[Finished] Medival Knight UE5

Lev_314

Hello guys!

It started like an warhammer empire knight armour exploration and end up learning and designing Maximilian style armour.

i decided to make a deep dive into UE5 and learn a lot of stuff.

For this project my main goals is:

Learn how to rig character and to be abele retarget it to UE5 character blueprint

Became a good frends to shaders inside Unreal

I woud like to start practicing hair design as it's the one of the thing what's shows the personality of a character

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3q6aGg

I did one post on artstation but i will continnue public WIPs here.

Sweet progress gifs

Here is some gray mat shots

Done with Baking and now I'm doing shaders and basic material blockout in Unreal. Next i'll make a hair to gather all meshes and do rig and pose to start working on look dev and final textures.

Actually remade all UV's and baked it all again to match same drection as i want to try make anisotropic shader for armour polish effect.

Sora123

Awesome breakup and detailing love it!

Lev_314

Hi guys! some updates

First pass of Unreal with initial materials and hair sketch. Damn, Unreal is complex, lots of settings to tweak. Also disappointing is the difference between Ray Trased GI and Lumen. Okay, a few hits on the wall always help not to take things too seriously.

Defined the textures a little more, but still at the initial stage of texturing and tweaking the armour shader. I learned that working with OpenColorIO color management is pretty close to Unreal viewport. Hopefully in the future I'll share some cool texturing breakdown

Here is the hair that I stopped working on for the time being to bring up the quality of the armour textures. high hopes for a baked AO to break up this solid piece and add colour variations. Also painting the scalp should help with the transition to the hair.

Lev_314

So here is the final), I'll make some breakdowns later after the rest. More info, renders and turntable here https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8bmJZx

HarlequinWerewolf

She came out awesome! Did you get a baked AO working on the hair? I had issues with AO not working in UE 5.0

Lev_314

Thank you! Yes i did it, here is AO shader part, you might tweak Texcoord parameter, i worked in blender, so it's 2 in my case

Lev_314

Hey guys i wrote a big breakdown on Game Artist if you interested in armour creation and Unreal Engine, please check it out.
https://gamesartist.co.uk/knight/

zetheros

lol I was wondering why "hmm this guy works exactly like I do" amazing work, keep it up!

Lev_314

zetheros said:

lol I was wondering why "hmm this guy works exactly like I do" amazing work, keep it up!

I represent your feelings), sometimes two people on different ends of the earth have the same brilliant ideas, but not in this case XD. I want to thank you personally, the staff that you do is AMAZING, I learned a lot from you.

zetheros

Dude, I'm just super glad there's been recent efforts to improve the quality of armour in video games. It really is a huge deal, having good armour in games, and it's genuinely cathartic seeing other people besides me making this stuff.

Comparatively, we have insanely skilled artists making 1:1 replicas of guns. We have 3D scan data for human faces that we utilize in Zbrush, and apparently Battlefield goes so far as to have capillary maps for blood veins! Yet, armour and weapons; items that drop in like 75% of all video games and that have a lot of nuance and complexity are oddly treated as an afterthought. Literal emperors, kings and lords used to order armour from our predecessors. This is important work, so I'm super happy to see this!

Lev_314

Damn you're right, I've never thought so deeply. Your comparison illustrates what we have today pretty well. I hope soon in games we will get more detailed, beautiful and functional armor. Since you already said there is no project on the market that could set a high bar for quality, there is no incident. I don't even know which of the modern AAA studios can do this. I have high hopes for Unreal and CD Projekt Red with their upcoming Witcher, as they have high artistic taste and desire to jump above their heads despite limited resources. Or we will wait until some enthusiasts do something similar. Italian Renaissance in 3D?

Archaon

Still confused about armor. Trying to recreate, but stuck on part about extract. What exacly you extract?

Lev_314

Archaon said:

Still confused about armor. Trying to recreate, but stuck on part about extract. What exacly you extract?

i extracted whole thing to add the thickness, when group loops