I understand, my knowledge of Bloodborne is lacking at best. In any case this is awesome, the wrapping will not change it. Looking forward to see more.
Thanks guys! Been texturing the past 2 weeks. still have a lot of tweaking to do, as well as the mace textures. Also need to design some sort of base for her to stand on in the final pose.
Dude, incredible work so far, really digging it and i am intrigued by the result of your hair so far - would love to see a breakdown /process when your character is done!
Pav3d, outstanding work man, nailing that victorian Bloodborne look. Are the eyebrow all baked down to the face/or you're using cards for that/or both?
Thanks everyone! adrxzero glad to hear that! IntervainThank you, they were bugging me! ive tweaked the feet. OutsideLane With the hair I started by creating the main strands using Jonathon Nascone's hair plane brush in Zbrush, which was a huge time saver. I then created some large hair in photoshop just by going from dark to light reds and oranges, with a larger brush to a smaller brush. I tried that one hair texture on all the cards and made more as i went. Its a lot of back and forth between photoshop, 3ds max and marmoset, for example here is where i started. Heres a breakdown of my hair cards set up: Heres what my marmoset hair setup looks like As you can see theres a lot of tweaking in the shader itself, its just moving sliders up n down till you get the result you want really! I recommend looking at this video to get a more detailed breakdown. Whats very important for hair is a flow map, im not completely sure on it but it seems like it controls the anisotropic reflection direction based on what direction one colour blends into another, here are some notes i did a few months ago when i was experimenting with it. @Justo I am using hair cards for that too, (with a slight shadow painted onto the head diffuse) here is a breakdown for those
Thank you for the breakdown of the hair, that's essentially what i'm doing aswell, with the difference of making my texture in zbrush with the curve brush, being able to bake normal maps. Though i'm not satisfied with the results, similar to your picture from your first hair texture test. Maybe i should give the handpainted route a try, too. Your hair from the start looks completely different from what you ended up with, did you add many more cards and tweak the texture to get to your end result? Regarding the anisotropic shader and flow maps this video is a great example of it and in the free program Krita there is literally a brush to paint flow maps with Though i found that having a normal map gives a very similar result for the highlights.
Will try out the handpaint approach now
PS: How many tris is the hair (without eyelashes/brows)?
I did a test in Zbrush (here) where I created hair strands from fibremesh (just using a very high gravity on a plane) and baked them down, the result is decent, you get a lot of detail, but the idea of having to bake every time i wanted to add a new card seemed like more trouble than its worth, maybe ill give it another go with a future character. Yeah I added loads more as I went on, usually duplicating existing parts of existing card meshes and moving them around. Also my diffuse and specular hair maps have loads of adjustment layers as I was constantly tweaking in the maps and in marmoset. I spent around a week on the hair until I got something I was happy with. Thats handy, All my hair uvs are straight up and down so I could just use the photoshop gradient tool to create the flow maps.
The hair is currently sitting at a very unoptimised 10k tris :P
Thanks for sharing your workflow! I'm curious to see what your flow map looks like if you don't mind sharing. Also, any particular brush used to paint the hair strands in PS?
Sure its nothing fancy, its just simple gradients, since the uvs are laid out just straight up n down. General question, should there be more detail in the flow map? I might have to do some experimenting. To paint the hair I just used a standard hard round brush, with opacity set to pen pressure and with pixel size varying between 2-6.
Hey cheers Felixenfeu, i think it was to do with the camera FOV, ive since adjusted it Created textures for the mace, created a floor, and did some tweaks. Next up is rigging and posing.
Sure its nothing fancy, its just simple gradients, since the uvs are laid out just straight up n down. General question, should there be more detail in the flow map? I might have to do some experimenting. To paint the hair I just used a standard hard round brush, with opacity set to pen pressure and with pixel size varying between 2-6.
Thanks for sharing! I don't know a whole lot about flow maps myself, but from what I've done and seen I don't think there needs to be any sort of detail. That mace looks hella sick, can't wait to see the final images!
Definitely better with the changed camera FOV . Now she just looks short instead of deformed so it's cool
Oh and nice renders man ! Pose might be a bit stiff, maybe more contraposto could be interresting, but the overall thing looks great ! Stellar texture work.
Awesome top notch quality character for your portfolio for sure.
Anyway, I came here to ask about the additional geometry around her eyelids and caruncula. Are there two extra meshes for wetness AND occlusion? Or just a single extra mesh for both purposes?
I've always wondered is it possible to just paint those areas glossier on the main head mesh with good results instead of adding extra geometry? And how about having some sort of stronger SSAO (HBAO+, VXAO or wherever this tech is developing itself further) around eyelids without that extra geometry?
Also, I'm quite the beginner with real-time hair, but what I've heard and read, it's just gotta be done manually in these days. Lots of patience. Ah, and flow maps, somewhat confused with them too.
With the wetness/occlusion meshes i tried to combine them together initially but my results werent great which meant that the occlusion would sit above the wetness, making it look like its floating, so theyre 2 seperate meshes. (there is probably a cleverer way of doing this with just one mesh :P)
In the texture the top line of the bottom lid does have a very high gloss/low roughness value but the mesh allows for the "water of the eyeball thats pressing up against the lid" reflection. the wentness mesh on needs to be raised, intersecting the
eyeball and the bottom eyelid at an angle to catch the light.
As for using in-engine AO to achieve that effect i _think_ because that is a largely a blanket value across the level (im not a tech artist, so im just guessing), in order to have it show up on such a small area it would really need to be cranked up, affecting everything else in the level.
Yeah with hair you gotta just tweak for hours on end, and keep going back to references. That zbrush hair plane brush saved me a lot of time. Flow maps took some time to get my head around them, just experiment.
This is valuable information indeed! Thanks for answering and sharing your insight for this.
Just
few more questions. Did you bake normals for the wetness/caruncula mesh
from the HP head to made it fit "seamlessly" together with the main LP
head mesh? And I guess you probably need some sort of alpha to fade the
glossiness at the edge before the line of eyelashes, because otherwise
we could see the harsh polygon edge of that wetness/caruncula mesh.
But for the occlusion mesh I guess normals aren't relevant because it's just a smooth AO in the alpha channel, right?
Another
thing are the eyes. I wish we could get a proper real-time refraction
effect from the iris and pupil to the cornea, so that we could see iris
and pupil from grazing angles, instead of them disappearing to the
nature of concavity of them. What an explanation, but that's the last
drop of realism.
But other than that, her eyes are gorgeous
nevertheless. Looking at your real-time renders of her, I also wonder
did you add any uneven surface noise to the cornea mesh around the
convex cornea, while only cornea itself being completely smooth and
glossy? I'm just curious because I'm always pushing my skills further
when it comes to realistic characters.
EDIT: Would also be cool to see a complete breakdown of the eyes, with meshes, UVs, usage of shaders and textures. It would be nice to see your point of view of approaching real-time eyes. I hope I'm not asking too much, though. ^^
Also, @Eric Chadwick , this helpful image from Pav3d could be a good wiki material, am I right? (;
No I didnt, but that could be a good idea, and yes that harsh line can be an issue and could possibly be resolved with an alpha, or with some more geometry, would have to try it out.
Yes the occlusion mesh is just an alpha and a flat diffuse (around 50% grey). since its just a faked effect it doesnt need glossiness/reflection.
Yes there is a slight noisy surface on it, so the eyes dont looks too much like glass. I have also since edited the roughness so its very slightly rough. This scene by Magdalena Dadela provides a great insight.
For the real time refraction effect you can fake it with this technique shown here. I should have used it really, I cant remember what but I think it was interfering with something else, again ill have to do some more experiments.
I will do so this weekend, its a combination of various other techniques, Ill also take into account what ive learned here.
Oh yeah, modeling the eyeball itself with convex shape as well. Looks convincing, but for some reason I feel it's a bit funny and unpractical approach. Might try it in future projects. Still, for example the PS4 game, Until Dawn, didn't have refraction (but very good reflections) and the eyes looked amazing in there. So, in summa sumarum, there's probably no ultimate solution for eye shading tricks. Even without refraction eyes can look good, like in your girl here. I'm buying that. ;D
Cool, looking forward to your breakdown, it hits the spot for my character project, so I can learn from you. Anyway, thanks a lot for taking your time to answer and explain.
This is nice! really great work and inspiration!. I was wondering, how did you texture stitches? which map can give you a good mask for them?
Let me answer you this even though this might not be Pav3D's workflow. But for stitches you can make them as a separate subtool in Zbrush with the insert mesh to follow a curve. You can model the base stitch in Max, Maya, Modo or Blender. Then you can polypaint the cloth as black and stitches as white, and bake those black & white vertex colors to be you mask texture.
This is nice! really great work and inspiration!. I was wondering, how did you texture stitches? which map can give you a good mask for them?
Hey thanks! The stitches are picked up by the curvature map, they are highlighted as part of an edge wear layer I have in substance painter. You can isolate the sitching by playing with a levels layer above the curvature and then paint out any undesirable areas on the map. Another way could be when you sculpt in the stitches you use them with polypaint and then bake out that mask in xnormal.
So with the eyes I first sculpted the iris and some veins. (see links below)
Then polypainted (matcap is zbro_Eyereflection) using standard brushes and some vein strands i created in photoshop, all the while having lots of high resolution eyeball reference handy
Then I created the following in 3ds max, which has been discussed above
Then setup in marmoset The eyeball itself needs some subsurface scatter to give it that "eyeball jelly" look
Thanks for the breakdown of the workflow of her eyes. Looks pretty neat. The only thing that I've been thinking is whether to bake the normals of those veins also to the cornea to pop them out a bit. Because I think cornea might "hide" the definitions of the eyeball's surface details by being more dominant with its glossy reflections all over. Kinda like blending those veins to the noise of the cornea. Might be unnecessary though.
I might go with a bit easier route just to get comfortable with eye shading. Just to paint those veins and rely on the noise on the cornea only, because I guess that could be enough.
Also, it's cool that with the help of SSS the eyeball gets that slightly fleshy and organic feel. I guess it doesn't need any specific scatter and translucency maps to define the SSS even more accurately, lol?
I can also see that the base whiteness of your sclera is ever so slightly tinted to yellow, am I right? Like the color of cream or so. Because that's the whiteness I usually start with, because IMO the sclera isn't 100% white. So, you did it right. (:
Well, I guess that's what real-time eyes pretty much can be with today's tecnical limitations.
Replies
In any case this is awesome, the wrapping will not change it.
Looking forward to see more.
Been texturing the past 2 weeks. still have a lot of tweaking to do, as well as the mace textures. Also need to design some sort of base for her to stand on in the final pose.
adrxzero glad to hear that!
Intervain Thank you, they were bugging me! ive tweaked the feet.
OutsideLane With the hair I started by creating the main strands using Jonathon Nascone's hair plane brush in Zbrush, which was a huge time saver. I then created some large hair in photoshop just by going from dark to light reds and oranges, with a larger brush to a smaller brush. I tried that one hair texture on all the cards and made more as i went. Its a lot of back and forth between photoshop, 3ds max and marmoset, for example here is where i started.
Heres a breakdown of my hair cards set up:
Heres what my marmoset hair setup looks like
As you can see theres a lot of tweaking in the shader itself, its just moving sliders up n down till you get the result you want really! I recommend looking at this video to get a more detailed breakdown.
Whats very important for hair is a flow map, im not completely sure on it but it seems like it controls the anisotropic reflection direction based on what direction one colour blends into another, here are some notes i did a few months ago when i was experimenting with it.
@Justo I am using hair cards for that too, (with a slight shadow painted onto the head diffuse) here is a breakdown for those
Though i'm not satisfied with the results, similar to your picture from your first hair texture test.
Maybe i should give the handpainted route a try, too.
Your hair from the start looks completely different from what you ended up with, did you add many more cards and tweak the texture to get to your end result?
Regarding the anisotropic shader and flow maps this video is a great example of it and in the free program Krita there is literally a brush to paint flow maps with
Will try out the handpaint approach now
PS: How many tris is the hair (without eyelashes/brows)?
Yeah I added loads more as I went on, usually duplicating existing parts of existing card meshes and moving them around. Also my diffuse and specular hair maps have loads of adjustment layers as I was constantly tweaking in the maps and in marmoset. I spent around a week on the hair until I got something I was happy with.
Thats handy, All my hair uvs are straight up and down so I could just use the photoshop gradient tool to create the flow maps.
The hair is currently sitting at a very unoptimised 10k tris :P
To paint the hair I just used a standard hard round brush, with opacity set to pen pressure and with pixel size varying between 2-6.
Very clean texture otherwise !
Created textures for the mace, created a floor, and did some tweaks. Next up is rigging and posing.
Oh and nice renders man ! Pose might be a bit stiff, maybe more contraposto could be interresting, but the overall thing looks great ! Stellar texture work.
Anyway, I came here to ask about the additional geometry around her eyelids and caruncula. Are there two extra meshes for wetness AND occlusion? Or just a single extra mesh for both purposes?
I've always wondered is it possible to just paint those areas glossier on the main head mesh with good results instead of adding extra geometry? And how about having some sort of stronger SSAO (HBAO+, VXAO or wherever this tech is developing itself further) around eyelids without that extra geometry?
Also, I'm quite the beginner with real-time hair, but what I've heard and read, it's just gotta be done manually in these days. Lots of patience. Ah, and flow maps, somewhat confused with them too.
With the wetness/occlusion meshes i tried to combine them together initially but my results werent great which meant that the occlusion would sit above the wetness, making it look like its floating, so theyre 2 seperate meshes. (there is probably a cleverer way of doing this with just one mesh :P)
Here they talk about it briefly in paragon.
In the texture the top line of the bottom lid does have a very high gloss/low roughness value but the mesh allows for the "water of the eyeball thats pressing up against the lid" reflection. the wentness mesh on needs to be raised, intersecting the eyeball and the bottom eyelid at an angle to catch the light.
As for using in-engine AO to achieve that effect i _think_ because that is a largely a blanket value across the level (im not a tech artist, so im just guessing), in order to have it show up on such a small area it would really need to be cranked up, affecting everything else in the level.
Yeah with hair you gotta just tweak for hours on end, and keep going back to references. That zbrush hair plane brush saved me a lot of time. Flow maps took some time to get my head around them, just experiment.
Just few more questions. Did you bake normals for the wetness/caruncula mesh from the HP head to made it fit "seamlessly" together with the main LP head mesh? And I guess you probably need some sort of alpha to fade the glossiness at the edge before the line of eyelashes, because otherwise we could see the harsh polygon edge of that wetness/caruncula mesh.
But for the occlusion mesh I guess normals aren't relevant because it's just a smooth AO in the alpha channel, right?
Another thing are the eyes. I wish we could get a proper real-time refraction effect from the iris and pupil to the cornea, so that we could see iris and pupil from grazing angles, instead of them disappearing to the nature of concavity of them. What an explanation, but that's the last drop of realism.
But other than that, her eyes are gorgeous nevertheless. Looking at your real-time renders of her, I also wonder did you add any uneven surface noise to the cornea mesh around the convex cornea, while only cornea itself being completely smooth and glossy? I'm just curious because I'm always pushing my skills further when it comes to realistic characters.
EDIT: Would also be cool to see a complete breakdown of the eyes, with meshes, UVs, usage of shaders and textures. It would be nice to see your point of view of approaching real-time eyes. I hope I'm not asking too much, though. ^^
Also, @Eric Chadwick , this helpful image from Pav3d could be a good wiki material, am I right? (;
@FourtyNights:
No I didnt, but that could be a good idea, and yes that harsh line can be an issue and could possibly be resolved with an alpha, or with some more geometry, would have to try it out.
Yes the occlusion mesh is just an alpha and a flat diffuse (around 50% grey). since its just a faked effect it doesnt need glossiness/reflection.
Yes there is a slight noisy surface on it, so the eyes dont looks too much like glass. I have also since edited the roughness so its very slightly rough. This scene by Magdalena Dadela provides a great insight.
For the real time refraction effect you can fake it with this technique shown here. I should have used it really, I cant remember what but I think it was interfering with something else, again ill have to do some more experiments.
I will do so this weekend, its a combination of various other techniques, Ill also take into account what ive learned here.
Oh yeah, modeling the eyeball itself with convex shape as well. Looks convincing, but for some reason I feel it's a bit funny and unpractical approach. Might try it in future projects. Still, for example the PS4 game, Until Dawn, didn't have refraction (but very good reflections) and the eyes looked amazing in there. So, in summa sumarum, there's probably no ultimate solution for eye shading tricks. Even without refraction eyes can look good, like in your girl here. I'm buying that. ;D
Cool, looking forward to your breakdown, it hits the spot for my character project, so I can learn from you. Anyway, thanks a lot for taking your time to answer and explain.
Thanks for doing all WIPs and explanations
Another way could be when you sculpt in the stitches you use them with polypaint and then bake out that mask in xnormal.
@FourtyNights
So with the eyes I first sculpted the iris and some veins. (see links below)
Then polypainted (matcap is zbro_Eyereflection) using standard brushes and some vein strands i created in photoshop, all the while having lots of high resolution eyeball reference handy
Then I created the following in 3ds max, which has been discussed above
Then setup in marmoset
The eyeball itself needs some subsurface scatter to give it that "eyeball jelly" look
Some links that helped me along the way:
Marmoset Character Set up
Paragon Character setup eye section
Sculpting eyeball details
I might go with a bit easier route just to get comfortable with eye shading. Just to paint those veins and rely on the noise on the cornea only, because I guess that could be enough.
Also, it's cool that with the help of SSS the eyeball gets that slightly fleshy and organic feel. I guess it doesn't need any specific scatter and translucency maps to define the SSS even more accurately, lol?
I can also see that the base whiteness of your sclera is ever so slightly tinted to yellow, am I right? Like the color of cream or so.
Well, I guess that's what real-time eyes pretty much can be with today's tecnical limitations.