FMP - Easter Break #2

 I’ve made very specific creative decisions with my FMP from the get go which I’m glad I have because it’s given me a chance to enhance and refine skills in ways I hadn’t thought about before. Mainly this being about me choosing to create diffuse only hand painted models as opposed to PBR models. There are understandable limitations to diffuse only models like them not being as procedural as PBR so editing them can be hard or them not being able to carry as much depth to them texture wise, etc. But considering I had to ensure I was creating a project that could do within 4 months and produce work of a professional standard, choosing diffuse only was the better option for me.  I’m not opposed to PBR nor do I consider myself unable to effectively make a PBR model, it was just I felt that my hand painted skills at the time of deciding what to do for my FMP were stronger. I didn’t want to end up fumbling a PBR based project when I knew I could do a hand painted project much more efficiently.

That being said, I still needed to include an aspect of PBR to my project to showcase that I do have these skills that are sought after in the games industry.

From previous feedback and some thought of my own, I’d decided to make an additional PBR prop that I would have as another focal point for my overall scene. I’d planned to have my characters displayed as a sort of mini diorama in Unreal Engine 4 just for aesthetics (I’ll do individual renders of the characters as well since they are the main priority though).

The prop I’m creating is a gemstone, similar to the ones that appear on the all the characters, with some gold and chains attached to it. What I knew I had to be careful with though was keeping the style uniform with the characters so the PBR material didn’t make the prop look out of place against the characters. I’d looked into heavily stylised PBR and saw a character by Tim Paauwe on Artstation where he’d taken to hand painting it completely but then created a PBR material also. Had I seen this post 4 months ago I might have been inspired to try this for all my characters but what’s done is done so I’ll save that for a personal project. But I could apply what I learnt from looking at his posts to my prop.

It was very basic design wise- I created the low poly version in 3DSMax first before going into ZBrush and applying my levels of detail. Nothing too complex, just standard scratches and cracks in the gemstone and gold. The unwrap was all done in Max and I baked a normal, AO and curvature map in Marmoset. Typically in the past though whenever I’ve done PBR stylization, I’ve used Substance Painter to create my textures. But this time around I used 3DCoat, mainly because 3DCoat was what I was more comfortable getting the painted style I’d achieved for all my characters with. It could handle PBR just as well as Substance though.

I completed all my painting just as I did with my characters. But with my final albedo, I went into Photoshop and rendered it out in grayscale to create a roughness map. In 3DCoat there was a means to paint in roughness right then and there but I thought converting the albedo would be the best way to enhance the hand painted textures without the PBR material making the whole texture feel misplaced. I packed my AO map and metallic map into the RGB channels alongside the roughness map straightaway when I’d gotten it adjusted to my liking.

 

With this though, I had to immediately test out how the textures would look as a material in engine so that I could make adjustments if necessary.

At this point, I implemented my whole scene into Unreal, characters and all. I’d posed my characters previously so staged them around the gemstone and assembled my lights and post processing. My PBR assets worked well against my diffuse only assets- I’d tweaked my post processing so that the strength of the diffuse maps were more impactful and it didn’t look overcast against the PBR materials. I found this tip from an Artstation post by Linus Asplund.

I created smaller PBR assets alongside the gemstone like rocks just to fill up the scene some more and it really turned out to be a miniature diorama, much more to the scene than I’d initially thought. But it works well, it brings it all together. Having made these assets though, I thought I would have time to create some VFX on aspects like Judgment’s tail and whatnot. But it was honestly a different ballpark that I wasn’t familiar with and having to spend extra time making these props meant I had less time to research and figure out how to make the VFX I imagined. I tried to do something simple with just a panning texture in the node editor but it didn’t look good to me so I scrapped it. And with the deadline approaching, I don’t think I’ll be able to make what I want. Which is a shame but I don’t want to add something that looks cheap or half-done to my models as that could detract from it as a whole. I’m fine with them just being stationary.