So I thought I'd share how I approached these blades.

When I work on props, I'm always thinking about where my time is best spent. In production, every decision has a cost. If I can make a decision early that keeps me close to the concept and saves hours of adjustments later, that's usually the route I'll take.

For this asset, I had a detailed concept sheet, so I started by tracing the main silhouettes in Maya. At this stage, I'm not focused on details. I'm focused on understanding the design and breaking it down into simple, readable shapes. The goal here is to stay loose and avoid spending too much time polishing. We just need a strong foundation.

Once the proportions are in place, I move everything into ZBrush and start refining the forms. Here while refining the overall shape just by using move brush, it's important to see based on how they would exist in the real world. For example, the blade and the handle would be made from different materials and parts, so I treat them as separate pieces and do so as early as possible.

I like this approach because it gets me very close to the concept right from the beginning. Instead of spending time fixing proportions later, I can focus on refining the design. 

This workflow has saved me a lot of time over the years, especially when working with tight deadlines and production schedules.

This is my final blog post for this contest. Overall, I've been busy with polishing the textures, skin and hair style and shaders. The project could go in many different directions but I decided to keep it as simple as possible, for the sake of learning. I try to break down what I did to finish the last part of the project. You can check out the final presentation on my portfolio section.

To create the hair strand textures, I'm using xGen in Maya and baking everything out in xNormal. Here is the example of a more detailed workflow I always try to follow video link.

Hairstyle

Usually, I create a pack of hair chunks and use the Nonlinear Deform tools - on the section Deform. However, this time I've tried a slightly different workflow. Instead of using these shape deformers, I've used a plugin called GS CurveTools

Character Creation 3

You can choose a Hair shader in CC3, import your textures and tweak the parameters. 

For the lighting, I used a contrasty atmosphere that I found in the Content-Environment section, which imports already setup lighting as well. I slightly tweaked that until I was satisfied, turned on the GI setting on the Visual Tab and added some Post Effects to emphasis the overall mood.

iClone Turntable and Animation

I've been very lucky to find out that iClone has a female Animation Persona with dual guns that is free to use. Overall, I tried and used standard presets I found in the library with little bit of adjustment. Adding facial expression or adjusting the body animation can be done easily by checking through the Motion tab. 

Also, I've created multiple cameras and switched them by using the Switcher section on the timeline, you can find more detailed explanation on this tutorial from Reallusion. This way I was able to work on the short turntable animation by using just one project file. 

 Turntable preview

For the second animation, I decided to create two additional separated project files. The first one, where I created just a dancing animation scene and the second one, where she fires her guns. Final editing was created by using OpenShot video editor.

Dance

Openshot 

Last week, I've been working on the textures. Great that CC3 has also a link to substance painter as well. Also, I'm very happy to try out their substance export settings. Everything is exported in a well organized way.  The setting creates for every texture set it's own folder with proper naming. If you're getting overwhelmed with organizing your stuff, it could be very handy to use. Even if you're not using CC3.

I still feel that I need to go another pass for polishing the textures. Hopefully, I'll have enough time to do that but for now, I have to go through the most challenging part to me, which is the hair -.-

Besides the textures, I've been busy with rigging the skirt in Maya. Since my rigging and weight painting skills are very basic, I admit that it was a total disaster! xD After couple days of wasting time in trying to get a decent result, I found out that you can use the Soft cloth physics in iClone. Honestly, I'm trying it for the first time and made my mind blow how fast I got a nice result. At last, I saw a tutorial where you can import everything to Unreal with already setup shaders. Can't wait to finish everything and try that out as well

Playing around with the facial expressions.

Progress render in Character creator. Still busy with the hair and clothing textures 

  

Face progress and little bit overpaint on top of the screenshots. I'm just still working on the hair

Before and after look on Character Creator. Basically, the screenshot on the left, is base mesh where I've started sculpting her face. I'm using xyz textures as a base. I'm still figuring out how to get a better picture quality on Character Creator. Looks like it's compressing all the textures, I guess for the performance. 

Before I start with adding more details and changes, I wanted to play around with Character Creator and iClone to test out how everything is working. Amazing to see how easy it is to get from this very early stage, already to the lookdev and enjoy pretty much an unbreakable back-and-forth method. Just by couple mouse clicks, everything is automatically imported into the Character Creator scene and it works the same if you want to import your stuff back to Zbrush. Also, automatic weight painting works very nice and easy. However, it doesn't work well with very long dresses or skirts. I think it won't be a huge problem to fix the weights if the skirt was up to the knee height, but in my case, I should probably weight paint my skirt manually in Maya.  

Important things to note: 

When I tried to re-import the meshes from Zbrush to CC, all my clothing and the rig were broken. I guess it's because I initially imported the base body mesh from CC to Zbrush with the default A pose. Unfortunately, I think that default A pose makes it difficult for me to sculpt and/or simulate clothing on it. The arms are too straight. The legs and finger are too close to each other. So, I applied UE4_A_pose that you can find in CC's content library. 

First thing first, if you want to GoZ another pose, you should probably use Layers in Zbrush. So, if you want to make any changes to the face and body later, you can always set back the default A_pose to re-import your character without breaking the rig. 

Conclusion

Looks like there are so much more things to explore and I'm excited to play around after finishing the modeling and texturing stages. My next goals would be, to work further on my characters face and clothing. Then apply the xyz textures and use substance painter for texturing the clothes etc. 

iClone animation test:

Hope you guys doing well! I'm participating a new challenge - 2020 CC Digital Human Contest. This is my work in progress. Never worked with this particular pipeline and I'm excited to try out a new workflow. Decided to give it a shot. 

Description: 

People call her - Black Arachne. She is a legendary huntress. Successfully liquidated the most challenging and secure targets. Some say, her mourning dress and a tender smile shows her enemy's, she still remembers everything. But who knows? Her true intentions remain hidden...

• Key features:
  Elegant Black mourning dress
  Dual revolvers  

Axe and sword work in progress