Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Weekly Progress

 

This week, I focused on completing the model for the head of the princess character. Like with the body, my goal was to pay careful attention to the edge flow and keep it as low poly as possible without losing the level of detail I was originally striving for. I still plan to sculpt the general shape of the face a bit further in Mudbox, but for the most part, I have now completed the modeling stage for this character. I imported the completed character into Marvelous Designer to use as the avatar so that I can begin designing the clothing. 

 

For this upcoming week, I plan to continue working on the garment design in Marvelous Designer and begin creating a hairstyle in XGen. I also plan to finish importing the main environment assets into Unreal and hopefully begin working on the game mechanics.

Time spent this week: 9 hours

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Week 7 Progress




This past week, I continued bringing assets for the castle environment into Unreal Engine. I also finished modeling the body of the princess character, reusing and re-topologizing the hands and feet from one of my previous models in order to save some time. For the castle, I began learning how to use Substance Painter to create materials for the assets and plug them into UE4. I figured out a workflow for texturing some of the modular assets, such as the pillars and the railings. I am currently continuing to create materials and import them into UE4 along with the models I created in Maya.

By the end of week 8, my goal is to start creating the lower part of the clothing in Marvelous Designer (the part that I will apply Apex cloth to). Even if I don't finish the details of the clothing, I would like to finish at least something simple so that I can better understand the workflow of exporting the cloth from MD to Maya (and then from Maya into Unreal). I would also like to begin sculpting the head in Mudbox, as well as continue creating models and textures for the castle environment.

Time spent this week: 16 hours

Monday, October 3, 2016

Weekly Progress

This past week, I began modeling the princess character, completed the layout of the castle and began bringing assets from Maya into Unreal. I still need to refine a lot of the meshes and UV them properly, but my goal for this week was to start bringing my scene into Unreal to start testing it with the scale of the character, collision maps and blueprints. I also did more research into creating hair for my characters and found that if my goal is to bring my characters into Unreal (as opposed to my original idea of just creating an animation in Maya), I should not use XGen like I had originally planned. Instead, I plan on looking into creating hair cards using textured planes and alpha channels.

For this upcoming week, I would like to finish the body of the character so that I can start work in Marvelous Designer by Week 7. If time allows, I would also like to start sculpting the face and begin creating the hair cards that I mentioned above. For the castle environment, I will continue to refine the meshes and do UV / texturing work. I would also like to see if I can figure out how to create NPC dialogue options using Blueprints in Unreal. For now, the NPC will just be a static mesh.

Time spent this week: 17 hours