November 16th 2018

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Minotaur

I started this project for my presentation during Zbrush Summit 2018. The head started based on a Carlos Huante Concept, and then I sketched a body and some accessories based on different ideas. After the Summit was over, I turned this into an exploration of different techniques and workflows, more concern in learning new things as opposed to striving for a finished project. As you can see, there are a lot of things unfinished like the horns and the rest of the body…. I call it a study :)

Topology and UVs in Maya. (this is not perfect topology for anim but it was ok for presentation purposes)
Detailing was done through a combination of Texture XYZ projected textures in Mari, plus hand sculpted in Zbrush.
Textures were done in Substance Painter.
Look Dev and presentation was done in Unreal Engine 4.21

I’ve also used this project to dive a bit deeper into Unreal Engine and start exploring the power and complexity of it a bit more.
Epic released a couple weeks ago a new Digital Human that you can download for free. It comes with very complex shaders and also great lighting rigs that you can use in your own projects. To me, it was more useful to understand how they were approaching different things and also got me a bit more interested in math and coding. I love Tech Art as well, so every opportunity I have to learn a bit more how things are handled behind the scenes, I take advantage of it.

I ended up building my own Skin Material / Shader from scratch, and I plan on releasing it at some point. As opposed to hooking up the textures directly, I’m trying to build a complex material that could work with almost any project that requires complex skin and I’m exposing only what you really need. Still working on it, but stay tuned if you are interested in trying it out soon :)

For this Project, I’m using their Eye Shader and Eye Contact Shadow Shader.

Hair work was done in xGen and optimized and transferred to Unreal in order to utilize very complex shaders, based on Unreal papers. They have very interesting concepts when it comes to rendering “Next Gen Hair”, so I definitely wanted to understand how they are doing it. My own hair shader is a mixture between Epic shader with my own tweaks to certain things (I’m still working on the fur and hair for this guy. Whenever I get some good results on it, I’ll update this page here)