Eden
Player Character Production for Viridian
Harvey, R. (2019) Meet the Model: Erika Linder. Available at https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-au/porter/article-773108feae83bc0c/fashion/art-of-style/erika-linder
I started with Metahuman as we had decided to as the character artists on Viridian. For our androgynous character, I used famously androgynous model Erika Linder as reference. Of course this face will change as it is sculpted over to fit the Final Fantasy style, but this creates a good base to work from. This also provides a body base mesh that won't need much alteration as we had decided to use realistic anatomy for the form.
These clips show the metahuman in motion, with and without hair for reference.
Credit: Metahuman
Credit: Metahuman
Exporting the metahuman into Maya through Quixel Bridge, I deleting the rig, in fact, anything that wasn't geometry, and combined everything excluding the eyeballs. This made the base mesh suitable for sculpting over, so I took into into ZBrush.
Above are some progress photos of the sculpt-over which I shared with my team as I worked. As a part of this process I also added some skin details like wrinkles, and made sure there was a clear distinction between the skin and the nails. When it came to areas I knew would be covered by clothing, I made fewer changes to the surface, as only the general shape would be seen through the cloth. This means that the legs ang feet are generally smooth, and there is a lack of nipples and a belly button.
After using Dynamesh to create a lower poly version of this mesh, I imported it into Maya to add a quick rig, which would enable successful collision with cloth within Marvellous Designer.
I did encounter this error when trying to create the quick rig, it turned out it was just that my up axis was set to Z rather than Y for some reason.
Once the rig was all set up, I could import the mesh into Marvellous Designer, ready for creating the cloth piece base meshes.
I say base mesh, as the plan is to sculpt over these, so I'm not concerned with specific stitching or details in marvellous, just using the cloth simulation to create a realistic shape around the body.
Above are the garment base meshes I made in Marvellous, ready to import into Maya to combine the seam verts. Whilst this was loaded into the program, I made a quick couple of base meshes for buckles and potion vials and their holders.
After importing into ZBrush, I used the ZModeller brush with the QMesh and All Polygons options enabled, I added thickness to the meshes to make sure I'd be able to sculpt over them without making irreparable changes to the form/silhouette. Once the meshes were thickened, I used Dynamesh to add more geometry to the mesh and smoothed it somewhat to make it easier to read for the next step. This step included using a mix of the gizmo and move brush to adjust all the pieces to fit together with their new shape.
Now, the long process of sculpting over this begins. I don't have too many process photos of this step, as constantly taking snapshots was breaking up my flow and, to be honest, I forgot to do it a lot of the time; but hopefully what I have here will be enough to show the progression of this character.
I made sure to share these progress images with my team to get feedback to work with as well.
These snapshots show some of the progress between sculpts and feedback.
These images should, hopefully, explain the process I went through to add stitching details to many of the assets. I took the High Poly version of the asset (in this case, the bag) into ZBrush and used a brush set from a creator on ArtStation to add stitching. For this bag, I chose a simple running stitch, as this is how I imagine an old leather piece like this would be sewn together. I believe I used this stitch on most of the assets, as they were mostly leather. For any of the clothing pieces, I would have opted for a more complex cross-shape stitch that really looks like it can hold the garment together. However, since all the garments' seams are correct and inside, there were no visible areas where I could add this detail.
These are all the final high poly assets in Maya. There were some instances of the meshes clipping through themselves here, so I brought the assets this was affecting back into ZBrush to delete the inner faces the could be seen.
Doing this was simple enough, I used the masking brush (with Backface Masking turned off) to mask off the areas I wanted to keep. I then hid the other areas from view and used DeleteHidden to remove these from the mesh altogether.
Retop went smoothly, I used rings like this to ensure the right topology was centered around reas of the face that moved. For the other assets, there was no need for this so I kept the retop as simple as I could. I did use a reference image for the hand topology as shown below.
Sergeev, A. (2018) Free Hand Topology Model. Available at https://80.lv/articles/free-hand-topology-model/
The final low poly character assets.
I made a duplicate of the low poly head and used the multi-cut tool to cut out a hair cap that would sit between the head and the hair, to give the illusion of fuller hair without using too many hair tubes and reaching too many polys. The full head must remain underneath, as the hair cap will use the existing hair card texture, which has transparency, so without the head, the player will be able to see inside the model.
This image shows how I distributed the materials on the character, with one for the head, one for the skin on the arms, one for any cloth assets, one for the hard surface pieces (belt, metal, etc.) one for the hair and one for the eyes.
Here is an example of the UV map layout. This one in particular is for the hard surface pieces.
Now onto the baking process. You can see in this shot below that I kept getting these dark artefacts despite tweaking my baking settings. I took the model into ZBrush to inspect it and found that the mesh had inside faces that were pressing through, hence causing these artefacts. I used the move brush to carefully pull these back in, and then the bake worked just fine.
For my texturing process, I keep it pretty simple by using combinations of base materials from substance painter. I always start by pulling materials onto each piece so I can texture everything at once, being able to see all the pieces next to each other proves extremely useful for creating a cohesive and sophisticated look.
Below are progress images of texturing the face, filling in the eyebrows, adding temperature with yellow, blue and red and using substance painter skin textures in conjunction with each other to create a variety of textures around the face.
Shown above is the hair created with hair cards, which is used in-game due to its functionality and low budget. To create these cards, I worked with one of our environment artists in Substance Designer. The process of creating these is shown more clearly further down this page.
I painted the emissive mask design I wanted directly onto the arms in Substance painter, and export the Base Colour Map. This way none of the shapes were distorted, as they were created in the 3D space.
This shows the end result of using the alpha I made to create a tiling embroidered design on the outer shirt. I created this alpha in Clip Studio. This alpha is show to the right.
Some areas of the alpha are cut out so it only affected the UVs of the outer shirt.
Fully textured character in Unity engine.
Fully textured character classes in Unity engine.
I wasn't happy with the final sculpt of the face, I think I should have spent more time collecting clear reference for the Final Fantasy style, as this part of the face sculpt was very difficult. I wanted to see what the original metahuman face would look like. I could only use this version in Unreal engine as per Metahuman's ToS, so this render on the left is in UE4.
Using the metahuman head highlighted the low quality of the hair cards, so I wanted to experiment with a different method of making the hair. I used a method that involved making hair clump shapes in ZBrush (I used a custom brush by to do this) and then importing them to Maya. Ensuring each end of the shape is open, I smooth it and convert it to subdivisions, then to NURBS. After this I make use the 'Surface to Curves' option in the utilities tab of the XGen options.
Creating curves along each shape lengthways, I then delete the geometry and use these curves in conjunction with Maya's hair system.
Click here to view the final character renders on ArtStation