This week I have been unfolding UVs on the model and importing them into Substance Painter for mapping.

The UV unfolding was done in Maya, which is relatively simple and does not require a strict UV orientation. Because the model is mainly a solid colour, the UVs were simply split.

But here I used a trick, I unfolded some small parts of the UVs on the same sheet, so that I could make fewer materials, such as buttons and trousers, crowns and tops.

I need to give the materials a name in Maya before importing them into SP so that each UV is displayed correctly in SP and to avoid overlap problems.

In SP, I first baked the model’s texture to obtain information such as normal, ambient Occlusion, thickness, etc. This will be useful when creating textures.

The UV unfolding was done in Maya, which is relatively simple and does not require a strict UV orientation. Because the model is mainly a solid colour, the UVs were simply split.

But here I used a little trick, I unfolded some small parts of the UVs on the same sheet, so that I could make fewer materials, such as buttons and trousers, crowns and tops.

I need to give the materials a name in Maya before importing them into SP so that each UV is displayed correctly in SP and to avoid overlap problems.

In SP, I first baked the model’s texture to obtain information such as normal, ambient Occlusion, thickness, etc. This will be useful when creating textures.

This is the result of a colour scheme recreated from the character designs：

Generally, the next process is to bind the character. However, considering that the character will then be rendered in a real-time engine like UE4, I should first go to UE4 and set up the materials so that I don’t need to change the model. I should also make sure that the model will not be modified before I rig it.

This week I created clothes and props based on the body.

Clothes are mainly made using MD, Marvelous Designer.

First of all, the production of close-fitting clothes, a tank top and a pair of leggings. Because these two clothes are relatively tight, and subsequently do not need to go to these two parts of the fabric simulation. So only some of the edges will be wrinkled.

Then freeze these two parts and use them only as collision bodies to make other clothes, so that it will not affect their own shape.

The shape of the shorts is a bit too big here, but it’s okay, it can be adjusted later.

The jacket is similar to a casual suit. And because I hope the character’s clothes are stolen from him, so it does not fit, the jacket will be a bit on the large side. It doesn’t matter if the simulation results in a lot of wrinkles because I want to do a fabric simulation for the shorts and the jacket later.

I exported the clothes from MD to Maya. Here I need to pay attention to the fact that the model exported from MD is poorly wired, and some of the face pieces are not sewn together. Drawing on my experience from last semester’s collaborative project, I re-topologized the model using ZB and manually merged the facepiece vertices, which was a real pain to do.

Next, I made the scarf. Here I simply sculpted the outline in ZBrush and then exported it using Zremesher topology. Considering that the scarf needs to be animated afterwards, I reworked his topology in Maya to facilitate subsequent binding.

Then came the little prince’s necklace. Here I used the curve base in Maya. First, draw a curve, adjust his control points, so that its trajectory is like a necklace. Then use a triangle to select the curve for extrusion. The rest of the necklace was modelled using a circle.

The crown was made using the pipe geometry in Maya to reduce the number of vertices and adjust the vertices position. To avoid the corners being too stiff, chamfers were added at the edges.

For the final shoe, I downloaded the free model from Sketchfab. I adjusted the number of faces and some details.

This is the final model：

This week I mainly did modelling, and the software I used were Maya, Zbrush and Marvelous Designer.

Firstly, sculpting the high poly model of the head in Zbrush:

After that, I used a plug-in for topo in Maya, ZiRail, to make the topology of the head.

At the same time, I also topological the body. The hand is a free model downloaded from Sketchfab. Finally, all the parts are combined into one through ZiRail.

I also made hair in ZB. In order to be more cartoonish, I made the hair as a whole. And use the ZRemesher in ZB for a simple topology.

Add the details of facial features, eyebrows, eyes, eyelashes, teeth and tongue in Maya, because they are all cartoon looks, these can be easily made in Maya.

I also made a crown using polygon modelling.

Then, exhibit UV in Maya, and show some small accessories of the face to the same UV, which can save space.

Since term3, I have tried to transfer the traditional animation process to a real-time rendering engine, such as Unreal Engine4. During the summer vacation, I found a Technical Artist internship. I think I will combine some of the knowledge I learned during the internship to make FMP.

The goal of my FMP is to make an animation clip in UE, including rendering and other work done in UE. This week I mainly designed the character. Here is my character design:

Concept: The little prince of the elven world came to the modern world because of playfulness and accident, so he changed into modern clothes and explored adventures in this unknown world. He has the appearance of a child, has a naughty personality, and he is lively and active, likes to be cool, and is a bit reckless.

Clip design: The little prince violated traffic rules on the road and was chased by a police car, so he ran over various obstacles on the street, and finally used magic dodge to avoid when he was about to be hit by a car.

Part of the character design comes from the little prince, which is one of my favourite works. It can be seen that the scarf comes from the character of the little prince.