The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Sketchbook: stray
polygon
Hello there! Stray here.
I'm interested in creating stylized characters and I'd like to focus on actually finishing them and getting them into game-ready state. Thought maybe starting a sketchbook here will help me focus on the last part.
As a hobbyist that never worked on a real practical project, my learning has left me with quite a few random holes in education and general understanding.
So any thoughts, critiques, suggestions and reality checks are always welcome!
I'm interested in creating stylized characters and I'd like to focus on actually finishing them and getting them into game-ready state. Thought maybe starting a sketchbook here will help me focus on the last part.
As a hobbyist that never worked on a real practical project, my learning has left me with quite a few random holes in education and general understanding.
So any thoughts, critiques, suggestions and reality checks are always welcome!
Replies
It doesn't really help that I couldn't quite pinpoint what style I'm going for, so I was exploring options and methods.
The condition I can think of: the method should be able to support big masses of wavy hair, because... well, I guess, because that's my style?
Also, fuzzy/fluffy edges would be nice.
I've started with stating the problem as going for "complex silhouette, simple shading", so here's what I've ended up with:
The obvious idea is to simplify the shading of a hair with custom normals. But normal data transfer is hard to setup for complex hairstyles and it doesn't always provide robust results at various view points/deformations.
In my case, I attempt to render a curve-driven hair clamp (made of geo or haircards) as a simple curved tube.
It's an approximation, where the point's position vector relative to master-curve and an incoming camera vector are used to calculate normal N of an imaginary surface that incoming vector passes.
The calculation is made in shader, the only data that needs to be baked into mesh is "position vector". It can be transferred into Tangent Space (with Normal and Curve Tangent as basis) and stored as Vertex Color. Provided that the mesh is unwrapped in a certain way.
Doing it this way should allow for the mesh to be able to be deformed and animated without breaking the effect.
It looks like this:
Here's a test. Light color to better see the effect, 22.5k tris, 1k opacity map + SSS to soften the shadows.
Before:
After:
I've made a test export to UE4 and replicated (most of) the nodes and judging by the World Normals visualization it works as expected, buuut... so far it looks way worse than Blender's EEVEE above. Too simple. Mostly I think it's the difference in shadows/AO, but I'm not sure how to address that.
I've stripped the mesh of the most of the "muscle-shaping" loops - they seemed like a good idea at first, but the stars are always getting in the way of sculpting. Well, the hands are an exception.
And in an attempt to move a star from the side of cheekbone to a flatter area, I got carried away...
Anyway, I've made a quick (but slow) Geonodes modifier to fill an unwrapped mesh with tiled geometry... yay. I don't want to use Boolean to remove extra geometry (it will be VERY slow), so the edges are a bit broken. So they are going to be hidden under some other geo.