WIP: Aphreal Texturing 2

Greetings and salutations. Sorry about the lack of posts, I've been quite busy recently. However, I do have work to show which consists of improving the textures on Aphrael. Lets go ahead and look at a full body shot so we can see the overall change in appearance from last time I posted.

Improved texture on Aphrael.

The materials are coming out much better than they have before. The satin is looking really nice, the hose actually now looks like hose and the hair... THE HAIR!

New and improved hair!

Another angle of the new hair.

The hair is amazing now. I learned how to do this hair by looking at a material set up posted on the forum here. I then tweaked a few values and added a few other things and I now have decent looking hair. However, the hair is not the only thing that is starting to look nice. Take a look at where tiling can take you in Unreal Engine 4:

A close look at the tiling textures for the jacket and leather.

Those textures, they look hi-res but they're really not. They are 256x256 normal maps. I have the material set up so that it tiles in the u and v directions of the UV map, creating the illusion of thread or texture roughness on the leather. The sheen on the satin is only possible because instead of using a diffuse material, I used a metallic material instead. And all of this controlled by RGB masks.

So the textures are coming out quite well. There is still a lot work to be done and I definitely need these textures polished up so that they will really look good. I hope to display that level of quality soon but for now I leave you all with shots of Aphrael's upper body and her legs to show off what UE4 can do and how it is helping get nice textures for the character. Enjoy!

Upper body.

Aphrael's legs.

WIP: Aphrael Texturing 1

Greetings and salutations! Today I want to show what I have so far in regards to texturing Aphrael so far. It is coming out okay but a lot of work still needs to be done in order for the model to look good. Here is what I have so far:

Full body test in Unreal Engine 4.

Face test in Unreal Engine 4.

I mainly only have diffuse maps going at the moment except for the hair, but I will get into that in a little bit. So far the colors are reading correctly so now I have to make the appropriate specular and normal maps to bring out the textures of the materials. The UV sets are all working correctly thus this will allow me to use tiling normals to drive the actual normals through RGB masks. I also need to make a subsurface map for the Aphrael's skin even though the current vector set up I have is doing pretty well by itself. You can see it in the fingers here:

Some subsurface scattering in Unreal Engine 4.

The main problem I am having right now is the hair. The hair looks pretty bad and I will more than likely re-do it. While trying to render hair in UE4, I discovered a major flaw with the engine: it has translucency sorting errors! WTF!? Most modern engines don't have this problem at this point but for some reason UE4 has sorting problems when dealing with translucent objects. I will show you what I mean with a render using a base translucency shader:



Sorting errors in UE4.

Looks horrible doesn't it? If you still don't understand what is going on, let me a explain a bit. When rendering out translucent objects, not having the right algorithm in the software can cause the renderer to be confused on which translucent object to render in front and which one to render in back. The result of this causes a sorting error because the engine doesn't know which objects to render in which order. Hence the mess above. I discovered this problem in Maya and mental ray and I despaired to encounter this in UE4. Sorting errors are very difficult to fix. Lucky for me, after a bit of research, I found a work around called dithering.

Usually when one thinks of dithering, they think of a shading technique in 2D space such as the choppy shading in animated GIFs. However, in this case, the principle behind this is applied in 3D space to create the illusion of soft edges when using UE4's opacity mask. Why the opacity mask? Normally it renders hard edges from the alpha channel because it can only read 0 and 1 and not everything in between like the translucency channel can. However, using dithering and then a blurring node in the opacity mask can help smooth out the edges and hence no need to worry about a sorting error since the opacity mask doesn't use translucency. So what does that mean for the hair? Well now I don't have the translucency mess that I had before. Take a look:

Using blurred dithering for in the Opacity Mask channel.

Now that I understand what is going on with the render, I can attempt to fix the issue when I re-model the hair. Hopefully when I post about Aphrael again, the hair will be much improved. We'll see!

Disgusting.

Greetings and salutations. I want everyone, especially men, to read this article. You can find it here. Come back when you are done.

Stuff like what is described in this article is horrible and makes me angry and sad. In the U.S. alone from what I hear (I don't remember the source unfortunately so I will have to look it up), one in two are sexually harassed at one point or another in their lives. That is fifty percent of all women in this country. For men, it is one in three, or thirty-three percent of all men, a far lower but still disturbing statistic.

My concern at the moment is for women. I remember back in the past some men asking me why I do not date or why do I not flirt, etc. This article is one reason why. So I don't seem like an animal, a creep, a pervert. Because I am none of those. I am a man, a human who doesn't believe people are animals. Even when people act like animals. To me, the people who act like animals bring themselves down. Why do that when you can be better? I will never know nor do I care to know. All I know is that it isn't right. Women are not objects for men to use as they please. They too are human, not some animal to be used. Look up the word sexual dimorphism if you are having a hard time thinking men and women are both human. After researching that and you are still having a hard time viewing women as humans, then get out of here. I don't want to associate with beings that are less than animals.

My rules for myself when dealing with women? Do not look. Do not touch. Do not speak unless spoken too. The exception is if you absolutely must speak to them for a legitimate reason like if they are a cashier or you have a work related question for a female co-worker. Otherwise, I stay away. I don't want to be seen as an animal. Because that's what men are who behave in the type of behavior described in the article. They are animals that need to be put down forever. They are less than animals actually and don't deserve to be on this planet.

I do not consider myself a feminist, but boy do I sure understand where they are coming from.