[WIP] Jedi Realtime Character

HarlequinWerewolf

Current:


Alright, starting this thread to keep me somewhat accountable for this project. I was playing Fallen Order fairly recently and really got back in to Star Wars - watched Andor and the original triology - so I want to make my own Jedi character.

I'm going to make a Mirialan character so green skin and tattoos - figured I could use that to brighten up my portfolio. Aiming for realism with final renders in UE5. I'm trying to decide whether to use the meta human pipeline or not as I had originally wanted to use the third person blueprint and pull in animations from Mixamo so she could wave a cool lightsaber around!

This started as some concept doodles before settling on her hiding on a forest planet and working as a lumberjack type:





Before downloading a scanned head from 3D.Sk that I cleaned up. I really wanted to practice scan cleanup and figured this was a pretty good opportunity. I managed to pull some low frequency detail from the scan but the high frequency was hand sculpted.



I've also set up a base body and will get round to blocking in some clothes soon. 



But I think next I want to make some hair cards so I made a volume in ZBrush with Dylan Ekren's hair brushes. I think this is a little too big but we'll see how I go once I start.



In the meantime I dumped everything into Marmoset with some clean head topology to check how the polypaint looked with a super basic roughness map. 

Vertrucio

Interesting seeing the scan cleanup during this process. Keeping an eye on this. 

HarlequinWerewolf

Vertrucio said:

Interesting seeing the scan cleanup during this process. Keeping an eye on this. 

Appreciate it! The scan clean up was definitely a learning curve so I'm glad I did it.

I haven't done much on this lately as I became distracted by the Steam Summer Sale - and visiting family. But I've created the hair caps for the head (Hair, Eyebrows and Eyelashes) in XGen and baked it all down on to planes. Everything is on it's own scalp geometry so I should be able to blendshape things out if I make changes to the underlying structure.


For the eyelashes I baked upper and lower on to curved planes and then added some additional geometry to add depth and fill in some gaps.


Pretty happy with how everything has come together for these caps and I have all the files ready to go if I need to make any adjustments. 


Up next is trying out FibreShop for hair card textures! I'm excited to see how easy it will be to iterate with this software rather than waiting for xgen bakes. 

HarlequinWerewolf

Quick update to say that I have spent a few hours messing with Fibershop. One minute I love it and it does what I need it to do, the next it's drawing things 2 miles away from where I want it! Anyway, I managed to get some textures ready so will setup my Maya scene to place the cards and see how it goes. I do, however, like the idea of being able to easily iterate on these textures.

HarlequinWerewolf

Blocked in some hair cards this weekend. Got my base layer and initial clumps in to get the flow and volume in place. Still gotta work in the transitional cards and get some nice layering going but it's a decent start



This is in Marmoset 3 but I do plan on bringing everything in to Unreal eventually, I just like using Marmoset to check how the render is looking

HarlequinWerewolf

Quick post mostly for myself to come back to. I haven't done a heck of a lot in the last week. Layered in some more sparse hair for a chunk of the long hair but I wanted to get everything in to Unreal and test out some materials. On the recommendation of a friend, I pulled the eyes from the Digital Humans project and used those materials as Epic's own materials are pretty darn solid. But I had an issue where the left eye (which was mirrored) was having issues with the eye refraction. 

It's almost as if the left eye is completely reversed in the way it's rendering. So I tried freezing transforms, deleting history, all the usual suspects but the issue was in the UVs. I didn't realise that the eyes had several UV sets and in UVmap_0 was the base eye UV layout. So I flipped the V channel and boom, fixed. So I'm putting this here in case I come across the issue again and forget what I did the first time! 



Anyway, I've pulled what I have so far into Unreal and setup the hair material in the same way I did for this hair asset. This is also just the raw textures from Fibershop. I usually like to edit the albedo or even just make a new one with AO, height, root and ID but we'll see where I go with this one. 

So, still loads to do in regards to hair and face but it's nice to see everything in engine

pxgeek

Looking neat!

Curious about the hair cards: Are they placed by xgen too?

(as a max user, I'm envious that it doesn't have a built in hair and groom solution)

HarlequinWerewolf

pxgeek said:

Looking neat!

Curious about the hair cards: Are they placed by xgen too?

(as a max user, I'm envious that it doesn't have a built in hair and groom solution)

Thanks! The cards are all hand placed using GS Curves for Maya, sorry, no max version but I believe max has a modifier that works in a similar way where you draw a curve and attach a plane that you can use as a hair card. That's essentially what GS Curves does but with lots of nice options to increase the tri count or CV points on the curve as well as binding multiple cards to one curve

I've seen assets using xgen to place cards in the past and they always need loads of manual work to make them look good so I'm firmly of the opinion that you should just hand place the majority of the cards. There are exceptions of course, like if you want to block in shaved hair stubble, xgen is super useful there.

pxgeek

Yeah, almost every demo/tutorial/gdc talk i've come across...it's all done manually by hand

Max has a similar plugin to GS Curves, but not as robust. I'll have to mess around with maya eventually (or blender)

HarlequinWerewolf

Little update cos I've been playing about with hair colours in Unreal and I really like the different versions I can get with 1 texture set. The black was the initial colour but I really like the purple/pink


Also tweaked the eyes bit and I think they're reading better now.


Anyway, I will pop open ZBrush at some point soon to block in the clothing