This week I mainly did modeling and texturing and rigging work.

This is my final result:

About modelling and materials, there are no special difficulties that need to be told, but the main thing is to make it carefully. In the process, I mainly use Maya, Zbrush and marvellous designers.

In this process, I also mastered some substance painter usage skills, such as smart mask.

Smart masks can have a more natural texture effect than hand-drawn masks through some calculation methods, such as noise or finding edges. In this way, I can more easily add rust and dirt effects to ordinary metal materials.

To make the character’s skin more textured, it is also necessary to make the character’s scattering map. Subsurface scattering is a complex phenomenon that occurs in a medium with a high scattering coefficient. Common subsurface scattering media include milk, wax, skin, etc. After light is incident on the subsurface scattering medium, more Sub-scattering, and finally exiting, forming a special translucent effect.

In sp, you can simply draw scattering black and white textures to provide the light penetration of the character’s skin. Of course, this texture cannot be used directly in ue4. Here I refer to the explanation of subsurface scattering in this article.

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/337384739

The whiter part indicates the better the light transmittance.

In UE4, the subsurface scattering model can be selected in the created material, and the subsurface colour channel can be used in the material after it is turned on.

In the official UE4 documentation, the description of this channel is:

The Subsurface Color input is only enabled when the Shading Model property is set to Subsurface. This input allows you to add colour to your Material to simulate shifts in colour when light passes through the surface. For instance, human characters might have a red subsurface colour on their skin to simulate blood beneath the surface.

Therefore, if only the black and white image is connected, the effect will be black and white, and there is no red light after light transmission. This light red needs to be added additionally.

Because this character is not an ordinary two-legged character, the binding is somewhat different from my previous operations. In the beginning, I planned to manually create the bones of the four robotic arms, but this is very difficult to control, and on the other hand, additional controllers need to be created, which is very time-consuming.

But I noticed that additional bones such as hands or tails can be added to advance skeleton5. I chose to add additional hands, but the result is not good.

It only creates a new hand, no arms, and is directly connected to the root node.

But unexpectedly, I thought of directly copying the existing arm bones. I didn’t expect advskeleton5 to support it! ! And it will automatically modify the name of the bone.

In this case, when I clicked build, he not only generated the bones perfectly symmetrically but also generated an excellent controller!!

IK and FK conversion are automatically created for each arm. Thanks advskeleton5!

Usually, I will leave advskeleton5 after this step to manually modify the weights. But this time I decided to further study its other functions. So I saw his excellent weight distribution function.

Create a skincage to control the weight distribution of each bone, and then copy the weight of skincage to the character. This function really gave me a deep understanding of the role of copy skin weight. The other functions are just adjustments to the details of skincage.

One simple step made my riging work several times faster. Thanks again advskeleton5! !

The final facial binding is only one step different from usual because you want to import it into UE4 at the end, so you need to check the game engine.

A painful lesson, a problem that was discovered only after the import failed many times.

The work has been done well this week, and the animation production and cartoon rendering experiments will be carried out later.