[FINISHED] Shaman stylized character creation to learn some [UE4]
greentooth
The result:
Original post:
Wazzup people.
I am currently in the process of finishing the Highpoly for this Shaman dude based on the art by Yasen Stoilov (original concept here)
After taking part in my first GamesJam I see the need to broaden my skiilset beyond Zbrush and Substance painer.
So here is the plan: I wanna spend less time on polishing this guy and instead learn some new skills like:
Minimum:
Currently I have to create the stuff and do some minor polish. Good luck to me, I guess.
Cheers.
Original post:
Wazzup people.
I am currently in the process of finishing the Highpoly for this Shaman dude based on the art by Yasen Stoilov (original concept here)
After taking part in my first GamesJam I see the need to broaden my skiilset beyond Zbrush and Substance painer.
So here is the plan: I wanna spend less time on polishing this guy and instead learn some new skills like:
Minimum:
- Rigging and skinning in maya using built-in autorig system
- Learning the basics of animation in maya to create a simple Idle animation
- Importing and setting up the character in UE4
- learning how physics works in UE4 and uisng it to make some parts of the character be affected by it (mainly leaves on the head and the leather skirt)
- Creating presentation with one simple idle animation that can be used as a GIF like this one
- Learning at least something about animation trees in UE4
- Making a very basic animation tree or however it is actually called in UE4
- Modify Mixamo animations until they fit my purpose. I want this guy to walk, stand and do some primitive casting when I press LMB
- Maybe learning some basic FX stuff like making his stuff glow or something
- Learn something about sockets in UE4 so I can make the staff swappable and maybe do another version of the staff to play with that.
Currently I have to create the stuff and do some minor polish. Good luck to me, I guess.
Cheers.
Replies
Thanks, Gannon! (Feels kinda weird talking to ya after defeating you in BOTW)
Lets say I've done the HP for the staff
All that is left to do for highpoly is some minor polish (just an evening or two, I promise) and start retopoing. Not the funnest part, but the sooner I'll get to it. the sooner I'll be done with it
Cheers!
But for what it is worth, here's the lowpoly:
I am not going to make the guy the most detailest asset in the world, but making him one 2k sheet was also a bit too much for me, so I separated him into 5 textures - head, body, his leather parts, his wooden armor and the staff. This way I can optimize the texture sizes a bit and play into Idea that he might have different outfits as game characters tend to do. I definitely am planning to play with making different staves, like, put some leather stipes on highpoly, rebake it, and call it "staff+1" or something.
I was really not paying attention to polycount on this guy, but for what it's worth it is 35k of triangles. I am sure there is a lot that can be done to bring the polycount down, but I was in a hurry and it still took a long ass time, so I won't let perfectionism take the best of me here.
I have been paying attention to the topology flow, but I am sure have messed up. if anyone there pays attention, please me a hint If I have done something obviously wrong.
I have aimed this project at learning something about skinning, animation and Unreal, so I'll restrain myself from delving into texturing for the time being and go do some learning about skinning, adding physics in UE4 and stuff like that.
I am also going on vacation for two weeks, so the next post will probably be in another month. I'll try to post something in a next couple of days, but no promises. So far the plans are to watch some basic course on skinning in maya, probably not the fastest thing, to go through, but we'll see.
I know that topology and bakes are not the most captivating of subjects, so here is a picture if my cat as a compensation. Isn't she cute?
Still a bit dizzy in terms of willingness to study instead of watching anime and gaming.
I've completed Hyper Light Drifter two times (NG and NG+) during this time and want to do boss rush, guys, its a problem
But at least I have managed to watch two courses about HumanIK since I do not want to create complete rig from the ground up. Seems to be a great system for the base humanoids but there seems to be hard to add any addiional bones.But that is a problem I will deal a bit later with.
I've done a test skinning of base body to the base bones to see how it looks.
Here are some gifs from mixamo:
As the next step I'll watch some more tutorials on basics of rigging and skinning, add the rest of the bones and try to skin the guy to the best of by abilities. If later I realise I have messed something up, I'll just redo it again. That is the process of learing, is it not))
PS: I gotta say, painting weights in Maya is a bit more confusing than I thought. Maybe thats just my experience with skinning using 3dMax a while back, but skinning in maya feels rigid, wich is weird since from what I understand Maya is the program of choice for riggers and to lesser extent the animators, but again, that might just be me being used to Max. I'll watch some more tutorials and do some more skinning and maybe it will dawn on me.
PPS: Keeeping this thread is really helpful at least for structuring my own thoughts and figuring out what to do next. Now all I have got to do is keep it up and also start visinig other threads. Yeah, that'll be nice.
I have attached the armor to the body to see how it looks together in motion, because it was easy and didn't require any additional bones.
Found some clipping that is easily fixable, just a couple of simple mesh tweaks.
The reason I am bringing this little thing up is because seeing my 3d model in motion really clears up the head in terms of modelling: Animation brings up the things I have glossed over or plainly was not thinking about during modelling. The now obvious thing that the guy should bend his leg and there gonna be clipping issues just didn't occur to me. I guess the clipping is not that obvious and could totally be ignored if that guy is supposed to be just a mob in a mobile game or something, but it is not the point.
The point is that artists in he industry become more and more specialised and sometimes don't even have the opportunity to talk to someone down the pipeline, but we should all still keep the entire process in mind while doing our part of the job, and the best way to do it is to do the whole pipline by yourself. At least to some extent.
Okay, so I have done a rough skinning of the shaman guy with all the outfit this time. Base skinning tools for this time, cause I have to have a point of comparison, but I definitely keep NGTools in mind (Thanks again, @CheeseOnToast)
Still needs refinement, but for now that is enough to send him to Unreal with a couple of placeholder animations from mixamo (idle. walk, run, jump) to learn the basics of the Unreal side of this project.
I really am looking forward to making his leather and leaves react to physics!
but for now lets stick to the basics: I want to see his leather flap and add a socket for the staff.
After that I think I can work on proper idle with staff, and do some texturing, I guess
Love yall!
I have got itno animDynamics a bit. That stuff rocks!
A bit unintuitive, but cheap, since it does not actually use physics or something like that.
anyway, it gabe me the exact result I wanted for the bottles, everythind else still needs some tweaking, but that is neverending process. Oh, and I reacts to the wind in the level just like that! really cool thing with a lot of settings that I have no idea what for))
I guess I'll go and do some texturing now, coupled with creating appropriate Idle pose with the staff. I beilieve I can do that. just some more tutorials to watch)))
BTW while I was figuring what to use, I have dabbled with actual phisics assets, so I can at least create some stuff on the chain that you can push around.
not much free time recently, but I have assemled a first procedural texural pass on this guy. Planning to go over later and repaint at least some of it, but for now it will do.
Now I'll try to find time and do the Idle pose as well as maybe some glowing fx on his eyes and beltstone.
have to assemble some sort of base for final scene as well.
Hey @HarlequinWerewolf ! I am quite new to this stuff myself) For now the best first option in unreal seems to be AnymDynamics. I have picked up basics in this stream:
and then just toyed with it. I can not say I have mastered the tool in any way, and I still have to go through all the setup again to fine tune the results)
But I will be glad to help if you want to ask something specific, so we learn together ^_^
And I also have to find a way to produce bette looking GIFs, cause this is sort of terrible)))
https://www.artstation.com/slipgatecentral/blog/NEpB/artstation-and-your-gifs
To get higher quality GIF that also loops correctly I have to come up with some optimization.
Ideas so far: Optimize the background, remove fancy gradient in favor of basic gray, make the base one solid green color, make the resulting image smaller. That considering the GIF size.
To at least lessen the issue of looping, I think I will increase the amplitude on actual animation and lower the power of wind.
So there is probably gonna be two setups -
*One for the static image and the video - with the fancy background and base and stuff and some FX like fireflies or sparkles
*One simpler one - for the GIF -with some or all of the optimization Ideas mentioned above.
I think that is It regarding the final Image. Now I am going to actually learn some animation stuff and do some hand painting for the textures.
And I need to gather one good reference for the "Idle with stuff" animation
Cheers!
The animatin got some rework as well, see the GIF
I have toyed with a couple of things, mainly have started painting over some of the textures, mainly the staff and the mask, even though the mask still needs more lovetyed with Idle animation a bit. I have also created the base, finally! With grass that is affected by wind no less! It still needs some love (the colors will definetely be tweaked), but I am actually proud of myself for once, because I have learned a lot!
The useful thing I have learned here is how to upload custom collision to UE4 - create the colliision mesh in the same scene as the mesh and name it "UCX_mesh_name" and export them both in a single fbx. A very simple solution, although not the obvious one. I have spend a decent amount of time, trying to figure out how to add collision as a separate mesh, but found no such option.
I like how the grass turned out. I have projected the normals from the base onto the grass mesh, and it almost seamlessly merged with it!
I have also painted some vertex colors to use later to controll what the wind affects
I have watched one tutorial to make the grass act as if affected by the wind (thank the great Progress for the internet). "As if" because the wind node is marked as mobile and probably does just basic noise displacement without taking actual wind in the scene into account, which is fine by me. At least for now.
The movement is subtle, but I do not want to attract attention to it anyway. If I have time, in the future I want to figure out how to offset some of the grass movement, so it doesn't all move in unison. TBH right now it feels almost alien and tentacle-like.
I think I'll also try to use vertex color to darken the base and maybe add some other visual variety.
As I have said, the colors will still be tweaked in the future, but for now it will do.
In other news I think I am done with staff diffuse. Of course it is not the best texture ever, but I still make myself move forward without getting stuck on making everything perfect. This is a learning project more than anything else.
Overall progress so far:
http://youtu.be/k1qXDmN3HNo
Now I need to finish texturing the rest of the guy, and then set up the materials a bit better, because right now everything seems to be reflecting incorrectly. I want the leaves to be shiny!
After that it is almost done. But not really, cause I will have to look into some post effects as well as play around with lighting, although honestly I like how it looks already. Oh, and I think I should add some details to the background texture. Just to make it more graphic.
That's it for now folks. Love ya
In short, I have been working on the background. Created the texture for the background mesh, added some detail maps to it. To fill the scene a bit more and create a sense of depth,I have created simple silhouettes of grass and trees.
The thing I am most proud of is material with fake water effects around the grass. It is not very noticeable, but it shouldn't be. Man, playing around with materials in UE4 is pure fun!
Oh, and also particles, to imitate fireflies, because why not))
I created this particular effect to create some transition between the grass and background mesh, and also to pronounce the illusion of the swamp.
Geo is a simple mesh ribbon mapped in a straight line around ground isles.
The effect is mostly done using a simple texture pack: Red channel would determine the general area where the effect would happen, green to create some outwards going rings, blue contained simple Photoshop clouds that I would use to warp the UVs and alpha contained the gradient to hide the effect on the outer portion of the used geometry
Than I plugged those into material editor and start playing
And the result looks like this:
Background
Most of it is quite standard - I have created the 1k texture for the background that looked blurry, so I added some detail map on top
and than I have added some simple planes with grass and trees silhouettes create sense of depth and fill in background a bit.
Something like that)
It is not Ideal but it was definitely worth it! Thanks to the great feedback of the awesome @Svartberg, I was able to learn a bit about hand painting textures in Photoshop and 3d Coat. There is definitely a lot more to learn, but at least I've got the grasp on the tools and techniques and was able to add some additional details.
The Idea to change the yes is Svartberg's as well but I love it! it will not be noticebla in static shots, but in the animation Shamans eyes flicker and with added depth they have more visual interest.
Here is the final result
In the beginning of the project I have created some goals for myself. Lets see How I managed.
Minimum:
- ✔ Rigging and skinning in maya using built-in autorig system - Done! Got myself acquainted with HumanIK in Maya. I am not sure about the flexibility of this particular tool, I hand troubles setting Up the Staff rig and there are some keying issues, but that tool should be more than enough for most basic stuff, I feel, and I'll try to use it again and understand it more.
- ✔ Learning the basics of animation in maya to create a simple Idle animation - Done! Honestly, I have done the bare minimum, because animation does not seem interesting to me, but still I think I should invest more time into it to be able to create at least basic stuff.
- ✔ Importing and setting up the character in UE4 - Done! Nuff said here. Even learned how to add vertex color and set up mip levels and some other stuff
- ✔ learning how physics works in UE4 and using it to make some parts of the character be affected by it (mainly leaves on the head and the leather skirt) - Done! In my case the ideal solution turned out to be anymDynamics, but again, I have barely scratched the surface of all the dynamic stuff you can do with your mesh in Unreal
- ✔Creating presentation with one simple idle animation that can be used as a GIF like this one - Done! Although due to Gif limitations and Artstation's size cap for images, the Gif sort of went into background and I have spent most of the time working on a video, learning sequencer and adding stuff like glowing particles and pulsating eyes and wind, that could not be easily looped, but could be captured in a video without any problems. I have even gave my YouTube channel some use)
Ideal:- ✔ Learning at least something about animation trees in UE4 - Done! But indeed, something it is - I have created the simplest solution to make the guy run and jump, but that was hacky at best and anim blueprints is one thing I feel I have to invest loads more time to understand it and I do not want to. But I have to.
- ✔ Making a very basic animation tree or however it is actually called in UE4 - Done! But again - see previous entry.
- X Modify Mixamo animations until they fit my purpose. I want this guy to walk, stand and do some primitive casting when I press LMB - Nope! This one clearly failed. Even though I have used Mixamo animations for walking and jumping, I have not modified them at all and there is no signs of him casting anything)
- ✔ Maybe learning some basic FX stuff like making his stuff glow or something - Done! Lets call this done but that is more due to the vagueness of the description. I have indeed learned some basic particle parameters to create me some bugs and I have played a lot with material effects to create the water rings, so I guess it is a win.
- ✔Learn something about sockets in UE4 so I can make the staff swappable and maybe do another version of the staff to play with that.- Done! I have indeed leaned the basics of sockets in unreal, and theoretically I can swap his stuff, but I have not done that, so it remains to be seen how successful it will be. I have also learned that things that are crucial to animations and need some special rigging should not be placed in sockets and should have their own bones and stuff. I could still swap them, but this time I will be sure they will behave correctly.
So here It is folks! All in all, this is a successful project and the funnest one I have been working on.I will rename the theme as [FINISHED] but there still may be some posts because I want to test out a couple of things and maybe play with animations some more.
I hope at least someone have learned something along with me
Good luck everyone and have a great year!
Thanks for the kind words)