I collected some initial reference from artsation of stylised character designs which I liked. Since I have never tried making a full high poly PBR stylised character before I felt as if this brief would be the perfect opportunity for me to give it a go. I plan to do a realistic character for my fmp therefore I want to make sure my portfolio includes a wide range of both realism, semi realistic and stylised. Lots of company's need artists to be able to tackle a wide range of styles therefore I want to make sure I develop my skills as a well rounded character artist. I decided to go all out with my stylisation choices for this project and picked some very stylised refences to use as part of my sculping process. I love how interesting and dynamic the bodies of the characters are and how the artist has been able to sculpt them with very extreme proportions in effective places to make the characters look aesthetically pleasing and pretty. The texturing and the sculpting is very clean and minimalistic on some of them so I think I'm going to incorporate and element of this to some parts however areas such as fabric I would like to add some more fibrous details. I am really looking forward to having a go at making very stylised hair as I have never tried it. I will look up some good ways in doing this before hand. These characters remind me of the kind of Pixar style human so I could also have a look at the structure of those as well. When sculpting I am going to be using a mixture of realistic accurate anatomical refences and stylised ones to influence my final outcome.
Sculpting- 8.10.22
My first part of the sculpting process was to sculpt the face. For this part I struggled to detach myself from the ideas as realism as it is what I am used to doing so I really had to push myself to step outside of my comfort zone. Of course the face still had to look like a human so I made sure to use a lot of refences of actual human faces with skulls and the muscular structure. I found some good refences of the facial planes which helped a lot in mapping out the initial build of the dead. It is still not completely finished yet as I want to up the sub division and clean everything up. I will then further refine and polish up any structural inaccuracies. The head was just a simple sphere which I used a mixture of clay build up and move to sculp into. The mouth was definitely the hardest part as I could not get a good ratio of the mouth to nose in a stylised way and kept making the lips too big. I am relatively satisfies with the size and shape of the lips now as they look cute. One thing I have noticed when I have been sculpting the head is that a lot of stylised characters have very short faces with areas of significant fashion fat such as the cheeks and forehead. This is what gives them a cute look.
Blocking out the body-9.10.22
To make the body I started by using basic shapes to block out the proportions and features. This looks very strange at the moment however once I dynamesh all the parts together and start building the muscles and curses smoothly it will look a lot better. One of the main factors in my stylised characters body that I wanted to include was a very small waist and very wide hips. This accentuated ratio creates a stylised look whilst also conveying femininity and curves in an interesting way. I plan to keep this consistent with the other parts of the figure such as the relation to the thighs moving down to the calves and ankles, I want this ratio to be very wide so that the style is consistent through the body. I am using anatomically correct refences for the proportions somewhat except obviously I have elongated the legs and made the shoulder to hips a lot greater in difference.
I have now dynameshed all the shapes together and started smoothing down all the lumps and bumps. This part is where I'm going to focus the most on using my anatomical refences to get the basics of the muscular structure whilst keeping to my style. After some feedback I was advised to make the shoulder smaller which I have now corrected and also I need to focus a little more on the torso area around the under arms. This is nowhere near finished yet and I will be continuously tweaking it up until export for retop.
Sculpting the hair 13.10.22
Before sculpting the hair I did a fair amount of research on the best ways to go about making stylised hair as I had never made hair in this style before. From looking at a few tutorials on YouTube and at some existing models on art station I started my process today by blocking out sections of hair. I plan to retop all of these separately as I think this will make the process a lot easier and will achieve a much nicer bake. I used the move tool a lot whilst doing this and a long side my reference from art station and my ref board I looked at some real life hair refs so that I could accurately replicate the way hair behaves and complete a convincing shape. I plan on using an IMM brush to sculpt add more fullness and detail to the sections of har as this could be a very non destructive way of working as I will be able to move around the separate strands. It’s very important that when making hair you ensure all sections work well together and I think this is especially important for stylised models due to the boldness and separation of each section. I am quite happy with how the blockout is coming along, I have chosen to go for a bun hair style as I feel this will have a positive impact on the silhouette of my character. I also plan to add hair sticks int them to further enhance the siloutee. One thing that I have found very prominent in the sculpting of stylised characters is how bold the silhouettes are. The characters often feature very prominent round or geometric shapes,such as reaper or D.va from overwatch who are very prominent from even a black silouhette of them. This hows how effective the character design of them is.
The shapes used also suggest what kind of character they might be. For example more harder shapes like the sharp triangular shape of reapers coat could suggest a more evil and scary character shears the round shape of dvas mech could. Give the idea of a more good and trustworthy character.
As my character is going to be a fantasy badass Yakuza woman I am going to be introducing some more angular triangular shapes in when it comes to sculpting the clothing. This is going to suggest that she is powerful and not to be messed with.
Continuing the hair sculpt
As you can see on the image above I have began to use the IMM brush to add definition and more individual strands onto the section of hair. I have to be careful not to make these sections too noisy as I want the character to look clean and smooth because it is heavily stylized. The IMM hair brush has been a very useful tool o far in constructing the hair in a clean and non destructive way. During this workflow I have been making use of the polish tool as well to get a clean smooth finish after subdividing the strands to retain the details. I am quit happy with how this is looking but I am slightly concerned about the time it is taking me because I am trying to get all the hair to work into each other smoothly and convincingly. I have found using an IMM bruh to be a quick and non destructive method of making stylized hair.
In a previous project I hand sculpted each strand of hair myself and the end result was good but it was quite noisy as it is very easy to get carried away, the IMM brush makes sure sections are clean and uniform as well as preventing too much noise which would not be appropriate for this project.
This is what my finished hair sculpt looks like I have completely sculpted over each section. I have made a big error when it comes to how I was going to go about retopping and baking which I am going to struggle with further down the line. I accidentally sculpted on wrongly selected pieces of hair meaning that the IMM sections are all mixed up and not on the relevant section. Therefore I will not be able to separately retop and bake each section. This would have made it a lot easier for me as I think retopping this as one hair cap may by tricky. If I was to do hair in this way again I would definitely make sure to correctly select the section I wanted to put the IMM strand on. I will try my best to cleanly retop this as one and going forward I will be doing a test bake to check that the high poly will bake down cleanly. I found that from researching stylised characters a hair plays a bit part in the overall finish and quality of the character as it is quite prominent in terms of silhouette. I have some ideas of how I am going to texture this as I am hoping that the generators in painter will pick up any details and I will be able to add a nice ombré effect to the hair. I found that characters such as ones in overwatch often use gradients as part of their texture.
Going forward I need to:
-Start sculpting the clothes and shoes
-Have a look a some yakuza wear, geisha wear and traditional Japanese clothing
-Import the high poly into max for retopping.
Moving on to sculpting the clothes- week 2
Today I have started sculpting the clothing using masking and extracting to add a thickness to it. Originally I was going to do the clothing on marvellous designer as I learnt how to use this software a bit over summer and I really enjoyed using it, however I ended up deciding against it. For my other project which is a realistic jacket I am using marvellous designer because it is very good for creating realistic fabric simulation and folds on the garments. However I decided against using it for this brief because I chose to make a very stylised project which requires me to make sure everything about this character is extremely clean and polished. Looking at some existing models of stylised characters I found that their clothing didn’t have the level of detail that was created in marvellous and looked more sculpted in zbrush. I thought that it would be better for me to just sculpt the clothing by hand rather than simulate it in marvellous as I don’t think that it is appropriate for this particular project. Also since I wont be including any long pieces of fabric which would have been easier for me to simulate.
Design choices
I wanted to make sure my choice of clothing was suitable for my character concept and that since my character would be doing a lot of movement and fighting I considered the practicality of the clothes. I chose for her to wear a short skirt with a slit in it for maximum movement. Under the skirt she will have shorts that are baked onto the legs. The top is also cropped for maximum movement. I have considered the silhouette a lot when constructing this as from my previous research on the silhouettes of overwatch characters and research on shape theory. The sleeves are a very prominent part of the design as they are angular this works well with suggesting my violent mafia concept.
-I want to make it clear that because my character is from a fantasy universe some design choices may not be exactly as they are in real life. For example there were very very few female mafia members in the past and therefore I have taken a lot of traits from the male mafia members to create the overall look of my character.
-I will be adding tattoos to signify the importance of my character as a captain and important member of the mafia.
-There was no particular way to distinguish the ‘captain’ or leader of the yakuza apart from the ornate manner and expense of their clothing. Therefore I will be making sure the fabrics look very ornate and bold to signify that she is high up in the yakuza gang to distinguish her as a ‘captain’
-I was considering adding something to make it obvious that she as the leader however this really doesn’t add any historical accuracy or positive design choice to my character and could make It look overly tacky.
-Therefore I will be pushing her character design as a captain or leader through the ornatness and flashiness of the fabrics and tattoos, this is something I would really like to make clear.
These are some of the refence images I have used to influence my design choices. Some of them are taken from real life female Yakuza (the very few in real life) and some from female Yakuza from all Japanese films. I also plan to refer back to these when it comes to texturing my character.
I noticed from all these references that they had their shoulders exposed and a lot of tattoos going down one side of their arm. This is why I chose to include the off the shoulder style top. I did make the top and skirt shorter for combat in game purposes. I also liked how they were wearing traditional Japanese clothing and not just similar to what the Yakuza men wore which often consisted of suits shirts and long jackets. Buns and hair pins are also a common theme.
-It was key that collect as much research as possible to influence my design choices and make them as relevant as possible to my concept.
The images above all show images of Japanese Geisha. I really loved a lot of the items of clothing, colours and makeup styles so I will be referring back to these during my texturing process. I used these images a lot as reference when making my high poly. I wanted to ensure my character is as researched as possible to get the best quality design I can and to make a quality character I could see in a Yakuza type game and someone I would want to play myself. I personally really enjoy the Yakuza game so this has been a really fun project for me so far.
Finished sculpt in Zbrush and reflecting on my progress-
I am quite happy with how my high poly sculpt has eded up looking. As I have previously mentioned before I really focused on polishing up the high poly as much as I could. I did this by heavily making use of the deformation tools and polish in particular. Along with dynamic subdivide to get nice stylised looking crisp edges. Through making a stylised character I have really learnt a range of new tool in Zbrush and from various feedback from my lectures I have been able to apply this in a way which really helps polish my stylised character to the maximum.
-As I really want to make sure that the clothing on the character is highly ornate and fancy I made sure to consider where I would use different fabrics and patterns. I added trims around the top and skirt edges so that I could get a nice contrasting material to the main fabric of the clothes. To tie it in nicely together I added oversized bows to the top of the sleeves, front of the skirt and a really big one on the back. I really liked how they effect the silhouette and also create a fun stylised look to the character. Since my character is not historically accurate I was happy adding this design feature in
Changes I made from feedback
-One very important change I made from feedback was how the sculpt of the face looked. I was told it looked too cute and childlike in a way. If you look at the image before of my sculpt you can see that there was a lot of fat on the cheek which made her face look too timid and cute.
-As yakuza are incredibly brutal and violent It was suggested that I made the expression and face look a lot harsher. I decided to take this advice on board and I had another look at the face.
-I went in with the move tool and started missing with the shape, I made her cheeks less prominent and her eyes smaller as they were very big and looked too friendly. I wanted to make sure she was pretty but also had a darker more harsh look on her face with out loosing the intended look.
-After making these changes I was much happier with how she looked and her expression and overall face lent itself much better to my concept.
-I am overall quite happy with my sculpt and the proportions of her body.
- I think one of the strongest areas of this is the hair although I definitely needed to give myself more time for this as it took a lot longer than I originally thought.
-I did struggle with getting the face to match the concept better but I think after making the changes from my feedback It works a lot better.
Back view of the high poly
Here is the back view of the high poly sculpt. The shoes were inspired by traditional geisha wooden platform shoes but with a twist. They will be textured from wood like the original but with a leather knee high boot. The images below are what I used as references to choose the design.I wanted to incorporate some Geisha clothing into my deign choices because there were very few female yakuza so I had to kind of make up what I think that they would wear. I really enjoyed doing this as I was able to make my own narrative for her as there wasn’t many exact references for me to go off.
As you can see the shoes had very high wooden platforms which I thought were an interesting design feature and added nicely to her silhouette. However I did have to consider how my character would be able to fight so I had to make the platforms considerably thicker and lower.
These are some shoes by Vivienne Westwood which I liked as they were very much inspired by Japanese Geisha footwear. They use leather along with the platform wooden soles. I also used these as inspiration for my design choice with the shoes.
-Moving forward I will now import my high poly into 3DS Max for retopping.
- I am going to collect a variety of references for deformation loops on the character as It will be being rigged and skinned. I will be focusing heavily on clean and good topology as this is very important part of this project for creating a high quality game ready character.
- I need to split up my character into textures sheets as well, since the brief does not exactly inform how we should do this apart from giving us a texel density I will be doing it based on generic character budgets and not being excessive with how much I give each sheet for optimisation.
-Same with the topology I will be making sure not to go overboard with the tri budget as we have not been give an exact one. I will make sure not to have wasteful topologly and consider ways I could optimise the character.
Retopolgy in max- week 3
I have now started retopping my character. As you can see from this screenshot I have made sure. To add in all the deformation loops around the mouth and eyes so that an animator could make it move. To do this I used wire frame references from sketch fab and also references from art station. I actually did the face after I did the body and clothes which I think was not the best choice because all the topology from the body needed to feed well into the face. Luckily I didn’t have many problems with doing this as as able to have a good amount of topology withought it being excessive or wasteful. Below are some of the images I used a reference for my retop.
I made sure to have enough references so I could accurately retop my facial deformation loops. The image above shows a stylised face with the relevant deformation loops.
One of my weaknesses is time management and I definitely spent a really long time on the retop an struggled quite a bit with making sure the loops all merged into it well without having too much wasteful topology. There are loops on the face, knees, elbows and shoulders. The hands took my a particularly long time as I needed to make sure to do the topology correctly so that the fingers would deform well. I think if I had the time I would have spent a bit longer on them however I needed to make sure I only spent a week and a half doing this so that I have enough time to bake and texture before putting it in engine.
Today I retopped thee hair and this was quite a struggled originally I wanted to make sure I added deformation loops however I didn’t manage to do this so I will just be rigging it onto the back and the neck so that it doesn’t deform on it own. I would definitely have split these up if I was to do it differently next time to make it easier for me to retop and bake. I tried to get the topology as neat and even as I could doo that I can get a nice bake when I come to do it. I am almost finished with my retop just need to do any details such as straps and bows. I also need to make sure that my naming conventions are all the same so each individual object will bake onto each other.
I have now finished my retop I am quite happy with how it looks even though it took me a really long time to finish. I made sure that there are no faceted edges and any geometry that is not visible was deleted for optimisation. On the image above you can see how I split up the model not texture sheets. I think I will be using either 2 2048s and 1 1024 or 3 2048s depending on if the hair matches the resolution of the rest of the model. I logically split up the unwrap into the texture sheets where I would be using the same material. Such as the skin on one, hair on another and clothing on the final one. Except the boots which will be being baked down on the legs. I have added some geometry around the top just as it affects the silhouette slightly and it might not bake very well. the sleeves were quite tricky to do as I am going to be baking on the trips directly on the clothing and not having them as separate objects. I am hoping they will bake down well, the way I retopped them should make it easy for me to texture as I will b able to easily use poly select.
Here is the low poly model ready for exporting into painter for texturing. It is relatively dense topography however I made sure to optimise it as well as I could to achieve a smooth low poly. It is the average amount of tris for a stylised character based on existing models I looked at. I dd struggle a lot with the bows as they looked faceted very easily so the topology is more dense. One thing I would liked to have done if I had mor time would be to shift the loops on the shoulders up a bit for optimal deformation topology. I ran out of time and really needed to move on to unwrapping an baking at this point. It should still function well but I am aware that this is something I could change in the future.
This is a close up Of the top half of the topology with the material IDs assigned to each texture set. I tried. To get the polys as uniform as possible.
Here is the back view of my low poly retop. The hair topology is quite dense but I couldn’t optimise it anymore with out it looking really faceted.
-Overall my model ended up being around 40k tris in total.
-Moving forward I need to begin the unwrap and split it up in texture sets.
Unwrapping- week 3
Hair UV
Eye UV
Skin UV
Clothing UV
Here are some screenshots of my unwrap sheets. As the shapes were unusual I struggled to pack them in a way which made the most of as much of the texture sheet as possible. It took me a few attempts to optimise my pack annd unwrap so that there was no squewing and the textures would bake well. There wasn’t anything I could straighten up well as it was squeuing the checker pattern too much. I split my model up depending on what textures would be going on each, for example all the skin on one. This will make it a lot easier for me in substance painter to texture my model in a logical way. The character has material IDs so the textures will apply to the correct UV.
Moving forward-
-I am going to check any naming conventions on my low poly retop and make sure they are matched with my high poly.
-Make a new painter file and start my baking process.
Baking my character- week 3
Today I have been baking my character and I have had a lot of issues with it so far which I am currently trying tot fix. For some reason the bows on my character have been baking completely wrong with a lot of artifacting even though I have checked the unwrap, naming conventions and high to low poly models. The image above shows the strange artifcating that is currently going on with this bake. Any other errors I have on this initial test bake will be easy for me to fix by adjusting the front cage distance to remove errors with the AO map or by changing setting such as bake same mesh name only to stop objects projecting onto one another.
I tried exploded baking by moving the bows away from the model and then moving them back in and reimporting the low poly with them in the correct place however this didn’t fix it. After some research and asking around I think this may be caused by an issue with the FBX file so I may try importing the high poly meshes that i am having issues with as OBJ files and see if this fixes the artifcating I am having. I think it may be a problem with the sizing on the fbx file is wrong on these objects in particular.
Update on baking issues-
After I imported the assets with the baking issues on as obj high poly separate files they baked on perfectly. I think the fbx files had some issues with sizing on export and were bigger or smaller than the low poly it was supposed to bake onto. After adjusting some values and cage distance I was able to get this bake (the image above) which I am very pleased with I am particularly happy with how the hair has baked. I will now be moving on to texturing.
The back view of my bake.
3/4 view of the face no torso.
A close up of the hair which I am particularly pleased with as I was quite worried since I made a mistake with my workflow sectioning it and was concerned that it wouldn’t bake nicely however it did with very minimal issues which were easy to fix in the bake setting.
I started the bake at a very low 1080 with 2x2 anti aliasing and then bumped it up to a 4k with 8x8 quality. I will be exporting 4k textures only for my beauty shots in marmoset and the relevant size for a game ready character for the unreal hand in.
I thought I would include some pictures of my AO map and normal map just to show how the details have been caught on the bake.
The normal on the hair is also pretty clean.
-My next step is to start building up textures on my model. I have already done a lot of research on ideas for texturing to make my character have some kind of narrative and make it relevant to the brief. I will be sharing my references for this process in the next portion of my blog.
Texturing and rendering- week 4
During this stage of the project I decided to texture a long side an unreal render so that I could get a good idea of what my textures would look like in engine as they usually look very different from how they look in the viewport in painter. I have found that things look much too shiny in unreal compared to painter, this is why I decided to texture alongside an unreal render with some basic lighting. Eventually I am going to light my character using the box technique so I can add some world space context and it isn’t lit in a void as this was some feedback I received.
Like I had previously mentioned in order to make my character look important I wanted the textures to be very flashy and fancy looking. Therefore I chose to use a range of patterns including a traditional Japanese print which I edited in photoshop to make an alpha to use on my model. The colour scheme I chose was very much influenced by the images of Geisha I had collected since many pictures of the female Yakuza were in black and white. I definitely wanted o include gold to emphasise the importance of my yakuza captain. In contrast to the ornate traditional Japanese flower print which I added some height and metal nests to to make it pop out I added a different colour and texture on the other side. I chose to do a leopard print fabric because I thought this was a funky contrast and it was influenced by prints I had seen on some of the yakuza men and on the characters in the Yakuza games. I was also inspired by Japanese ‘Gyaru’ and hosts in japan as these were often associated with the Yakuza and sometimes still are. Leopard print is a popular fabric within these groups of people. Below are some of my mai reference images for the colour scheme and textures I chose to have. I am quite pleased with the dynamic mix of fabric and textures I have used.
The above images show some Japanese hosts wearing bold prints such as leopard print which I included in my design. Hosts are often involved with the Yakuza as many host clubs are owned by them. I thought this would be an interesting pattern to include. Another observation i took is that a lot of hosts had boldly bleached r highlighted hair, therefore i chose to give my character bleached hair that had grown out slightly at the top. I like the gradient effect I created with this as it lends itself nicely to my stylised way of texturing this project.
The above images here show Japanese gyaru from the early 200os onwards. Leopard print was also popular with this fashion subculture along with bold makeup and bleached hair much like hosts. I am a fan of Gyaru fashion so I was interested in taking some inspiration from the textures an colours seen commonly in this subculture.
A lot of the yakuza game characters wore very flamboyant shirts or prints as well.
This is an image from an old Japanese film of a fictional female yakuza member. As female yakuzas aren’t common in real life I had to find reference from film and other fiction to influence my design and texturing choices. The character is not supposed to be a realistic interpretation of a yakuza boss and more of a creative and unique interpretation of one.
I love the red and floral colour scheme of the traditional kimono that this Geisha is wearing.
I think I will be using a red black and gold colour scheme as this is a common theme I found amongst both refs for yakuza and for Japanese Geisha. It also suggest a feeling of importance with the gold and I want to make it clear that my character is a leader and someone high up.
I love the tattoo down one shoulder this seems to be another prominent part of how female yakuza are being portrayed in films.
Also from a character design perspective anything to create asymmetry will be an intervening design point.
These were the main inspiration for my colour pallet and tattoo designs. I photo-bashed some tattoos together on photoshop and made them into alphas to stamp onto my model. I really liked the black gold red colour scheme as they are very traditional colours and are often used on geisha wear. I also used geisha makeup as an inspiration for the makeup of my character as you can see from the heavy blush and red eye shadow. The red line under her chin and dots under her eyes were also influenced by geisha and Padme from Star Wars as I thought a lot of her outfits were quite similar and were influenced by geisha. There aren’t a lot of images of female yakuza as they were very rare however the ones I did find I have included in my references above. I will include some references for makeup a bit further down in my blog with explanations.
These were some of the earlier texture passes as I had my model in a scene in unreal along side. I did have the red strip down the chest however after feedback I decided to remove it as it looked like it was cutting her in half and was too symmetrical.
Currently the texture looks a little basic and flat. I wont be adding a lot of tertiary details to it as it is stylised and very clean however I want to add some gradients and more curvature generators to pop out some of my sculpt. I will also be changing u the lighting when I come to properly present it and taking my beauty shots in marmoset.
I originally had the red line going all the way down however after some feedback I was advised to remove it as it looked a bit strange and out of place. It also was not going to tie into the tattoos. The images above are some screenshots of my early textures before I had fully refined them. I Am planning on making some eyelash alphas on a 512 just to give the eyes some more depth to them.
When having a look at some stylised references I noticed that a lot of them made use of gradient texturing to add variations in colour to them without adding too much detail as it gives it a very clean look. I added this ombré effect to the hair on my character and am very pleased with how it looks. I like the idea of giving her slightly yellow bleached hair as it related back to the Gyaru research I did where they often had very yellow bleached hair. This is also a common thing among yakuza members. I have included a picture of the 2D texture sheet of the hair texture so you can see how the ombré has plied to it.
After feedback from my lecture It was suggested to me that I could use the AO map to pop out the hair sculpt even more. Therefore using my AO bake I added some more finer strand details as highlights and inverted it to created some more dimension with out adding too much noise. I am very pleased with how this is currently looking as I think the sculp baked on very well and my generators are picking it out well.
I picked out some of the detail with my AO map.
Further reference I used
As I said previously I used padme from Star Wars as a bit of a reference for the makeup and look of my character. I really liked her bold Mongolian tribe and geisha inspired makeup as I think it gives her a sense of importance and brings in multiple different cultural traditions including Japanese.
Traditional Geisha makeup most commonly involves very pale faces and red eye, lip and cheek makeup. I didn't want to make my character look exactly like a Gesiha as she is only supposed to be inspired as she is a yakuza captain therefore I chose not to include the white face makeup.
The inspiration for the line on the lip came from both Geisha and Mongolian tribe face paints which inspired Padmes makeup.
I really liked the dots on the cheeks.
Here is a refence I found of a girl from a Mongolian tribe with the traditional face makeup including the dots on he cheeks.
This is a character concept that I drew for a future tribes brief and I decided to refer back to this for some element of my fantasy yakuza captain. For this character concept I also looked at Mongolian tribes and was happy with the outcome. I thought it would be nice to incorporate some of the elements into this 3D project brief for my final year.
I really enjoyed using my own concept and ideas for the character as it give me the opportunity to not only make a game ready character model from start to finish but also come up with a unique and interesting concept considering the silhouette and player appeal. I didn’t use anyone else’s concept so I have been able to do a lot of in depth research in creating a unique and interesting character. I really enjoy creating my own concepts and one thing that I am proud of myself for doing this project is creating this character from start to finish. Even though I did not have enough time to draw out concept iterations I was able to collect a lot of reference images that I took different ideas from to create an interesting geisha yakuza gyaru hybrid from. If time allowed it I would have liked to be able to sketch out my concept and get feedback on one iterations before making it however considering the time constraints I did my best to consider many aspects of my research with out a solid concept to copy directly from.
For the tattoos on my character I used many different images which I made alphas from in photoshops and stamped them on in painter and then corrected them by erasing the mask to make them perfectly fit around the characters arms and leg. This was the non copyright png that I took into photoshop to use as the thigh tattoo. I looked at a lot of references for the type and positioning of the tattoos on my character so I could get a sense of authenticity as yakuza are well knows for having tattoos it it one of their most identifiable traits. I also did a tattoo down the shoulder and arm which i made using some alphas and hand painting it myself based off traditional Japanese tattoos an prints.
Here is the finished texture in substance painter. I am quite pleased with the colour pallet of the character as I think it suggests the concept quite well and has linked in nicely with all of my influences but with a darker and more badass twist. The red and gold themes push my character towards being important and high up. To make sure my character wasn’t overly symmetrical I went for a half and half leopard print and more traditional fabric for the top and skirt whilst considering the movements of te character in the actual clothing design as previously mentioned. The image above shows the front view of my character.
I was going for a very clean and overwatch kind of look so. Did not add lots of surface or fibrous detail and kept he overall texture quite simplistic apart from the designs on the fabrics and tattoos. I made sure that the design and silhouette of my charter was interesting and distinguishable. Since the last time I took screenshots of the hair for my blog I have added more definition to the hair by using the AO map to make it pop out more. Since the hair is quite a prominent part of my project.
-Next i will be making and tweaks to my texture alongside unreal and marmoset files.
-taking beauty shots and a turntable video
- Adjusting the lighting for my unreal deliverable.
Texture sheet sizes I will be using-
-Hair- 1024
-Skin- 2048
-Clothing- 2048
-Eyes- 512
Posing my model
Today I planned to put my model into Mixamo in order to pose it. I was quite nervous of how mixamo was going to work because of some of the shapes on my model are quite big and may rig awkwardly using the software. If needs be I plan on brining the model with the bones into 3DS Max to hand fix any issues myself. I wont be animating it, just posing it in a relevant way that fits with my character. I am thinking of doing a fighting stance or a kick pose.
I have now exported my model out of mixamo and there weren’t many issues with the skinning and rigging surprisingly. I had a few issues with the sides of the top a the hair which I tried my best to fix in 3DS max. The skinning is not completely perfect but for this project asI am just posing it it looks good. I do struggle quite a lot with rigging and skinning so I had to mess about with the model quite a lot. Now I am going to set up a marmoset scene and import my posed model into it.
Marmoset scene
This is how I have set up my scene in marmoset. From previous feedback from when I had my character in unreal I was advised to light it with some kind of background. So in 3DS max I modelled a cube and the inset and extruded it inwards to create a box where I will light my character, this allows me to have a lot more control on the lighting set up. I will be doing this for my other project also.
When I imported my posed model into marmoset and also my unreal file I noticed that there was this range issue going on with this poly on the hand. It took me awhile to work out what was going on with it as the weight painting looked ok and so did the model in max.
-I fixed this by resetting the xforms in max and editing normal and resetting the verts and faces.
I have now fixed this issue and am very happy with how it looked in marmoset. I’m going to be putting my textures onto it now and setting up a lighting scene accordingly.
I was quite happy with how the textures ended up looking in marmoset however I need to properly set up a lighting scene before I take my beauty shots. I will also be lighting it in a box as suggested by my lecture. It looks a bit strange just floating in space and this will also give me more control over the lights and how they are casting shadows over my character.
I have imported my posed character into marmoset and made an extruded cube to light it in from. 3DS max. I am not very familiar with using marmoset as it’s only the second time I have tried it however I will use some tutorials and lighting theory to find the best set up for my character. I will consider the 3 point light concept when doing this. The image above shows my currently lighting set up however I really do not like this as there is too much going on with the spotlight. I also think the background colour needs to be darker so that my character stands out a little more.
This is the scene with the removed spot flight however the details on the hair are getting quite washed out.
The darker background looks much better but the lighting complexity is too much.
This is the lighting I am now settled on. I am very pleased with how this is looking as the background looks soft yet it is not completely pitch black. I have also added a side light in a red tint which adds a contrast to it. The backlighting is soft but makes the character pop out from the back ad brings out the silhouette nicely.
These are the lights which I have used. I will now be taking my beauty shot renders and making a turntable video as required by the brief. Then I will be setting up my unreal scene mimicking the lighting setup I have done in marmoset.
Unreal file set up- week 5
Earlier on in the project I had an unreal scene which was just on a black background and after some feedback I was advised to change that to a cube setup which I have done for marmoset and now my unreal file. The lighting is not complex with a combination of warm and cool point lights to bring out the textures of the character and give it a bit of an atmosphere.
I have made sure to set up my unreal file correctly with naming conventions , folder organisation and correct material setup and appropriate texture sizes imported for the hand in.
Here is what my unreal light set up looks like. It is quite simple as I have tried to consider lighting theory as well as the unique context and pose of my yakuza captain.
In my unreal file I will be submitting both the posed character and an A pose so that it is clear what my character looks like in both contexts.
Final shots and overall reflections
Conclusion- Strengths, weaknesses and reflections
Firstly I have very much enjoyed this brief as it gave me the freedom to create a captain interpreted in whatever way I wanted. It gave me the opportunity to not only make a stylised character which I have never done before but also make up my own concept design from start to finish. One of my strengths this project was that I came up with my own design based off dry in depth research and applied it in a way where i produced a finished and game art character which has an interesting integrative design. I really enjoyed being able to explore stylised creative anatomy an having a look at some character theories such as silhouettes along side following along with this professional brief. Since I have never made a stylised character before I was worried that it would com out looking strange or uncanny but overall I’m pleased with the sculpt and after tweaking it from feedback along the way I think I was able to produce a solid high poly to work from. I really tried to meticulously think about the design of the captain and although my finished result isn’t an obvious captain such as a pirate captain where it is easy to incorporate design features to show its a captain, I think I tried to include elements which ore subtly suggest her position. In a game of course she would be given a narrative alongside the design to make it clear.
I struggled somewhat with time constraints and did end up messing up some of my planned workflow to make following steps more efficient such as thinking about how I would be able to retop assets to the best of my ability. This is something I will correct next time. Another issue I would address if I had more time would be the topology on the shoulder. Even though it is functional and correct I think it could have better deformation loops for movement as the looped need to go more broadly around the shoulder rather than on it. Finally I would have liked to be able to make some props such as a sword or gun however I ran out of time. To somewhat compensate I posed her in a fighting stance with blood on her hands as if she does hand to hand combat rather than using a weapon. However sticking true to yakuza ways contextually she would have had a gun, bat or sword. Overall although there were a couple of things I wish to improve upon for my fmp project I’m happy with the overall quality and finish of the character and would love to make another stylised character in future projects.
