Character development

When concept was done I went straight to Zbrush.

For base i used male body that I previously sculpted. I adjusted the proportions to stay closer to the concept I've made. 

I always begin with quick sketch in Zbrush, making sure to establish bigger shapes first, without going much into the details. It wasn't too hard with this character, as I already had my design, I only needed to transfer it to 3D.

When this stage was done and proportions of the character were set to permanent, I gave the decimated version of sculpt to Chris. He used it to scale Unreal Man to proportions of our character, so he could start making animations while I am still working on character.

At this point all big shapes were set and I was ready to show character to Jamie. 

Feedback was really helpful, he pointed out few things about the face and said that I need to do some work on the pants. He suggested adding more changes of planes and sharp and soft edge variety. He also pointed out that it is good to use more reference for that.

I gathered some reference that I thought could be useful and then worked on all the areas Jamie pointed out. The main problem was that I wanted to keep pants symmetrical to save some resolution. Whole design is quite symmetrical, but I tried to play it smart, and broke symmetry with glove guard on left hand and asymmetrical scarf.

When this sculpt was approved I went into sculpting all the details. I tried to stick to concept art, but some things still were changed to add more realism. Main changes were on his hairstyle,boots and arms. We decided to go with bare arms, because environment is quite hot and such warm clothes didn't really fit. 

Next step was to set up base colours. Just a block out, somewhat a plan for texturing. No more vertex colour baking with PBR, workflow changed a lot. I used vertex colour baking only to create material ID masks, and they looked like this -

I used flat colours with max saturation. I can't describe how much time been saved thanks to this map. 

For Retopology and UVing I used amazing software called 3D-Coat. It is very fast and intuitive.

To learn how to properly do topology for character I bought tutorial by Hai Phan at CGCircuit.com.

It was extremely useful. I learned about correct flow, about how to set correct loops for places that going to deform a lot e.g. knees and elbows. Topology on the face is animation friendly too. At some point I felt like retopology took me longer than high poly. I would lie if I say that I liked doing it, but I certainly did my best and put a lot of effort in it. It wasn't just some personal project, I was working with animator, and had to make sure that what I produce is good. Apparently I succeeded in it. Chris mentioned many times how much he liked topology on the character, and how easy it was to use this model. I can't even say how happy I was to hear that, as I was worried a lot if it's going to work.

I also need to mention that I made really major mistake in the beginning. I modeled hands too low down, so armpit was merging a bit with the arm, and it was really bad for animation. During sculpting I had this feeling, but as I been showing the sculpt to others, and no one ever mentioned it, I thought ( or hoped) it should work. I realized that it's a terrible mistake only when I Retopologized, UVed! and baked normal maps. So I had to go back, move hands higher, resculpt armpits, make new topology (thankfully I was able to reuse hand, so I saved some times on not making new topology for fingers), then make new UVs and rebake. You can see that on the image below arms are higher than on last Zbrush sculpt (coloured one).

Normal maps for character and pretty much everything else were baked in Substance Designer. I was amazed how clean bakes were. It maybe because of me being more experienced now with how to bake normals properly. How to set objects, and how to arrange smoothing groups. I learned a lot from my classmate Alex Downham. But even though, bakes from SD were extremely clean, and in most time I didn't even need cage mesh. Baking was really fast thanks to Designer ability to turn on and off meshes for baking. On the right you see quick import test that I've done to see how well UE4 handles seams. Result was absolutely great, that set me free to start texturing.

Texturing was totally new and unusual experience. In my opinion Substance Painter is as revolutionary software for game industry as was Zbrush when it arrived. Texturing feels so natural now, it made transition to PBR a bit easier. In some kind S.Painter reaminds of Photoshop in its structure. I know all the tricks with masking in Photoshop quite good, so I got grip of workflow in Painter pretty fast. Masks on layers, masks on groups, groups withing groups and mask on those groups. All that allowed to utilize custom Substance effects and freely edit them afterwards by adding our subtracting from them. At the moment Painter is missing some minor things, but it is already a very powerful software.

When character got imported into UE4 first, there was a huge issue with roughness and everything that was metal. Everything looked almost as twice shiny as in Substance, and metals were freaking out and sparkling all over the place. Skin looked like it's covered in oil. Nobody is 100% sure at the moment, but say that this difference in roughness is because of lighting types.
Solution for this was to multiply roughness map in Engine by 1.5. Interesting fact, is that another artist who was using Substance Painter for this project, also had the same problem. And he solved it exactly the same way, by multiplying roughness by 1,5-1,6. For metals, additionally to this I also had to keep roughness not lower then 3,5.

Otherwise it would start sparkling like camera's flash. I found that it works best in 3.5-4,5 range.

Later on we also decided to darken the skin. Great advantage of Substance Painter is that everything consists of layers and groups, nothing can be merged, and therefore can be adjusted any time. This screenshot is made in UE4 but in different lighting conditions, in our scene darker skin looked better. Reason for using this default UE4 scene was that we had some trouble with lighting for a while in our scene, so I tested if textures work in this one, and after imported them to our level.