FMP - Week 10-15 (Valkyrie)

Personal time

Over the duration that I will be completing the Adventurer in university allocated time, I will be using my spare time to get the Valkyrie up to date. I want her texturing to be finished by the polish week so I can gather crit and alter what needs to be changed whilst still having time to pose and present.

She's all retopped now and unwrapped I'm just trying to learn a small bit of xgen in maya so to create the hair cards to finish the hair.

This is the high poly of her hair cap, I have re topped and unwrapped this and will be painting an opacity map in Photoshop for the hair around her face so its not such a harsh edge. I will be using hair cards placed all around her head to build up the illusion of hair whilst the hair base gives thickness and depth the hair without using thousands of cards.

I've just done the skin detail :

I think I may have made all the pores too subtle so I might have to go back into Zbruhs and fiddle with the layers to make them more extreme or i could edit the baked normals but im not sure yet so i'll see after the bake.

All baked and ready to go! Got a few errors I need to clean up but mostly good. First thing I'm going to do is do the hardsurface details on the oversuit and armour.

Just a few hours of blocking out my ideas and base textures:

Spent my time in the past couple days adding the smaller tertiary hard surface details in Substance Painter:

I will be putting screws into all the indents around the panels.

This was the first time I had done this technique and it was hard to see which details I should of baked from either max or Zbrush but I think it was a lot easier to do panel lines in substance (cleaner too) which is a shame as I had already done the under suit lines in Zbrush but i'll know for next time.

I also gathered some 3D character with the materials I wanted to emulate with my character:

I was really inspired by Junior Guerhard's character (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l2V5o) on the top and bottom right as her materials are really what I had pictured when creating the Valkyrie. I think to make the texturing really pop i'm going to have to add a lot small details all over. The layered panels with contrasting trims are really effective in the bottom left character by Colton Orr (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/llyXO), as they help to show the shapes clearer etc which I think I will struggle with.

I am currently tidying up the normals and AO's from my bake before I begin my final texturing.

End of the week, wasn't really sure what to do after cleaning up my bakes and baking the hard surface I had done in substance and after receiving crit I was advised creating a mood board with lots of different colour variations might help.

After looking at them all I realised that having contrast between the 3 main layers would be really important in having a visually appealing character. I think the overall census was that red and black would be cool but doesn't really fit her character and the teal blue was more fitting but 1 had too similar colours. So I chose number 4, this is still not set in stone, I think after putting the wings on I may need to change a few things but I am happy with it for now.

Here's a quick screen grab of the current armour and suit progress in substance painter.

I haven't really touched the armour too much I still need to go in and place a lot of decals and variation in the metal etc. However, the under suit is almost done, more work is needed for the secondary suit parts I think too.

Hopefully all my texturing will be done by next week and then I can focus on getting her rigged and posed and presented ready for hand in :)

Here's more process I've made on the texturing. Face is almost done as well as the eyes I've basically only got the hair and accessories to do now.

So the wings are almost done (all placed in Max) and I have just spend a day attempting to do the hair in Maya using XGen. I have been wanting to try this software for a while but never had a tutorial or straight forward steps to follow to create hair cards. Thankfully Saran gave me one and I have made them.

I went to render them however and mental for some reason does not work. I think I will install a newer version of Maya at home and try to render it there, fingers crossed.

I got some really great from Craig and Saran explaining that a lot of the textures are missing a texture detail pass, and so as a result they are quite ambiguous and sort of stylised looking. I need to really work on getting detail into the face and armour.

Been struggling a lot through my characters with dead looking eyes and got crit to try some new techniques such as create a shadow plane for the eye and create a plane that is the eye wetness. I think these will both look amazing in marmoset and they look pretty nice in substance too.

Finally got around to putting the model and textures into marmoset, doesn't look too shabby at all. The wings are in but just with the normal and opacity, I need to create another variation on the texture and actually texture the feathers in substance.

Thankfully the materials look quite similar as they did in substance and i wont have to change much. I'm currently redoing the heel of the foot and slowly getting through a long line of crit and things i need to change. Hopefully tomorrow I will get some help on how to fix the hair problem so I can get that done.

AHH after spending a whole weekend and asking multiple tutors etc, I could not do the hair in xgen. I followed a tutorial and the hair looked fine in the view port but i had a whole load of problems with the mental ray renderer. So I gave up and didn't want to waste more time trying to fix the unfixable so I used substance to create the hair instead and although it doesn't look as good im really running out of time and she needs to be done by Friday so i have to move on. Here's what the hair looks like:

She's done wooo!! Just got to rig and pose now. Here is a GIF of the finished (t-pose) character. Too fast and awfully compressed I know, I will have a mp4 thats much better quality on my artstation.

I want her to be finished by Friday but if I have time i might quickly make a simple sci-fi pole arm for her to fit in the pose, probably not going to happen but I can hope.