Unreal Engine Start

-

Unreal Engine Start



As I was at the texturing point for all of the assets, I decided to import everything into Unreal Engine 4 and start setting up materials to see how the character would look.

Originally I played around with the fairly new 'Material Layers' feature in Unreal which worked slightly like Substance Painter in the fact that it has layers which you can assign different materials to and add layer masks. However, the layered material was buggy and often caused crashes, plus I found I was using quite a few layers for texture breakup, so I decided to just handle most of the colour and breakup in Substance Painter and use Unreal for blending tiling normals and subsurface scattering etc.




I created a master material to use for the clothing as a lot of the outfit benefited from using the same features such as subsurface scattering and fuzz. Once the master material was setup, I then made material instances for each of the separate clothing pieces so I could alter the properties and maps etc of each item.

Below is the material graph of the master clothing material, I tried keeping in mind all of the necessary features I would need and parameterised every part that I would need to change.





Here are the instances of the master outfit material. By creating the materials this way, I can tweak and edit parameters quickly and easily without having to recompile anything.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finalising in Marvelous Designer

-
Image
Finalising in Marvelous Designer   Moving forward with Marvelous Designer, I experimented with having the jacket open and closed, by doing this I was able to double check the proportions and fitting around my avatar.  I decided that I wanted to keep the jacket open as I felt it would look better in engine as I could add cloth physics, also if I had left it closed, the vest and trousers would be concealed which I didn't want.   I also experimented with adding a utility belt for my character in which I would put potions or vials. After finalising the garments to a point where I was happy with how they fit my character, I went back over each piece and increased the Particle Distance as well as changing the Weft and Warp values in order to increase or reduce folds in the clothing. Marvelous Designer has presets for different materials which were a good starting point, however they weren't giving me the folds that I wanted....
Read more

Hyde Texture Start

-
Image
Hyde Texture Start After the sculpt was finalised, it was just a case of redoing the UVs for Hyde's head and hand and mouth, as the geometry was all the same, then baking and texturing in Substance Painter. For the skin, I used the same methods and techniques that I employed with Jekyll. For reference, I found that elderly people's faces offered really good details and colour information that worked well with the look I was after.
Read more

Morph Target Practice

-
Image
Morph Target Practice In order to find out if the my idea for my project would be feasible, and to understand the process of animating the morph targets on my character, I carried out a basic test in Unreal Engine 4. Firstly, I created a deformed variation of my model in ZBrush using the same mesh, so it had the same geometry and UVs. I then exported both the high and low poly models of the man and deformed man, then imported them into 3DS Max. I used the Morpher modifier in Max to pick the deformed mesh for my model to morph into. I then exported the original male mesh ready for use in Unreal. Inside Unreal Engine, I used the Normal maps for both of the models, which I had previously baked in Substance Painter, and set them up to blend in a material. I then made an instance of that material so that I could change the properties of the parameters I had exposed. Inside Unreal, I used the 3rd Person Character template to give me a start with a ca...
Read more