Obi Moz - Rookies 2021

Hello there!

My journey with 3D started with making short films. After appearing for Rookies 2019 with no real experience or training, I was exposed to a world of artists and a platform to present their work. It inspired me to study game art and game design. Currently, I'm focused on improving my character production pipeline for AAA studios. I have also worked on a level in UE and prepared a gameplay demo.

I am presenting the four projects that I completed during the one year at 3dsense.

I hope to demonstrate through these projects a fair understanding of asset creation for games and get a chance to learn and contribute to the medium. But first, a demo reel a year in the making!

CyberKnight 

Real-time game character, mentored by Julian Khor and Claudius Dsouza. Sculpted in Zbrush, re-topologized and UV'd in Maya, textured in Substance Painter and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 3. Hair texture generated with Xgen in Maya.

I've always had a fascination for historic portraiture and character art in Assassin's Creed. The concept I selected seemed to marry that with the cyberpunk aesthetic wonderfully and caught my eye. 

66k tris for the body 
13k tris for the gun.
4x 2k maps for body and accessories
1x 1k map for hair

Concept art by Filippo Ubertino.

PROCESS BREAKDOWN

This was my first attempt at understanding characters in a game pipeline.  I chose this character to utilize multichannel TexturingXYZ  and learn XGen for hair texture creation.

I started by gathering references for each asset. Then from a previous anatomy assignment, I blocked out the main shapes with dynamesh and sculptris. I simulated the pantaloon and the skirt, but I had to sculpt the wrinkles and micro-wrinkles to inform the weight and flow of the clothing within the garters.

The head went through a lot of changes. At first, I started with a likeness of an actor, but it quickly started looking like an old man and very different from the concept. There were a lot of anatomical errors too. After some back and forth with my mentor, I could reach a face that was believably regal and resembled the concept.

I had to flip-flop between doing hard surface panel lines in Zbrush or keeping it for Painter where I could add smaller details utilizing proper UVs without adding a lot of polygons. I eventually decided on making secondary level detail in the sculpt so I could bake it, and leaving more tertiary details like dents, scratches and very small panel lines for Painter. Even then areas like the cushioned arm required a lot of detailing so I worked on it as a separate tool, utilizing livebooleans and panel loops.

I learnt how to use Xgen to make hair cards and placed them by hand to get a believable beard.  I'd tweak the shader and texture every other week to make it match the concept, after referencing a lot of real life and game beards

Retopology 

This process took me a long time as I explored different methods, I tried Zwrap to speed-up the process. However, to retain the silhouette and maintain budget, I manually did a lot of the retopology in Maya. I used Zremesh as a starting point for some of the hardsurface and ended up redoing smaller elements in Maya and projecting the details back on it. 

Texturing

For the body,  I  separated it by materials and created an ID map to block it. The head used TexturingXYZ pore details but most of the color was hand painted, while the gun was baked as separate pieces and then mirrored and duplicated to fit the design.

Ahsoka Tano | Grey Jedi

highpoly sculpting and polypainted texturing

I have tried to get it as close to PBR textures as I could with render passes. Inspired by the then recent casting news of Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano, I wanted to explore how her most canonically recent costume from Rebels might translate to the grounded world of the Mandalorian. A pretty quick project with a turnaround of two weeks. 

I started this project to practice female anatomy and was influenced to make it into a lifelike bust. Initially, I was using this project to take a break from working on the game character.  Hence, I was suggested to complete this character in higher fidelity. 

As I had initially approached it s a bust, I wanted to get a fine balance between character and actor for this. I decided to utilize Keyshot to achieve the result. I had some familiarity with creating shaders in it and could utilize the materials in it with polypainted textures. I quickly rendered a first look with some basic lights and shaders to check forms and shapes in the proper lighting. This helps me set up the mood and the temperament of the character. 

After this I quickly zremeshed, posed the base mesh and to sent it to Marvelous Designer where I blocked out her basic costume. This was followed by hard surface modelling of the equipment, mostly with zmodeler and the help of liveboolean in Zbrush.

I used surface noise with varying alphas to get tertiary level of detail quickly.  An important aspect of the character is her playfulness and mastery of the backhanded form. I wanted it to inform my piece through her pose.

I experimented with a few different looks including a poncho. In the end, I decided to include a baby Yoda and made some clothes for it in Marvelous. I blocked out his cradle along with her lighsaber hilt with booleans and  zremeshing parts to get smooth loops.

For the lookdev part of this, I took render passes out of Keyshot under different lights and composited them together in Photoshop.  

SCORPION

Remembrance (prop modelling)

A fanart for the Scorpion weapon from Mass Effect.

Imagined as the prized possession of a Krogan warlord who had taken this custom made weapon from a Salarian scientist. Depicts events that happened in the original Mass Effect trilogy; as a warning maybe or a romanticized saga. On it there are small hailstones embeded native to the Krogan homeworld.

This was done to study the full workflow from Maya to Substance Painter and techniques of properly UVing. Furthered my understanding of Substance Painter creating some smart materials and alphas to help paint more interesting details.

Steampunk Den

Real-time Environment in Unreal Engine 4.24

Done under the guidance of Claudius D'Souza at 3dsense, this assignment helped me better understand the production pipeline for real time environment in a game.

Environmental storytelling is one of my favorite thing about games. This was a  learning experience for me. as prior to this I was only aware of character pipeline for games. The use of modular assets, trim sheets and decals were new and  exciting. I have tried to capture a rustic feeling to this smoky little corner of an unearthed submarine, something you might find in Fallout.

I learnt how to create a master material and further created some unique material effects, namely the electricity and the sci-fi holosphere. I hope I get to further study the material and particle system and utilize megascan assets in the next projects that I work on.

As this was going to be either developed as VR experience or a FPS, I utilized a texel density of 10.24 px/cm for most assets as it was a relatively small scene. 

11 x 2k unique maps 
2 x 4k hero maps
6 x 2k tileables
4 x 2k trim sheets
2 x 2k decal sheets 

Concept by Mac Smith

BREAKING DOWN THE CONCEPT

Dragon Dial - Initially, I tried out making it with a combination of trims and unique textures, but I ended up making it a unique asset, done traditionally baking from a highpoly model. I utilized alphas, masking and radial symmetry along with surface noise to build up the ornate detail quickly. The scales were done with insert mesh and curve brush to maintain the level of detail needed for a hero asset. While the rest of the lowpoly was done in Maya, the inner dial I used a zremeshed version of the highpoly mesh to maintain the silhoutte as I was going to make LODs later.

Ornate Decal -  Instead of doing the entire door as a highpoly model, I instead modelled out the highpoly designs and baked it down to a texture. This gave a level of detail that I wasn’t able to get otherwise. I further utilized the gaps with alphas in the height channel in Substance Painter for remaining decals. This used one 2k sheet which had decals and trims. 

Pipes, wires & cables and readouts - The pipes were made of a modular set which I arranged in-engine from what I could see in the concept. The smaller wires, corrugated cables and connectors utilize trim sheets and tileables. The readouts turned out to be bit of a challenge. Eventually I separated the faces individually as a decal sheet and made a few variations of the casing with a glass shader in-engine. This allowed me to  get a good variety of modular assets.

For the tileables I used Photoshop, Substance Alchemist and Painter. To get a sense of the mood and the material I flooded the scene with tileables at first. Then I broke them into different asset types. Some of them were created from images found online, while others I made a highpoly model and baked into textures.

And finally, no steampunk scene can be truly complete without a old Fallout-style terminal and tesla coils spewing electricity. For the terminal I used 2k maps for the base texture, then separated the screen to use UMG for the UI. The electricity uses a RGB mask made in photoshop to drive it within the material shader like the one found in this example by Yoeri Luos Vleer.

Here are the 11 unique assets, modular pipes and some of the LODs created to optimize the scene to run at 60 fps

And finally we spent some time developing the scene as a playable demo. I got some insight into using UMG, Blueprint along with level editor and sequencer. I made a short cinematic with sequencer and a title screen.  Here's a small demonstration of gameplay inside Unreal Engine 4.24