter. I never figured out why not, but splitting the exports per MatID had positive baking results. I simply had all subtools hidden except for one group (the Cloth_ID parts, for example) and exported visible as FBX.
Substance Painter:
I imported the Baker FBX (all separate meshes but together in a group) and used these bake settings:
I could simply select the different FBXes out of Zbrush at High Definition Meshes, change the Match option to Mesh name and adjust the suffixes. In a single click I could bake all texture sets. Of course some areas would still have intersecting issues (think between the fingers, lips, ...) and I just baked again but with different distances. Then masked out the wanted areas in Photoshop and viewed everything in Marmoset.
Here's the result!!!
I also did a quick blockout of the colors and roughness in Substance. I colorpicked from the concept image to have a good start (except the shoes, which you can clearly tell :'D ) but a lot of tweaking and balancing will be necessary.
Now onto the real texturing fun. I've never done this kind of character/style before (not in realtime anyway), and I don't have much experience with realtime stuff, so I'm a bit uncertain of how to tackle this or what style I should go for. Any ideas on style are more than welcome!!!
And Happy New Year guys! Lets make 2017 great again!
Thanks guys!!!!!
So here's the progress on the shoes so far. I love polka dots and they fit well on the shoes, but I'm still figuring out wether it will fit the rest of the dress. I might change them again after doing the dress ^^.
They are usually a lot more shiney though, not sure if thats the look ur going for, but I think it could really make em pop.
However the dress has a lot of silky elements, which don't match very will with the fabric of the shoes. I might have to make them leathery afterall...
So many choices. This is a bad setup for my personality XD
Id definitely go for a patent leather look if I where you, and as you said yourself, it would break up from all the other cloth pretty well.
Little update, the skirt is OK imo, probably not gonna tweak it much more.
I'm a bit stuck with the ribbons/bows/dark green stitching on the dress. I tried something silky, something velvety, I don't know what I tried to do yesterday night but this is how I found it this mornin
This is the kind of thing I think would look cool in combination with the rough silk of the skirt and maybe the leather I'm thinking of for the shoes:
This is how the silk looked btw. I feel like it's too much of the same, and that I'd better try to break things up with something more matte. What do you think?
the sleeves are cool too, but I think the tiling is a bithigh, making the pattern look a bit small, noisy and hard to read.
anyways, would love to see some full body screenshots, also, are you looking at this only in Substance painter/designer? I really suggest setting up a marmoset scene with some nice lighting, AO, that kinda stuff.
You're also right on the sleeves, they aren't spot on yet....
Btw the pattern on the skirt comes from Zapolzun on DA. Must give credit!!!
Thanks for following, Alex...
Basically I've been putting together the materials in Painter from scratch. Come to think of it, designer could've come handy there...
So here's another update:
I feel like I finally got in a place where I can see the end in sight and the perceverance is paying off! Cool!
I made the jump to Marmoset and had to tweak a lot. Lesson learned - go Marmoset rightaway!
The mesh is fixed where it didn't align well, and I added a fuzz map to make the fabrics a bit fuzzier. Especially the velvet from the shoes needed it. It's a small difference though.
Now I've tried to make everything is physically accurate as possible, but the silky bits (a lot of the fabric types are silky) couldn't be done accurately. Since the idea behind PBR is to make the maps work well under every lighting condition I just tested the maps out with different environments and tried to author them to work with all of them. Is that.....acceptable?
as for the material stuff being acceptable, sure, why not? does it look good? In the end everything looks different in different engines anyway. as for certain specific materials like silk or metallic paint or something, unless you want to write your own specific shader for that, Its certainly good enough.
Those shoes do look fab though.
I started the hair texture but decided to do the skin texture first. This way it's easier to tweak the hair, since this is the part I have the least solid idea of how it should look. Skin is skin, not so much design doubts there. Solve the problems you know how to solve first, right?
I tried to focus on getting a quick result that's easily adjusted; so I worked mostly with fill layers and masks for both the color, roughness and height. I could quickly tweak ALL my values without having to redo a single brushstroke, or I could adjust the mask a bit in areas where it didn't work out. Having a lot of layering for color and roughness did the most work; I got 4 colors blended together and about 4 roughness procedurals blended together. I mainly used spots brushes to create the masks as these gave a good, slightly grungy result. Here's a part of my layerstructure with the colors and roughness maps I used:
As you can see there's also a base layer containing a base color and base roughness. If it turns out too glossy or something I can simly adjust this one slider instead of going through all other layers. I'm trying to work as non destructive/art director friendly as possible ^^.
Another note that I feel I need to make is about the make up. Depending on how you wanna interpret the concept I could go in different directions with it. As a former make up artist I hate to see whore-make up on every pretty 3D girl so I tried to tone it down to something natural, even though she's wearing a really heavy eyeliner and has deep red lips. I also tried to match the colors as much as possible to keep it simpler for the eyes to interpret. It's not a coloring book, but a carefully picked out color palette imo, which I should respect.
The hair, horns, eyebrows and lashes are not done yet - barely blockout!
More updates coming soon! Hope to finish this project asap
the overall skin tones look great! except for the hands. since the red paint/tattoo thing is already cutting of the hand from the arm, the pink tones in the hands is making it look a tad weird. I would either move the pink up on the arm more, so it fades above the red band, or below it, but now its creating a strange looking tangent.