Aphrael Red FINAL!

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show all of you the completed work for Aphrael Red. Yay! First up is the final 3d art piece:

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!

Aphrael Red Character Reel

Greetings and salutations! I have finally finished school! The graduation ceremony is next week! Yay! I also have several things to post in the next several days so I hope everyone enjoys. I apologize for the lack of any updates. I was swamped with school work and other projects, I had no time to update.

Anyway, I shall leave you with a demo reel of Aphrael Red, who is finally completed! Take a look below and thanks for visiting!

Aphrael Red Update!

Greetings and salutations! Today I want to show two of the props I have developed for Aphrael. The first is a handgun that she will be able to pull out and use and the second is her primary weapon, a crimson energy sword. Here's what they look like:

Aphrael's pistol.

Aphrael's sword.

I am quite happy with how they are turning out. I am not done with them yet as you can see with the normal map artifacts on the pistol. I will need to paint those out with Photoshop.

The props aren't the only thing I have to show. I have updated some of the textures for Aphrael and I need a few more meshes to complete. In addition, I now have a rudimentary rig set up so I can test movement, camera location, and some controls as well.

Aphrael in the studio environment I built.

Aphrael in the actual level environment.

Ah yes, I forgot about the water. I created a new custom water material after watching a few tutorials online. It took a bit and I think it still needs work. It's just a pond so I need to tone down the waves a little bit since it's not that windy in the level. There's wind, but not enough to generate that much turbulence on the water's surface.

Another issue I am having and some people noticed this is that when the level is running, Aphrael seems a little out of place in the environment. What I mean that she doesn't seem to blend into the game. It's almost like she is rendering in front of blue screen, but more obvious. I don't know if that is because I am not done with the textures yet or not. I will have to look more into this. I'm also still struggling with the post-processing settings. I am not for certain how to adjust these or turn them off during actual game play. I need to do more research.

Anyway, I'll try to post more often, but my schedule is about to get really hairy. I am entering my final semester next week and I have only ten weeks left to get all of this done for the portfolio show. I also need to order business cards, get another character done, have the plans for the booth set up and ready to go, etc. It's about to get crazy so hopefully I can survive and finish!

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!

WIP: Aphrael UV Mapping

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show off the UV maps that I just completed for Aphrael. UV mapping is one of the things I enjoy doing when building a character. In fact, I find it quite easy. For Aphrael, it probably took me only 8-9 hours UV mapping her. UV mapping can get complex, but as long as you keep track of what you are doing, you'll be fine.

Anyway so let me show the texture distribution first on the model and then I will explain what I did.

UV density in the front view.

UV density in the back view.

First I created a texture that used a multicolored tiled texture for its appearance. I assigned that to the unmapped model and then used that as a guide to eliminate stretching as much as possible. Notice how there is almost no stretching of the tiles? One of the goals of UV mapping is to keep texture stretching to a minimum. The reason for this is because it will look terrible on the model. Can you imagine seeing the texture on a shirt looking all stretched out? Yeah, that would look weird.

Another thing that I did was that I cut my seams in places where seams would naturally occur in the real world such as the seams on Aphrael's clothing or on the back of the hose she is wearing. Keeping seams at a minimal is ideal as well but when you have a complex object such as this to map out, it makes more sense to place seams where they would be at in the real world. This ups the seam count a bit but at the same time keeps the texture mapping much more manageable.

At the same time, sometimes it is better to keep specific surfaces as a continuous surface rather than cut a seam. I actually did a combination of both so as to help minimize the effect it would have on the model in Unreal Engine 4 and for consistency. So you can see how I actually set up the maps, I will show the four UV sets below.

Skin UV set.

Upper body UV set.

Lower body UV set.

Ruffles UV set.

As you can tell, I have continuous surfaces in some areas (like the skin) and full cuts in others. The full cuts are usually on the clothing where seams occur in real life. In addition, note that I have four different UV sets which normally is not ideal for game engines. The reason I have four sets is because this will allow me to maximize the texture quality in Unreal Engine 4 without compromising memory. Each set will have its own RGB mask to drive where tiling textures will occur. The texture details will then be provided by those tiled textures. Small 256x256 square texture files are a lot easier on memory than a full 2048x2048 map. The only 2048 maps that I will be using is for the skin UV set and that is because skin is unique and I need to ensure it actually looks like skin. Tiling textures do not work very well for this purpose since skin is very complex and requires time and dedication to get right.

So that is a little bit of insight into my texturing process. The next time I post about Aphrael, I will have started the actual texturing process so stay tuned!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 5

Greetings and salutations! The main part of the lo-res mesh for Aphrael is complete. Secondary meshes like the teeth, hair, and accessories I will focus on after I UV map the main mesh. However, before I start UV mapping, I wanted to do a little review and show how the mesh looks. First is the whole body:

Front view.

Side view.

Back view.

As you can see, the ruffles are done. I decided to make the ruffles a floating mesh instead of simply extruding out from an edge loop. The reason for this is because it will make it easier to paint skin weights for and I don't want any t-manifold errors. What I mean by this is having a plane of faces extruded out from a single edge loop that lies along a surface, kind of like a t-shape. That would be just bad geometry.

Speaking of geometry, let's look at it in more detail.

Head geometry.

Again, I am quite happy with the results here for the head. The edge loops are clearly defined and quite clean. Placing a facial rig should not be a problem here.

The hand and sleeve ruffles.

Would you believe that the hand and ruffles are actually floating and not physically connected to the main mesh? Again, I did this to keep rigging simplified and to prevent T-manifold errors. The hand itself did not take long to do and I am happy with the results. The ruffles though took forever but that's probably because I built the geometry and shaped each vertex by hand to ensure I got it to look the way I wanted it to look.

Skirt geometry.

The same deal with the skirt. It is an actual floating geometry and not physically connected to the main body. The skirt went by a little faster because I now knew the edge flow I needed to create the ruffles and all I had to do was create one set and duplicate the others. I then fine tuned their shape around Aphrael's hips. I had to pay close attention to this because of how big her buttocks are. I didn't want any geometry intersecting except at right below the belt so it would give the illusion that it is part of the mesh.

Legs geometry.

My personal favorite, I am quite pleased with how beautiful Aphrael's legs came out. This is exactly what I was looking for. They will look even better once I bake the tangent space onto her legs from the high-res model. The shoes were probably the one area that was giving me the most problems. I ended up with a single triangle on each shoe. However, since the mesh will be triangulated anyway, it will not prove to be too much of a problem in the near future.

Next is UV mapping. UV mapping doesn't usually take me that long; however, this is probably the most complex mesh I have had to map yet so we will see what happens. UV mapping really is an art unto itself and you have to practice, practice, practice to finally get comfortable with it. I'll get more into that next time I post about Aphrael so stay tuned!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 4

Greetings and salutations! Today I wanted to show off my progress on Aphrael. Since I've had time this week to work on her, I have made some significant progress on her. Take a look below:

Front View.

Side View.

Back View.

I believe I am at or around 5,700 polygons at this point before triangulation. Many of the remaining amount of polygons will be used for the next steps which is the ruffles for her skirt and sleeves, her hair, and Aphrael's accessories like her sword and pistol.

This is going to sound weird but one of the most difficult areas that I always have doing is a woman's crotch. The shape and how the legs connect to the pelvis along with the shape of the buttocks always throw me into a loop. I didn't have as much issues here because I have been practicing. How have I been practicing? By modeling panties! I said I was going to sound weird. I'm not a pervert however. I actually studied how panties were made along with the various types and patterns that are used. I then attempted to model them in Maya. After a few attempts, I now understand the edge flow needed to create the correct shape for the crotch and how to connect the legs and buttocks to that shape. I believe I have finally succeeded here even though the buttocks are kind of high density. That's okay though because it will make it easier to get the correct shape of Aphrael bending her legs easier when I start rigging.

Overall, I am happy with how Aphrael is coming along. I am particularly pleased with how her legs came out. It was tough getting the shape of her two jackets correct but they are there now and I am happy. I hope to finally do the ruffles and her hair next before I start UV mapping. Accessories I will do later because those will need high-poly versions as well. I will most likely use subdivision modeling for the accessories.

Next time I post, I will talk about my progress with Unreal Engine 4 and how I am using it for Prism so stay tuned!