Anyway, all jokes aside there's a lot to cover. I have my thesis date in two weeks so I need to "Do my paperwork" so to speak."
Spring break was marginally successful in working, tons of stuff has been interrupting my progress since then and continues to plague me. For example, as all the school has until April 26th to submit for spring show, us game design kids got until the 5th. Gee, that's so swell. It would have been perfect, my thesis would have been done and I could have just submitted the final work, but instead I took (and wasted) an entire week to fudge out and cut corners on this project that I've been working on for almost 3 years. It was kind of a buzzkill, to say the least. Here are the stills from that:
Then it's Lucy, depending on when I crank out the other human characters, I really need to add more paint details to her. As the first one finished, she's going to be a lower quality, so a revisit is in order. Depending on if I pass this review, which to me seems unlikely at the moment, will determine my fixes to her. She looks pretty good in engine though. I lerped in a detail map to add scales to her elephant skin. apparently we've found skin imprints of Sauropods, so I did my best to mimic the scales.
The raptor has been a royal pain. As you can see, the feather prototypes were very messy and unreliable. I'd really need a nice Anisotropic specular for this, but Unreal doesn't handle it all that well, so it has to be cheated. A metalness value of 0.212 is the best hack that I've found to get the striations in the feathers so far. I've also tried a new method for feather placement. It's super expensive for polycount, but I'm still well under my allowance so far.
Also, a note before I continue, the dinosaurs and humans are fully rigged in Maya with FK/IK controls and proper weighting. It took me about a day to Rig the 3 dinos, and then another for both characters (I borrowed the rig from class for them ;) ). So, posing is all done within maya, then those poses are sent back to Zbrush for blendshaping/wrinkle maps. This functionality won't be seen in my thesis, it's more for my own practice. Also, I've written all my shaders in Unreal for these too, I'll go into that more when I talk about Ailus.
Which I will do right now.
So, my main character as of last week went through some heavy redesigns, and here are some updated screens as of April 14th.
Some hurdles to jump through is multiple material handling in Unreal.
Some more assorted renders of pre-vis texturing. Legs and arms in these shots are way outdated. All things considered though, I'm hoping I can pull this off.