I think the character came out okay. She is my first truly completed 3D model for a game. I did all of the textures, modeling, rigging and animation for the character. I am certain there is some areas that need improvement but I am satisfied with the results at this point. Right now I even have her animated and playable somewhat in my game prototype Prism. However, before I get to that, I also wanted to show off the main props for Aphrael. First is the handgun.
This is Aphrael's handgun. The design was inspired from several sources, including a Baretta M9, a Varista from Phantasy Star Online, and a few other little things from various sources. In addition, I tried to keep the same motif of the weapon with Aphrael's sword to illustrate that the same manufacturer builds these weapons. I also wanted sharp, clean simplified lines with the overall aesthetic, giving it an authentic, yet futuristic look.
The textures themselves were interesting to build. I first made two texture maps, a diffuse map and an RGB mask. The RGB mask is used to tell Unreal what texture appears at what UV coordinate. After creating these, I made another RGB mask and diffuse map. These separate maps were used to tell Unreal where the decals on the handgun would be such as the text on the side of the barrel or the red safety mark by the safety switch.
Getting a good metal texture is one of the hardest things to do in 3D visual arts. However, after much practice, I have devised several ways in achieving different metals like the stainless steel and matte black metal of the body of the gun. Both use a tiling texture to create the base properties of the metal. This texture is not in the actual diffuse but is actually controlled by the roughness, or glossy output of the material. Both use a simple noise pattern, but how they are tiled and their specularity settings is what makes the difference. For the stainless steel, I have the noise pattern tiling in mainly one direction and in the other direction, squeezed to a point where it looks like fibers. For the black matte metal, the noise is processed through an inverse node so instead of being shiny and reflective, it is matte with some light reflected due to the density of the noise pattern, giving that metallic matte finish to the material. The overall shader is actually quite simple, but you have to know what you are doing to get these kind of results with as little work as possible.
Now the shader settings for the handgun were copied over for use with Aphrael's sword which you can see below:
I used the same techniques here for the textures, RGB masks for the texture and decals layout, then two diffuse maps to define the color. Everything else is tiled and controlled by nodes in the material editor in Unreal. The blade itself is even simpler, using an emissive shader along with transparency to give the blade that energy-like feel since it is supposed to be an energy blade, not a solid one. The emissive part itself has a strength setting that I can tweak to control the strength of the glow. Also, note the design aesthetic of the hilt. Again, clean, minimalistic lines to give that futuristic feel. That is carried over onto the handgun and vice versa.
Now as I mentioned earlier, I have Aphrael in the early prototype of the game I am making, Prism. The last pictured I showed had trees and water, but not really much else. Here is a screenshot I rendered from Unreal of the changes to the level since last I posted about it:
Now it is starting to look more like a forest. The ferns were actually more of a hassle than anticipated to texture because of my usual method of creating textures. When I create plant textures, I usually look up several sources of photographs, chop them up into unrecognizable bits, repurpose them into a new image (a collage you can say) that looks good for a texture map of a plant, and apply that to the mesh. However, I could not find the references I needed to do this effectively for the ferns. Thus what I did is I closely studied the structure of the ferns and their leaves and then hand painted in Photoshop an individual leaf. I then copied and duplicated this into a larger texture with the stem of the leaf. Finally, I used this large leaf on an even larger texture with the actual branch, copying and pasting the smaller textures to create the whole main structure and placing it on a plane for the fern. Then in Maya, I copied this single mesh by using a duplicate tool in a 360 rotation several times and got the effect I was looking for, a functional looking fern. To ensure a little randomness to the mesh, I slightly rotated each tier of leaves slightly off center to give a more natural look.
The material of fern itself was simple enough. I created a normal map from a desaturated version of the diffuse texture in XNormal and then tweaked the specularity settings to get the appropriate shine of the leaves in the sunlight. Ferns have a slight sheen to them, so I wanted to try to capture that with the normal map and specularity settings. It gives the ferns a much needed sense of depth and three dimensionality. After that, changed the shader settings to a two-sided foliage and used a brighter version of the diffuse map for the subsurface lighting in the leaves. This really makes them seem more realistic, especially at a distance when sunlight is shining through the leaves of the trees.
One final thing I wanted to point out to was the texture for the water. In the game itself, the water moves using a simple panning node on two tiled normal maps combined with a depth fade. If you notice, the water is not as rough and turbulent as it was in my earlier post. One of the problems I had with the water is that it made the pond to stormy and choppy looking. The area doesn't have that much wind, just subtle breezes. In order to reflect this accurately in the water, I had to rework the normal maps. This didn't take long, especially since I use the same tiling texture for both normal maps. Its just that one of the textures is rotated 90 degrees in relation to the other. In addition, both textures use a slightly different panner node so they move at different speeds, giving the illusion of small waves on the surface of the water. Finally, a Fresnel plugged into the refractive output of the material is used in conjunction with those same normal maps to crate the reflections on the surface of the water.
So Aphrael herself is done at this point and the forest level is starting to really come into its own. I hope all of you enjoyed what you have seen and understand what I was explaining about the textures and how they were made. Next I may go into further detail about the rig that I used for Aphrael using Unreal Engine 4's wonderful Maya plugin, the Animation and Rigging Toolkit. This tool is a beast and it made building the rig and animation much easier and faster. I may go ahead and talk about this next so stay tuned!
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