Pose/Background Exploration
I wanted to see how concept artists explored different still renders for games, and I am a big fan of Chengwei Pan’s Splash Art work, since this was the end result of this assignment. This also worked as portfolio reference, he has a really clear layout and showcases each stage and correction he made through production. He has a really good exploration of how to capture backgrounds and dynamic posing to make the character believable but also include some form of story telling/action so that it gives it a bit of life and personality. None of these are polished works it is all just about capturing lighting, intent/personality and readable poses.
Battle Bunny MF Concept Development
Following along I started off by thumbnailing out examples trying to think of scenarios that would tie into my character profile and bring some emotion of his backstory. I sent these off to some peers to see which they liked best and received some feedback on composition or contrast and mainly picked the bottom two. I decided to do two more variations to explore the lighting and focussing on the background a lot more. I found that picking between these new poses was very hard so I just decided to do both of them, since it wouldn’t hurt to have more things in my portfolio.
I also did a bit more exploration on what the background should look like and did some sketches. I really liked the idea of warm trees, pink skies and warm trees.
Unreal
Then I had to learn unreal, and this was done over a couple weeks with some class tasks. I learnt a lot and I am amazed by the capabilities that this software has and can see myself exploring it more in the future.
I went ahead and looked on the Unreal Market Place and found some good free assets that matched my texture style, which would help make my character feel like they belong in the world.
Downloaded Assets:
Stylised Eastern Village By AleksandrIvanov
Lowpoly Handpainted Environment By Yevheniia Yaremko
Then I used some elements and a texture I created on Quixel mixer to practice creating a scene.
Creating Environment and Posing
Now that I knew what I wanted my background to look like, I needed to do some research on how to set up things like the coloured sky and some ethereal looking fog. I found two videos that worked for these.
I set up both the volume dynamic fog and the plane fog using the material editor in unreal
I set up my scene using the un-posed FBX to get a sense of scale. I wanted to have a distinct background and foreground so I decided to separate these out with the layers of fog. The pink sky and coloured fog work to create this mystical quality and then I just added in different layers of mountains to get a nice silhouette on the horizon, and started to paint on some grass and trees to break up the blocks.
Rigging
Rigging isn’t something we are being marked on for this assignment but it was an essential part of posing my character, so I will just briefly show what I did.
Again, for this assignment I wanted to build on what we were taught last year, so I used a model I had downloaded for reference and set up metacarpal controls on the hand, the foot is able to go from Plantigrade to Digitigrade style, there are tongue controls and really basic shapes keys for my selected pose expressions. Weight painting is still something I am getting used to but I am understanding rigging functionalities a bit better. Moveable parts of my props are also rigged!
Testing Composition/Poses
Setting up my initial poses was a bit tricky as because of all the different elements of my mesh I found some issues with clipping that I would have to adjust on my final posed exports.
I then brought these into Unreal and received some feedback from Henry as well as bringing these over to and CSP to check on how contrast was working for me. and saw that I needed to make some adjustments.
I went back to Blender to adjust these poses, this time checking their silhouette so I would know it was readable before exporting it out.
I am a bit of a perfectionist, so after taking on some feedback I did a couple more tests of compositions, checking silhouettes and contrast.
Final Renders and Edits
For my final exports of my poses I had to use the move tool in the sculpt menu to adjust some clipping I had noticed on my test exports. I also added some more foliage in the background as it was looking quite bland, and created some material instances of the downloaded assets to create some variety of the colour.
The following are my final renders and edits I made (Edited in Clip Studio as my channel masks weren’t working in Photoshop). I was able to export things like depth, lighting, roughness, etc maps and could use them to help me create my final renders. I found that since I spent a lot of time making adjustments in unreal that I didn’t have a lot that I wanted to do in Post-Production.
Render 1
I played around with some Post Process Volume, and I didn’t like how it looked for one pose so I ended up just using it as a reference for a separate render which worked quite well. I also ended up blurring the background to bring more attention to my character, this is what I ended up doing to all of my renders.
Render 2
I wanted to have a more dynamic angle so I brought the camera closer and changed the angle. I was able to keep the post process volume Bloom here, and added blur in the background using my depth mask. I think this really helped my character and his props stand out from the background.
Render 3
I ended up adjusting the time of day for my sitting pose, the night sky was much more fitting for the mournful tone I was going for, and would contrast nicely with the warm colours of my fox and tree. I decided to place this new tree here to try and lead the eye toward my character, as well as making the foreground feel less barren and more like a liveable environment. Then I had to adjust the values to create some colder tones than my initial render had.
Render 4
I wanted to create some deeper shadows and create a more readable silhouette so I adjusted the rotation of some objects as well as playing with some light sources. I also wanted to paint in my character sister’s ghost to create a bit more storytelling so I planned ahead for this by using a spot light to shine some light on my character from where she would stand. I really liked how this ended up turning out, it is definitely my favourite of my renders. I think it best captures the personality of the character that I had created and he feels like he belongs in this background/setting.
My depth mask wasn’t the best for this so I had to manually select out areas to just blur the background and the tree. Then I just had to paint in the ghost, this was pretty fun to work out I wanted the ghost to appear 3D but also transparent so I used a lot of separated layers and changing the opacity to try and capture this. Then I realised more light would cast onto my environment so I had to paint on that as well. I am really happy with how this ended up turning out, it is definitely my favourite.
