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!

Logo Change!

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show the first in a series of updates. That first is the new logo. For comparison, look at the images below:

Old logo.

New logo.

I like the new logo much better. One of the things that was bugging me about the old logo was that there was no contrast between the shades of red. Another problem I had was that it is not ideal for printing purposes which I found out the hard way. Finally, I still felt it was too warm a red. I remember one of my instructors complaining how an even earlier logo needed some blue in it. I had been struggling with that for months and it finally clicked in my head while I was playing around with some colors that I can make the red more of a berry red than a tomato red. In addition, I simplified the crystal motif and made them solid squares instead so it can be printed with ease.

So now that the logo has been updated, the next thing I will show in my next blog post is an update on my level for Prism. Stay tuned!

Updating

Greetings and salutations! I sincerely apologize, I have not had a chance to update the blog in like forever because of being swamped by schoolwork and whatnot. However, I have a little bit of extra time that I can use to provide some updates. These need to be done as well since I am still in the process of finalizing my online presence right now. However, note that in the coming week I will be posting some updates on the work I've been doing for Prism and some changes to my brand. So please stick around because I will be providing some updates and new posts in the next few days.

As an assurance, I want to announce that I have just joined Behance, Adobe's professional online portfolio website. I am now using Behance instead of Deviant Art which I think will be better because of it's more professional environment. I have also updated my Linkedin a bit so check both out. My Behance page is www.behance.net/RedVermillion and my LinkedIn profile page is www.linkedin.com/in/jktarwater. Thanks everyone and stay tuned for the next update!

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.

Prism Level Update

Greetings and salutations! Today I will share a little bit of my prototype level for Prism. Here is what one area looks like in the Unreal Engine 4 editor so far:

Prism prototype level in progress.

As you can see, I finally have grass and trees and the entire map is now actually laid out. I need to cover the entire map with the grass and trees but so far it is looking good.

One of the problem areas I was having with the grass was making it look like grass. After many attempts, I finally just painted it myself by using a Photoshop filter and then masking out an initial shape for a blade of grass. Then I copied that shape and used the warp tool to create different blades and pasted them into a coherent texture I could use on a single plane. I then built up several of those planes in Maya and then imported it into Unreal. As you can see, the result is quite marvelous. However, the grass is processor heavy and it slows the editor down on more conservative systems (ones that aren't mine anyway).

Speaking of Maya, Autodesk just recently released Maya 2016. After playing around with it for quite  a bit, I must say that I am happy with the results. It is far superior over 2014 and 2015. 2014 was my go to so I think it is a big deal to find a version of Maya that is better than 2014. One of the things that I like the most is the new interface. Take a look:

The new Autodesk Maya 2016 interface.

The interface is very clean now with much more readable icons. The menus have been cleaned up from the mess that was 2015 and there are many new useful tools such as an entire sculpting shelf now. Even the UV editor has new tools and they helped me clean up some stretch issues I was having on Aphrael's face. I always had problems getting the face to have minimum stretching and now the new tools in the UV editor fixed it quite easily. I am very happy.

I am not for sure what I will post about next. Stay tuned though and sorry for the lack of posts last week.

No Content This Week.

Greetings and salutations. I apologize for no posts during this period but I don't have new content to show just yet. Don't worry, there will be stuff for me to talk about next week. Expect a new post on this upcoming Monday. Thanks and sorry.

I'm on LinkedIn!

Greetings and salutations! I apologize, but I don't have much to talk about today. However, I did want to inform everyone that I am finally on LinkedIn! For those who don't know, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. What I mean is that it is not like Facebook where anything goes, but instead it is for professional opportunities and contacts in the business world. For anyone serious about advancing their career or need a way to start networking in a more convenient manner, check out LinkedIn. Also, if you are curious, my LinkedIn page can be found here. Have fun!

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!