[FINISHED] Disney Hades stylized character in UE4
greentooth
Finished project:
Some more images: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRxnn5
Original post:
Hey everyone!
I am planning on learning some stylized suff in Unreal, namely toon shading and procedural fire via shader.
I have always wanted to create a character with flaming head, so eventually one guy suggested Hades as a character and I loved the Idea.
I even have the perfect emotion reference by Guy Dailey
So here is the battle plan - do the stylized model using regular stuff - Zbrush, Maya, and Substance. Import Hades into unreal and have fun shading.
The exact fun planned:
And here is the current progress. I have mostly finished the highpoly, although some more polishing is quite possible.
So now I am planning to make the lowpoly. As the goal of the project is not game ready model in the purest sense expect some dirty topology))
Some more images: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRxnn5
Original post:
Hey everyone!
I am planning on learning some stylized suff in Unreal, namely toon shading and procedural fire via shader.
I have always wanted to create a character with flaming head, so eventually one guy suggested Hades as a character and I loved the Idea.
I even have the perfect emotion reference by Guy Dailey
So here is the battle plan - do the stylized model using regular stuff - Zbrush, Maya, and Substance. Import Hades into unreal and have fun shading.
The exact fun planned:
- Procedural fire on the head - the main star of the show, the reason for the entire project. The idea is stolen wholesale from this talk about VFX in "Rime". I have already made some small flaming skull project to test the method and it works. Here is the GIF
- Toon shading for the character in general - I have tested it somewhat on the skull as well, but there are still some unknowns, like outline of specific color for different parts of the character
- Stylized smoke at the bottom of the toga - probably the most unknown part for me right now. the backup plan is to either create some general smoke an the bottom, darken the lower part of the final image or create the lowpoly meshes for the tendrils. the combination of all the options is also possible.
And here is the current progress. I have mostly finished the highpoly, although some more polishing is quite possible.
So now I am planning to make the lowpoly. As the goal of the project is not game ready model in the purest sense expect some dirty topology))
Replies
I have retopoed the guy, partially using zremesher, partially doing some manual stuff. It is not pretty but it gets the job done.
It is not even properly packed in terms of UV, because first I had to make sure about one thing...
The thing I absolutely had to make sure works is of course the hair. My plan was to make a procedural stylized fire texture that will scroll on the mesh of the hair and I was anything but sure, after all, all that FX stuff is quite new to me.
So I made hair mesh into separate material with its own texture sheet and sent it into UE4 as soon an Lowpoly were done,
Just a couple of evenings and it works baby!
There is still stuff to polish and stuff to figure out of course (the seam on the back of the head is quite ugly) but it definitely works!
Here are a couple of screenshots
I am sure it can be done more effectively, so if you know how, just give me a hint, I'll appreciate it!
The LP is assembled, not much to say here)
To be more coherent though. I have skimmed over a bunch of tutorials on how to do the outline in Unreal and it seems that the most common and cost-efficient one is via post process. than brings some problems, mainly there is no immediate way to control the color of the specific material or mesh, I have some ideas how to fix that, but we'll see if that works. At the very least I'll use a color that works the best.
Speaking of tutorials, I would like to Highlight these two:
- First, the stream of epic themselves on the topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQw1CL0xYBEIt sets the bases quite nice but uses the crude solution
- And second is a very good and thoughtful look over the basic approach, the problems and possible solutions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1uR6sXAvCIThe second video gets a lot of useful info out of Unreal's own learning project called "stylized rendering" that can be found at the bottom of the launcher's "Learn" tab. I have added it to my projects and am planning to try to learn something myself, but I am afraid I wont get much out of it due to lack of experience.
Anyway, I Have created some basic lines and applying them have shown that I have to do some tweaking to the model - some of the things show up too much, while others do not show enough. Plus there are some artifacts caused by gradients in my normal map.
Side note - Today I have learned about custom depth buffer in Unreal! That is additional depth pass used for creating outlines and other technical stuff. It is also quite useful to mask out objects to keep them out of post effect, or make them the only recipients of the effect.
In other news I have played a bit with fire, smoothing the gradient from inner fire outwards, I have also used the root mask as a third color mask to add some more color variation. still much tweaking to do but it looks much nicer IMO.
Seems to be all for now, I'll go polish and rebake the mesh, look into those artifacts and see if I can bring color to the lines.
First off, I have updated the outline shader to check the scene color underneath to see if it is below or above certain threshold. the light color gets darker lines, and the dark color gets bright lines. It is not yet what I wanted and also uses IF calculation, which is expensive as I understand, but close enough.
One interesting moment. I had to put the threshold value really really high (or low, depends on your perspective) this is because the post effect takes place before the tonemapping, while all the calculations are linear or something like that.
I have also took one of my cloud textures, tiled it a bunch and multiplied on top of the line mask to get less procedural look
The next thing I that I have finally tried out some tutorials on toon shading, and that looks super baaad! Like, this bad:
I understand that you can get really good looking toon shading, but that seems beyond me at this point, so for this project I am dropping that. Not only I am not gaining much out of it, I am also loosing out on Unreal's beautiful lighting system. So toon shading - get out of the equasion!
I have also reworked the fire a bunch.
made the textures more stylized and sharp, played around with settings a lot, changed the shape of the geo to always have the curve in it. I may try to get the same effect using bones later, but for now it works just fine, I have also smoothed out the mesh to get better deforms. I think in actual production I would have to find better solution than quadruplication of the fire mesh, but that is a personal\learning project - I wanna see pretty stuff! My goal with those hair is to make them look god in static shot as well as in animation. Right now I feel that goal is fulfilled, although I might do some tweaking later
Although I have denied myself the toon shader, I still wanted to play around with my newfound post processing knowledge. I have looked at awesome "Klaus" animation for reference, since I wanted a stylized but shaded look now and noticed that they have 1) a richly detailed materials and 2) those tiny dot imperfections where the shadow begins
I took blie channel of the world normal pass for the parts of the mesh that look away from the camera, basically the Fresnel effect to get the dots on the edges of the mesh plus grayscale version of the scene color to get the dots on the dark parts, mostly in shadows, since I do not know yet how to work with shadows in post process. the downside is that all the dark clothing pieces get constant dots, but it is really not noticeable due do general darkness of the area
Despite how mask is looking, the actual effect is actually quite subtle
The dots texture that I liked the most creates more of a comic book look than a cartoon, but I am fine with that.
Okay, now that I am somewhat pleased with the effects, it is time to do some texturing work.
I tried not to over-detail the model, just added some gradients, patterns, defined the roughness values and added emissive to the eyes, so that they are always bright yellow. suits the cartoon look just right
I have also added detail normal and diffuse nodes to the shader, but that is quite basic stuff.
I believe that is it for now. Her id the image of the combined result so far: better textures, better fire, outlines, dots
2. After colored outlines were done I have moved into rigging, and this stage proved that you should never skip over the proper lowpoly if you are planning o skin and rig the character))
I have tried "Advanced skeleton" this time as in had been recommended to me by a colleague. And I've got to say, this thing is waaaay better than HumanIK in terms of flexibility and usability! A couple of simple tutorials and I was able to do the same stuff as the last time, but way more fluidly. Check it out, it is free.
3. Skinning. I should point out though, that the fact that Hades is mostly amorphous clothing proved quite a challenge. I should avoid those for a foreseeable future. there were a bunch of mistakes I made that I should avoid in the future. For example, the trim had been done as a geo on top of the toga geo, but did not match its topology - that proved quite a problem as soon as I started moving the hands around. I had actually not solved this issue, just made sure the thing works within intended bounds. the same issue sort of shows up at all the layered clothing. the mismatch in topology slows down the skinning process considerably.
Speaking of slow, Maya's built-in skinning tools are very imprecise and sometimes quite cumbersome, so I had to find some tools to speed things up. The best thing I have found so far is the tool simply called "skinning tools". Also free) It is a panel with lots of tools and even marking menus, that helped me immensely!
anyway no matter how crude, but the rig is more or less done.
In other news I have tweaked up the fire again, made the displacement part less chaotic and more fluid.
Overall progress
I don't like hands right now, so I think I'll give him a martini glass he's been holding in the moment of his triumph
Looks simple enough to do - basic shapes and I will learn how to create a basic glass material at the same time)
After that the only thing left will be his tendrils of darkness at the bottom and animation.
there is still work to be done but I am happy!
But after playing around I have figured out that using the node "DitherTemporalAA" with "random" input set to zero gives much smoother result. The final thing that made this thing pop for me was tweaking the "Opacity Mask Clip Value". Before dithering it just controlled the cutout value, but as soon as dithering had been introduced, it started to control the general opacity as well. As soon as you cross the .5 threshold, all the material becomes somewhat transparent, even the parts that are not supposed to. that effect is especially apparent on value of 1.
but if you set the value juuuuust above the .5, say. .51, the material becomes just transparent enough to work as I want it to.
The only issue is that the head becomes somewhat visible under fire, but that got fixed by adding some lower fire color into the head texture.
Background - I did not what to put there, but I did not want to leave it just a solid color, so after some thought I have settled on usitng his shoulder skull as a pepeated symbol as well as some graphical shapes frown together in designer.
Current progress video
Also, I have decided to drop the lower part effect - I have been on this project longer than expected and I get a bit tired of it. So I am cutting some corners here, I think I'll find where to do something like than in the future.
I got pretty tired of this project, honestly, but after a couple of talks with friends who practically demanded for this guy to be animated, I decided to give it one evening, after all, the rig and skinning is already in place and took some time to do, might as well use it.
Animation is the hardest thing for me, personally, since it is so different from the modelling. I think I should do some crash course on that subject to get into that properly.
But anyway, in one evening I had somewhat decent idle anim, at least for my standards, that even still looked decent to me the next moring. So here it is))
In other news, I am wrapping this guy up. getting ready for posting on Artstation and stuff. Let me know if you want a breakdown of fire shader or post-process shader. I am proud with the result, but I would hate to take anyone's time without any interest in the subject)
Cheers
I will do a more thorough review later, for now here are the images:
check it out, give it a like if you feel like it)))
as some people asked for this, I have made a small breakdown of the fire shader, using Artstation's videoclip feature.
Check it out here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v1NW4d
It seems to be popular at the moment)
Hades quick review
Lets see how it went regarding the initial goals:✔Procedural fire on the head -Done! definitely the main point of the piece, a lot of people mentioned the fire specifically when talking about the piece. Also the breakdown went quite popular. I honestly did not expect that - I guess I'll do more breakdowns in the future if the subject will be interesting)
X Toon shading for the character in general - that subject proved to be something that needs more work and consideration than I initially thought - the mesh, material and shader all have to work together well, otherwise the result is going to look ugly. I definitely have to look deeper into that in the future
✔ Colored outline - Done! And I have discovered stencils in the process! a very useful thing to keep in mind for the future.
X Stylized smoke at the bottom of the toga - I just figured out that was not a best application of time for this particular project. Although I would definitely like to learn how to do smoke, lets learn one Effect at a time, shall we)
As an additional negative I would like to mention bad planning stage in regards to topology and especially rigging - that proved to be a lot more pain than it should have. I skipped the proper retopo stage and as a result I had to tweak a lot of geo later, and general movement of the Hades turned out to be quite limited. Definitely more careful preparation next time. Also, next time it is going to be someone more conventional - all that cloth rigging is quite hard for someone as inexperienced as myself)
In general that was a lot of fun! I loved creating the emotion on the face and playing around with material editor. I have never touched a post effect before, so that's good too! And I like that it did not take half a year to finish!
So, overall I am happy with the results) See ya in the next thread)