Amaranthine

My final renders are ready and I'm late again !! I used Movie Render Queue to get better Anti Aliasing and I must say that Everything is dynamic with no Light map, Also no Ray tracing were used. Textures are in 2k resolution and I used a packed map for Metalness, Roughness and Ambient Occlusion. It was my first experience using UE as a renderer and it was quite fun. This was a great project for me as I learned using lots of techniques in UE, It provides a solid and fast workflow for look development and I'm planning to use it for my future projects again !!

Here's an update on my entry, I made some overall changes to the character and still I'm not sure about the decisions I made but since there's not much time left, I'll stick to this scheme and start detailing more intricate textures. I wasn't happy with how the clear coat looked on the character so I decided to have more grungy and rough surface instead. Also, I changed angle of the horn to define a better silhouette. In the remaining days I'm gonna add as much detail as I can. I really enjoy this fast iterative workflow, but as I can't have any kind of GI in the scene, it's really painful to set up the lights to have the look I want and I still think that textures looked better in Substance Painter somehow !!

Hello everyone, I'm participating in the texturing category of RIG.B contest to show my skills in texturing and rendering. In this project I decided to have a completely different approach for rendering and that's the reason why it took me a month to post my first update on the project !! Rendering in Unreal Engine 4 is what I planned to achieve and it took me a lot of time to learn its rendering and shading basics. I'll explain a summary of each step, so let's have a look at my renders at first !!

The only thing that caught my eye in UE4 is the fast lookdev iterations between texturing and rendering process, it takes ten times more work than Arnold to make it look good though !! I'm satisfied with lighting at this stage and I know it looks a bit overexposed which I'm gonna fix later. I used a simple two point lighting setup with a spotlight and a rect light, I also added an additional spotlight in a weird position to catch some highlights on the hands ! For textures, I used two different shading models, one for glass and one for the other parts and the good news was that I could use UDIM system for assigning textures to them. 

Setting up a clear coat shader is a bit tricky, because at first I have to think of underlying shiny flakes which breaks reflections in all directions and a glossy smooth surface on top of it, I haven't added the flakes normal map yet but I hope it will look good at the end. At the current stage I have both layers with the same glossy surface. Fresnel node was another thing that was fun to set up. I used it for glass refraction and radial variation in specularity, roughness and base color. The effect is subtle though, I didn't want to get far away from the PBR look of surfaces.

Substance Painter was my first step for the process, I started making masks and basic materials for objects. Mostly I chose materials with distinct contrast in roughness and color. Then I added variations and made them rough and glossy which They're mostly based on mechanical objects in my references. There were some  challenges I faced, one of them was the separate texture sets for left and right part of the body and I didn't want to mess with UVs or transferring  layer masks each time I made changes to hands or legs. So I decided to texture just one hand at a time then added variations for the other side. I could only check them in UE. The other challenge was to define materials for some weird shapes on the mesh which looks like nothing in real world !! As an example, the area above the knees and the sides of them which I found it hard to texture, I still can't think of any good coloration for it !

After finishing the basic texturing I decided to have the character in a different pose for rendering, so I chose one of the Sans poses and changed it a little bit, I also modeled an additional object which I think it looks cool !! I really love that shiny horn ! Another thing I did was removing texture sets as I didn't want to assign a material 16 times for each set in UE4, and made only 3 sets for the whole body.

Finally I want to talk about my initial ideas of color pallete and references, I don't know why I used color gamut for choosing colors (It's ok, isn't it?). My inspirations are Frieza, Eva 01, Zero and Cell as the base color for the overall look of the character !! For mechanical parts I mostly use car parts as reference and make some variations in them. Objects like lens glass, hydraulic hoses, fins, joints, nuts and bolts are easy to recognize and they have to look exactly the same as in real life.