Greetings and salutations readers!
On this weekly update for BSG, we celebrate some progress made on the most difficult parts of the production so far.
For a while, our character has been in limbo. His facial sculpt was rather lacking, in that it didn't have any real appeal as a young man nor did it have good enough anatomy to quad draw good eye loops or lips. To solve this problem, we recruited a senior from another thesis film to sculpt our main character's head again, and match him closer to the photo reference of the facial model we picked. The sculpt that she made was far more beautiful in appearance, and had considerably better anatomy for features such as his lips, ears, and eye lids.
Once she finished the sculpt, I took the responsibility of re-topologizing this bust and attaching it to the torso from the previous iteration. I started out following the edge flow of a character tutorial from a YouTuber named JHill, whose created a long form video explanation on good facial topology for characters. After getting a mostly complete copy of the edge flow from the source on our character, I took him to our modeling and production professor for his input. I got some notes on how to improve the edge flow, such as ensuring that verts adjacent to the ear curved around the forehead instead of flowing completely vertically across the top of the head, and increasing the number of edge loops around the mouth.
An important part of any character is the mouth, which our character needs a good one considering how often he will be screaming and yelling. To make the teeth, I decided to use a mesh from Metahumans for Unreal as the basis. I created a male Metahuman, imported it into an Unreal Scene from the Bridge Editor, and exported the head as an FBX. The geometry that came in was unusable, with bad edge flow and plenty of triangles. However, by mesh smoothing it and quad drawing it, I was able to recreate all the teeth, gums, and tongue in a cleaner and more simplistic way. Using this method seemed more likely to succeed than scrounging for a free model online, and definitely faster than hand modeling every tooth from scratch. With help, I then created eyelids with thickness, a mouth cavity, eyes, and eyelid wetlayers, then went to attach our characters head to the existing torso.
Upon further inspection, I realized that the re-topologized torso of our character had a variety of edge flow issues, ones that would be costly to fix or remake in regards to time. Since we had a different professor for the previous production class, we didn't have the rigorous inspection of the torso that the head received, so we had incorrectly assumed that the character would be good to go for rigging. The silver lining is that the re-topologized torso enabled us to sim good clothes that could be rigged well, so the torso was a needed and valuable part of the pipeline. However, I am deciding to retire it, and our character's base anatomy will become his head/neck and arms up until the biceps.
To finalize the character's edge flow, I will rebuild the hands and arms, and then attach them to the torso again. The bust and the arms will be the only thing that has good edge flow on the torso, but we need a complete torso to project the high poly facial sculpt onto the new quad-drawn mesh. Here is a before and after of our character to show how much he's improved.
With some more re-topologizing of his hands, our character will be ready for final rigging using advanced skeleton!
The other update for this week is some promising developments on getting Deadline to render our Unreal scenes. Our IT specialist for the DAC has been working a lot in the repository and on different units, trying to isolate the problems. So far, he's identified issues ranging from missing Unreal Engine installs, to altered program file paths for Unreal, to timeout errors in the Unreal Engine python scripts for rendering. He has been awesome, and as of writing this, he has successfully gotten one job to render on one unit! After weeks of delays and hold ups, it is exciting to have some positive news to share about this problem. We still don't know how to fix the problems on every unit, but at least we now know that it is possible!
Well, this is all that I have to share production wise for the week thus far. Looking forward to showing how much our character will be improved in the next update! Until next time readers!
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