Sculpted in Zbrush
Retopologized in Blender
UV unwrapped in Blender
Triangles: 62,696
The texturing was done in Substance Painter. This process was a bit of trial and error in terms of how many shaders I'll be using in the final, how the hair will be setup and textured, and how the eyes will be approached. Things I considered for UE5.
Skin test rendering in Blender with Cycles.
Body textures
clothing textures
hair textures
First renders in UE5
A look at the camera view in UE5. I've also added some rain with Niagara system.
Master Shader
Master shader instance with custom parameters and texture inputs. The body and clothing both use an instance of master shader.
Clothing shader. Instance of master shader.
Hair shader master
Straw fibers shader. Instance of hair shader.
Procedural Eye shader made by Spencer Wang. Creating eyes is tricky in UE5 so for this time I wanted something quick and I found this procedural eye by Spencer Wang that I can also learn from.
The character alone is using 7 instance shaders. 5 Instances of the Master shader and 2 instance of the Hair shader for hair and straw fibers.
A character I developed as a personal project and UE5 study. This character is based off of a historical figure of my home Island called Micronesia/FSM(Federated States of Micronesia) where I was born before moving out to the US. The character was sculpted in Zbrush and further developed using Blender for retopology, uv unwrapping, and Substance Painter for texturing. One of the hardest parts of creating a game character for me has been hair cards but I feel I had a breakthrough with this piece creating real time hair. A big learning curve on this project for me was unreal engine 5. In this scene I created 2 master shaders. One to be a General shader I can add custom parameters for the body and clothing. The second shader is a hair shader with custom parameters to control the hair look and thickness. For the eyes it was a big learning curve and still is for me. I wanted to setup something quick for this so I found a great asset by Spencer Wang for a procedural eye in unreal. For the environment I also didn't want to spend too much time on creating the assets myself so using Quixel's bridge assets I was able to put together a stage for the final renderings and animations. This is a big step up for me in terms of getting familiar with Unreal Engine 5, setting up custom shaders, and Rendering.
