Christine Weng BDES Animation Blog

I was able to import the bear and apply the texture in Unreal Engine thanks to Henry’s instruction; however, I had a problem where the texture didn’t apply to the bear’s eyes and the vines that I put at the very end. When I asked Henry for help, he looked over my Blender file. He discovered that the reason specific components in Unreal Engine didn’t have texture applied to them was because they didn’t have a UV map, but I had created one for them. When I checked my Blender file, I saw that the UV map of the eyes and vines on the face disappeared when I combined all the meshes into one. To fix this issue, I had to maintain the two parts separate from the body.

I have selected Leartes Studio’s watermill environment from the Unreal Engine fab website as my Unreal Engine setting. When I was working with Unreal Engine, I had a lot of trouble making an environment by importing props from the watermill Unreal Engine file. I saved myself the trouble by importing the bear into the original watermill file and then just arranging the props and playing around with the lights.

Finally, I showed my classmates a screenshot of the bear to get their opinions on how I could improve. Nathan suggested that rather than showing the other plane leg, I could show more of the tree trunk leg. I quickly returned to Blender, changed the leg position, and then imported it back into Unreal Engine.

Before I reach to the sculpting stage, I did a bit of the armature work where I created the whole bone for the bear body and parented to the bear. I tried a bit of the weight painting because some meshes was responding to the wrong bone and some of the meshes are responding to the bone that they are not suppose respond to. I had some trouble addressing this, but my classmate Aaron offered to help me which had allowed me to have a better understanding of how to apply weight paint. Later, some of the leaves on the head were responding to the leg bone and some of the leaves on the leg were responding to the head bone as I was organizing the application of the bone weights to the leaves. I attempted to solve this by removing them and applying weight to the appropriate bone, but it appears that this approach is either ineffective or I may be doing it incorrectly. Henry responded to my need for help with a recorded tutorial that required me to assign the mesh to the appropriate bone in the side vertex group section. In the tutorial Henry also suggest to me that I should be name the bone making this easier to solve if the situation happens again.

I began sculpting in Zbrush after adjusting the weights. However, when I import back to blender and attempted to pose the bear, it was no longer parent to the armature, so I had to start over with the weight painting and bone assigning. I’ve learned not to do this in the future.

I decided to use Zbrush for sculpting. All the brushes I used were standard ones, such as the clay brush, smooth brush, and move topological brush. However, I also used a rake brush, which I believe is not as common as it could be at this point. To give the bear a fluffier appearance, I used the rake brush to add more fur and the move topological brush to take out bigger chunks of the furs.

The smooth brush was primarily used to flatten surfaces and correct erroneous strokes. I mainly used clay to make the patterns for the tree trunk and sticks, alternating between the Zadd and Zsubtract modes of the brush.

I experienced this issue where all of the polygon faces was all over the place, wasn’t sure what cause this but i fixed this by reapplying the subdivide layers.

I’ve chosen to make my own image by exporting the UV tiles as images and using Procreate on my iPad to draw on top of them. I think this is an easier method to create a texture that will best fit the bear in terms of colour and shape. I manually applied the image texture material to the base colour section and linked all the meshes’ materials to the right image texture because I wasn’t sure how to apply the texture using the UDIM workflow.

I asked Henry if my approach to the image texture was correct. He told me that although what I had done was fine, it wasn’t the greatest and most efficient way to apply textures in this situation. As a result, he recorded a step-by-step tutorial on how to import everything into Substance Painter and apply the image textures to the bear. Additionally, he showed how to blend the colour difference generated by UV mapping using the brush tool in Substance Painter. He went on to demonstrate how I would apply the image texture in Unreal Engine, which made that process much easier to comprehend and more practical.

Finally for details, I experimented with Zbrush’s slime bridge, which Henry had recommended I use for the vines. I applied it to areas that would look good, and it worked. Out of many of them, I wanted to keep the one in the bear’s eye and the one on the side of his face, but in the end, I only kept the one in the eye because the slime bridge was so difficult to uv map. I replaced the one on the side of the bear’s face with vines that I created by manually using Bezier in Blender.

I had to clean up some of the overlapping polygon faces on the tree sticks on the head when I was marking the seams. I also had to clean up triangles and broken meshes that had appeared when I sculpted the leaves a little before UV mapping them. I found the retopology tool to be convenient and quick to use, so I used it to solve those issues and tidy up the polygons.

Henry recommended a more organized method before I began creating the bear’s UV map, which involved using the UDIM workflow to map various parts of my bear’s UV onto several UV tiles. I followed the Blackboard tutorial, which was straightforward. All I needed to do was arrange the various parts of my bear on the UV tiles. This resulted in four UV tiles: a first for the body, mouth, teeth, nails, and eyes; second for the tree trunk and sticks; a third for the vines; and a fourth for the leaves.

I asked Henry to check my UV map to make sure it was organized correctly. He discovered that a tiny vertex was still attached between two UV shells, therefore I will need to unwrap them once more to separate them.

Henry advised me to merge the tree and vine sections into a single UV tile to better match the UDIM workflow. I did so, creating three UV tiles. Additionally, he said that I should rescale everything in the first UV tile if most of the texture details are going to be displayed on the actual bear body. This is because it doesn’t make sense to have the mouth detail UV shells unwrapped larger than the body UV shells. He demonstrated to me how to use Average Islands Scales to select every UV shell in the first UV tile and rescale them all at once. All I had to do was reorganize them back into the UV tile.

Following retopology, I completed asymmetrical work. I focused on turning the bear’s top right head into tree sticks and its left leg into a tree trunk. After taking out the actual leg, I attempted to create the tree trunk using a cylinder, but it didn’t seem to be working well. Instead, I used a cube, rescaled it to the wanted length, applied subdivision to make it round, added more loop cuts, extruded it to the side, and scaled it to create the tree’s roots. Next, I cut off the bear’s right ear and the top of its head. I tried using the same method to make the tree sticks, but it didn’t work as well as the tree trunk, so I looked for a tutorial. It worked, but there were a few small problems where the joints between the sticks overlapped, revealing some of the inner face, so I had to clean up afterward.

Tutorial Link: Bing Videos 

After finishing the tree sections, I started working on the leaves. I used a technique I had learnt in year one, which involved inserting a plane, cutting out various leaf shapes, applying solidify modifier to make them thicker then applying subdivision modifier making rounder. Every leaf had a slightly distinct shape, but other than that, I had to keep repeating the same techniques. To increase their attachment to the bear, I also sculpted on them. I made the vines using Beziers. To better fit around my bear, I experimented with scaling and rotating them.

I showed Henry the development after I added the plant details to my bear and gave him a general explanation of how they were made. The vine and tree section were fine, but he did point out that I could save a lot of time by creating the leaves using a different technique. I could either keep them as planes and use a tool in Unreal Engine to make them thicker, or I could just make one leaf and duplicated it then sculpt on them to make them unique but it’s too late. I’ve already finished the effort I put in. I’m going to incorporate what I’ve learned to the upcoming project. I also asked Henry how I would reduce the density of the details I had added to the bear, and he suggested that I simply import them into Zbrush and use Zremesh.

I exported the block-out bear from Zbrush and imported it into Blender to begin the retopology process for my bear. I then followed Henry’s tutorial on Blackboard to find the retopology tool and explain how to use it. I found everything to be straightforward. When I was almost done with Retopology the Bear, I shared my progress with a classmate. James pointed out that my retopology didn’t match the joint shape of legs to a body. He also sent me a reference image so I could better understand it. Many thanks to James for telling me this before I finished, as opposed to me fixing it later.

After completing my retopology, I discovered another issue. I went to question Henry about a strange performance I had where the retopology bear’s neck didn’t look as smooth as the rest of the bear and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it. He responded by saying that the face of the polygon on the neck might be on the wrong side. I followed his instructions and looked at the faces; they were on the wrong side, so I flipped them over. However, it appeared that the strange performance of the poly faces wasn’t fixed, so I had to send him my blender file. Henry then informed me that there were a few manifolds and n-gons, so he helped me in fixing it.