Unreal Project- Final Screenshots

Ground, Trees and Rocks are from Quixel and Bridge.

Initial Concept and sketches

PureRef File

Bat- Process

Turntable

Unreal Project- Beta

Textures and Texture Brushes

When I look back on my semester in character creation I realised that I have learned quite a lot in 3D texturing and modelling. Originally, I wanted to use an old OC of mine, but I changed my mind quickly, as I felt it didn’t really fit the criteria the module was looking for, that being a fantasy creature that also respected the anatomical realism, so I went with designing a bat like creature instead. I looked at stylised bats that fitted in with the style I was looking for, largely small, cute looking bats, though I also made an effort to look at more realistic bats and the skeletal structure of bats as well.

One of the artists I looked at for the development of my bat was some one called Joao Moura. They created rather heavily stylised Don Bluth creatures that also was slightly reminiscent of 60’s Disney characters as well. One such character was a rather tall looking bat. I took the hooked claws it has to use as climbing claws for my own creature, though I simplified it way down to match the concept art I created for my own character.

Joao Moura Art

Another artist I looked at was one who had their model on the marketplace- Ysolaire. Their stylised bat was much more cutesy and less detailed than that of Joao, but ultimately I ended up using attributes from Ysolaire’s design, such as a more cutesy, homely personality, than that of Joao, who I felt was, while well drawn, was a little to abstract and complicated for me to translate into my character.

Stylized Bat (cubebrush.co)

In addition to this, the artist also made their character for Unreal Engine and Maya, the latter which I had worked with before going into the University.

When first designing the character, I aimed to have a creature that was a cross between a bat and a fox with a tail that worked similar to that of a bird’s, to act as a sort of sail to help the creature change direction as it flew. I also wanted it to be able to use its claws on its hands to climb trees, like a squirrel. So I made concept art that illustrated that purpose.

I had known for a long while about how birds spread wide apart their tail feathers to help them steer while in flight, and took that as part of the inspiration for my own character, and also taken inspiration for the design of Ori from Ori to make it look more like a fantasy animal.

When it came to actually modelling my character, I dreaded having to retopologise the thing like I did with the character I created last year, so I hard modelled the creature and then used the sculpt too to add details. I made my model with separate meshes for each part of its body, such as heavily modified cylinders and cones for its nose and mouth, a sphere with extrusions for ears, paths and curves for its wings and legs, and planes for the wing membrane. It was the right call, as since I hard modelled the thing and used Multi res, I didn’t have to retopologise it.

Using the multi-res mods on my model helped me get in a lot of the detail in on the creature. It helped me to carve in the inner ears of the creature as well as give some leathery details to the wing membrane and ad a furry feel to the main body of the creature as well as a bit on the legs, as well. However, I became very lost on what to do with it next. So I sent over what I’d done to Henry, and he was a great help on giving me some pointers on where to take my model, as well as helping me out with the sculpting a bit. He also commented on how sine I made the neck using a separate mesh, I could make it into a scarf.  That gave me a great deal of inspiration on how to characterise my character, as originally it was a temparate forest living creature, but Henry’s help gave me an idea on what environment I wanted my creature to live in, so I made a colder environment in Unreal inspired by Nordic environments.

After adding the scarf to my character, I realised I could give my character more personality by giving it more human like eyes, with white sclera to make it seem more of a friendly creature than a skittish feral one, so I gave it such eyes in Substance Painter through simple texture making.

This semester, I also learned how to make my own sculpt brushes using Photoshop images to add to the final sculpt of my character. I had specific brushes that I could use on a black background to create a simple texture image that I can use in Blender.

I created texture brushes by making Photoshop images to add details to the sculpt, such as a leather texture for the wings and fur texture for the main body and legs. I had brushes made in photoshop to help me with the creation of the images, and when I applied them to the model it really helped give them texture. The texturing was where I learned a lot more about making good textures. Henry helped me with how to make professional looking textures using masks on top of paint layers, rotating the tiling so that it was moving the same as the fur sculpt, and I used the polygon fill tool to fill in the overlaying materials. This created a multi layered texture map consisting on many materials.

I initally exported all the parts of the UV maps individually, but found that it was hard to separate them all out in Substance Painter. Then Henry showed me how I can select all the parts of the UV mapped model and then export them, which results in the combined maps all being exported in the one texture map.

Rigging the Bat in Blender was easy, as I had rigged several several characters before this one, the Asanbosam character from my first year, and a Blacephalon Character I created called Notch during my summer break.

But I never learned about assigning specific vertices to joints before rigging my bat character. I found it to be an absolute godsend to rigging my character realistically, as the wing membrane never stayed fastened to the wing bone and the left side kept going completely off the bone. By assigning certain vertices to the rig bone, I could bypass having to use the weight painting tool and also create more professional rigging without any fiddling with weight painting.

Then I had to export the finished posed creature using the video that Mike sent me in my last year to get it ready for use in Unreal.

I was a little alienated by Unreal Engine at first, the UI was very complicated compared to Blender and my wariness of it worsened when I found that my Laptop, which I had upgraded some time ago, was not strong enough to run Unreal efficiently. Not to mention I was also easily distracted from my work to focus on other things. So I was running out of time, so I went in to work more on mu Unreal project in the college outside of school. Henry, Andrew, Aodhan, Mike and Alec were all very helpful, and helped me get my work fully finished off. I learned a lot from them, such as creating new Material instances to bypass the heirarchy system that was causing all my models to share the same material, and in Andrew’s case, finding and making use of the Global Season actor that changed the season on my trees. . I quickly learned how to place models into my scene and make it look professional and even expanded on my environment when I found that it was a little small and lifeless.

This is the final result of my Unreal Engine scene, touched up very slightly in Photoshop.

One other problem I faced with working on my project was procrastinating too much, and focusing on my 3D work a lot more throughout the semester. It was around the last few weeks when I realised how important it really was to work on the 3D work as well as the 2D stuff, which was why I went into the Uni outside of school hours to finish the project. Overall, even with my problem with procrastinating too much this semester, I had a lot of fun making my character and learning about how to make it more professional, as well as making beautiful detailed environments in Unreal Engine. It really got me into the pipeline of creating and developing a character and watching it change as it develops from an idea to the final 3D model. Comparing my initial concept to the final piece in Unreal really showed me how much my character had changed as I had worked on it and sculpted it. The next time I get to do something like this, I want to devote as much time as possible to my work and to also try and not get too distracted by other things. I’m not really much of a professional, but this really is something that I want to do, and actually have fun doing it, too!

This Thursday I received feedback on my 2D animations that I put up on Sketchfab. Alec gave me some good advice on how to make it more realistic I should have one hand grip the dumbbells of my character before the other, and also noted that my long jump character should have a longer air time when she is jumping. I took note of their words. I also worked on the finishing touches of my unreal engine project, duplicating the ground and many trees in the scene while adding rock shelters to make it look less barren. I then took a HQ screenshot of my finished piece.

I came into Uni today outside of class time to focus more on my 3D work, seeing how I still needed to get stuff sorted out on it. When I tried rigging my character in Blender, I found that the wing membrane was not staying connected to the wing bone, and he left side membrane was distorting far more off than the right side. When I asked Mike about it, he showed me how I could simply  assign weights to selected vertices by first removing unwanted weight paints from the vertices and then applying them to the joint I want them to follow. This was a huge godsend and allowed me to by pass having to physically weight paint them.

Andrew helped me out with changing the seasonal look of my trees, as they looked like they were in the summer while the scene was supposedly winter. He showed me how to access the global foliage actor in the Unreal Folders when I couldn’t find it (I had looked up a video where I wanted to know how change the seasonal look of the trees) and placed it in the scene, where he then showed me how to change the look of the hornbeams.

The leaves didn’t seem to fall off the hornbeam trees, so I looked up that and found that Hornbeams have a year-long leaf cover, despite being deciduous.

Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) – British Trees – Woodland Trust

For me the deadline was approaching fast, and with the 3D and 2D work I have to do I became incredibly distressed about all of it. My notetaker Lisa reassured me and prepared a to-do list for the day so I can break down what I need to focus at, and to tell me that on the days I’m not in Uni I can focus on my 2D work.

When I looked at my scene it was incredibly barren, with only two tree stumps poking out of it. I wanted to have trees with foliage in the scene so that it looks professional and more lively, so I asked Henry for guidance. We downloaded some English Hornbeam tree models from Epic games and then dragged them into the scene where I could set them up in the scene as I wished.

I then noticed the ground of my scene looked a little flat. So when I asked about it, Henry tried remeshing it and after finding a displacement map for the snow ground I was using, tried hooking it up to the ground, but it didn’t work. So he exported a new plane out of Blender, remeshed that, applied the displacement map to it, and make the plane look 3 dimensional.

It made my scene look a lot better and really boosted my confidence about my 3D work. These are a few screenshots from the amended scene.

Today we had a lecture from Becca, who graduated from Ulster University 4 years ago. She worked on production work, graphic design and 2D effects, and worked in Feed Me Light in London. She did VFX for four to five months, where she networked and made friends, and worked in the Blue Zoo Animations 2D department, where she did Pitch work and worked with clay on Adventures of Paddington, and also did freelance work for the Lego Company.

Becca moved to Montreal to do VFX work in a VFX studio, where she worked on the Paw Patrol Movie, and also did freelance work with OrangeComet, where she now works full time,

I also worked more on my bat’s textures, adding eyes to it and then exporting all of the textures into Unreal, creating a new material to house all of the textures and then implementing them onto the FBX model after that got imported to Unreal. I found using Unreal a bit less alien this time around, as I followed a tutorial on how to create materials and exporting models into Unreal. I then plugged the textures onto the model in Blender.

And here is the model in a beta scene in Unreal Engine

We delved more into Substance Painter and making an environment in this class. Remembering how my Laptop chugged when Unreal Engine 5, I decided to log onto Substance Painter through one of the University computers, making sure to copy over the most current model onto a hard drive. I had used Substance Painter before, when I was at Belfast Met’s E3 Campus, to do a creature for Nike advertisement. The creature was an Uwabami snake and if I remember right, all of its textures was done on the one layer. However, now that I have knowledge of using multiple layers for certain parts, I applied that to texturing my new character, and used various layers and masks for each of the bat’s parts. I still have yet to bake the textures in to the model, but I have done a lot of progress on bringing the character to life.

These are the texture maps I created in Substance Painter, along with the UV map I exported from Blender.

Today we played around with Unreal Engine 5, getting into its UI and functions.  We fiddled around with a pair of projects in Unreal, creating nodes to render a plane with many different textures and normal maps, and sculpting a forest scene. When I used Unreal, I found that my laptop chugged when it was open, and it came up with messages like ‘expect extremely poor performance.’ It was annoying, as I upgraded my laptop about a year ago with the highest specs, and the teachers recommended I use the PCs for using Unreal Engine next time.

In our class with Henry we looked at ways to sculpt hair, and there are similarities to blocking out characters with blocking out hair. We can use BDM brushes or customised brushes and do not need to sculpt hair. There are also techniques we can use when we need to and where we can avoid retopology, and sculpting hair overlaps with character design principles.

To start sculpting hair, we should start with the general shape and form of the character’s hair, and it should be a basis to follow the overall shape, and don’t think about individual hair strands. Unless the style of the character allows it, don’t think about the hair as a single block. The key is breaking down the form. Using the different meshes and sculpts on top of the form can help make a more interesting silhouette.

We can make hair using Paths in Blender and converting them into meshes. Looking at a reference is food for creating sculpted fur/hair can help break down any realism in the reference to make it more abstract and stylised. Excessive symmetry can make your hair sculpt boring, so be sure to add slight variations to make it more interesting.