ANIM3010

Looking back at my final project, I can say that during the past few months I have learned a lot. I have improved my skills in Maya and ZBrush and learned how to work in two new programs - Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag. All mentioned programs are industry used, professional software, which is a valuable addition to my skill set that is needed for my job applications in the future.  I have successfully rendered a fully textured 3D model of a character for a game, so I achieved my goals set at the beginning of this semester. The character will also be a good addition to my portfolio. However, during the semester I needed to leave out a couple of things from the original design such as the robotic forearm and the jacket, because of the time issues. I have spent a long time dealing with problems with meshes, UVs, I had to re-do different elements numbers of times (such as hair) and my learning process took more time than I expected, so in a combination with some personal ...

For my final renders, I decided to use two types of light. The first one is with a simple dark background and colourful lights to replicate the character design drawing I did in the first semester. It matches the cyberpunk aesthetic and theme for the game she would be in. The second type is natural light to see the real colours of the skin and other textures.  For rendering, I used a real-time rendered Marmoset Toolbag which is an industry standard software. It was very new to me, but unlike ZBrush, it was easy to learn as it is very intuitive. Compared to setting up a scene, lights, cameras and rendering in Maya software renderer Marmoset Toolbag has much better options, works faster and gives you more freedom with different options. I used two cameras and 4 different lights. The main camera was fixed and used for turnarounds, the second camera was movable around the character for capturing details and different angles. For lighting I used white key light from slightly ri...

At first, I was actually considering creating real hair from fibermesh but I decided to try hair from planes as it is supposed to be a game character and for real-time rendering hair like that doesn't work so easily. However, hair made from planes had its difficulties and I probably spent the most time on it. All the planes needed to cover half of her head (because the other side is shaven) but it was a difficult task as the hair on planes is more transparent than I thought. I had to create many planes of different shapes and lengths to achieve natural looking hair after texturing. The research for making this was not easy either as I was not able to find many tutorials. When it came to UV mapping, the hair was actually the first thing I did, because I wanted to try to texture it as soon as possible. I found out that this new version of Maya has different UV mode which looked much better than the previous one. In the beginning, I didn't have a good under...

The eye was much easier than I expected, it might have been a result of the development of my skills as it was one of the last things I have modelled. The eye consists of two meshes, one for the eye itself, one transparent and glossy. The eye itself was not a problem but I had issues with glossiness as it was textured before most of the other things so I still wasn't very confident in Substance Painter. The final result looks very good when it comes to textures, however, the mesh didn't work when I subdivided it, probably because of some issues from the modelling, so it is quite low poly. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to solve this issue but for a game character with the eyes inside of the head, it is barely noticeable. The texture for the eye consists of a photo of an eye edited to have brighter colours and more contrast, flat colours painted in substance painter and also particles from substance painter which generated different veins. At first it...

After the long fight with texturing hair and abandoning it, I moved on to texture the top, as it was the simplest shape, which made it the best one for learning how the program actually works. For the texture I used knitwear which I scaled to be really small so it looks like a plain cotton top. I was so happy with the material and how it all works that the demotivation from hair texturing was quickly gone and I was ready to learn how to create textile stitches. The best tutorial for that was about texturing leather ( link here ). This taught me how to work with brushes and all the elements of the fill layers such as height, roughness, and metalness. After putting it into Marmoset I was able to see it work quite well as a test, but the top still needs creases. I learned which textures I need to export and where they belong in marmoset to achieve a good look of each textured mesh. Most of the time I have worked with the base colour, normal map, metalness, roughness/gloss...