Greetings,

This is the third and final Demo WIP for this year's contest. This is not a contest entry, but rather a brief workflow demo and a possible guide as how to construct your own WIP thread. I've chosen this Witch character, as it delves clothing setup and texturing detail. The main character sculpt will be done in Zbrush, while the clothing refinement, UV mapping, texturing will be done in Blender and possibly 3D-Coat. I will try to demonstrate how to rig and skin complicated clothing, create hair, and also use spring bones for certain items. Normally a character like this would take weeks/months, so I'm not expecting I'll get an exact likeness in a few days.



I've begin this project by sending over the CC3+ mesh through the new GoZ Plus addon. I'm only working on the body and head, so I'm not going to send over the other items (eyes, teeth, tongue, etc) with any subdivisons or polypaint.



I've started by setting up placeholder meshes. These serve as a way of guiding my eyes / brain as I create the character, and these meshes can also be developed into more detailed assets.



The character's body and face details are not very complicated. It is, after all, just an aged human female. Because of this, I felt comfortable in sculpting some higher resolution details quickly after sending the mesh over from Character Creator. I replaced the default skin polypaint (converted from the CC3+ textures) with a darker skin shade. I calculated Ambient Occlusion, which creates a mask. I inverted the mask, and filled the exposed mesh with a darker shade of the same color. This brought out some of the details of the face, giving her complexion a more sunken look.

To create the hair, I duplicated the Head Mesh, separated it, then added an ‘Empty Hair’ object. This model uses UDIMs, which can cause issues with generating hair in this way. This is why I duplicated the head (rather than apply the hair to the whole body), because it isolates that UV space.



I ended up creating several ‘Empty Hair’ objects, which I populated with strands using the ‘Circle Profle UV’. These options are available for the Hair Tool Add-on. Creating several Hair Objects allows the settings to be varied and controlled with more precision.

For the clothing, I tried to visually divide the objects into components:

• Dress
• Robe (outer)
• Cloak (2 layers)
• Belt
• Belt Bangle (will likely be parented to the Pelvis or Waist bone; it has Spring Bones for the dangling elements).
• Earrings (spring bones)
• Sandals (not yet created)
• Hat

For the clothing folds, I used both cloth fold Alpha brushes and the Cloth Simulation brushes.

The next update I will attempt to texture the clothing and import it into Character Creator.

Greetings,

This is the latest update on this character. I ran into a couple snags with the import / export process. While the add-on is stable for most work, my workflow often takes some turns, and I broke my connection to the FBXkey. I ended up generating a new FBXkey from a previous version of the character I had saved. This allowed me to import the character, but some of the work I wanted to demonstrate will have to wait for another time, as I exported the assets as accessories, which then required new skinning within Character Creator.

I was able to create a new version of the robe and dress and a few other assets in Blender. I created the hair using hair curves (Hair Tool addon). The strands are very low resolution geometry, around 2500 polygons for the entire hair. I try to keep things low as possible while retaining the necessary detail. Since most of the detail is in the textures, it was no problem to keep the resolution low.

As I mentioned, I did some work on weight mapping and clothing preparation in Blender. However, I ended up exporting the items as accessories and skinned weighted them within Character Creator. Skinning can be done using Character Creator, but the assets should be fairly low resolution to use the CC4 skinning tools effectively.

I was using the UCUPaint add-on in Blender to texture many of the assets, which is very powerful, but I am more used to 3D-Coat so I finished up the textures in that app. I didn’t do anything too elaborate, mostly because I didn’t fully understand the clothing pattern in the reference image.

A tattered cloth look can be achieved by either hiding the bottom layer (Layer 0) and selectively erasing the color textures of the other layers, or by using one of the layers as a clipping mask.

Finally, I created assets designed for thespring-bones. The bangle on her belt, chest, and earrings all use spring-bones.I found that they were difficult to notice in the short animation I did.

So amazing!
thanks for sharing your process with us Peter!