This week was dedicated to finalizing my last few models and textures before final implementation into unreal for scene construction and with a lot of effort, time and dedication I was successful in achieving that goal. Specifically it was the construction, rigging and texturing of the character’s clothing and the creation of the face texture and creation of a human skull.
Going over the face texture first I created by taking pictures of my fellow students and mixing and matching parts of them in a face texture that I had created. The base texture was one I made from one of my friends
I used an online tutorial on how to set up the texture and what pictures to take. I made this image from 3 photos, front view, side profile and a middle between the two.
And finally mixing and matching resulted in this.
While it is a strange visual it is exactly what I was looking for. A homunculus composed of many different peoples to act as a visual stand in for as many people as I can.
Now the most difficult part of this process for me was getting the UVs for my face to fit comfortably in the 3d model I constructed around my skull. It took a lot of tricks and help from my friends but I was finally able to get my UVs to fit. Out of all the challenges I faced this week this was easily the most challenging as thus far I’d created my own textures in substance so I had no need to worry about conforming UVs to a pre-existing texture.
The skull underneath it was also textured
The skull was actually quite easy to construct. With all the refence images I had blocking it out wasn’t that bad. However what was difficult was making it look more organic, I am still not totally comfortable with the sculpting tools but I think the final outcome was really good!
Lastly the clothing, this was the refence image I was using to construct the outfit.
The technique I used to construct the outfit was to take a base model available in maya and cut out sections of its topology to be used as a basis for the clothing. This was a quick way of constructing accurate clothing and proved to simplify the process. What I wanted to do with this texture was to, instead of having each item have its own texture like I had always done, I have the entire outfit as a single texture with their UVs properly organized. I wanted to do this as to optimize my textures and not have the issue I tend to have which is one item having 3 or 4 textures which results in 20+ images that I later need to hook up to produce the texture in maya/unreal.
In substance to create the individual clothes I just had a series of white masks to, in substance, separate the clothing into individual parts. While this obviously would have an impact on fidelity the final result doesn’t really show that loss of quality. As a result this model had a complete outfit as a single texture which tremendously streamlined my workflow for setting up the texture in unreal.
I also rigged the outfit using Human IK so I can later pose it in unreal.
This was the first time I had to rig fingers which wasn’t to difficult thanks to an online tutorial.