ZBrushCentral

Realistic Face For Real Time Rendering

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Hello! First time posting here! This is a test for my project, this is markerless motion-capture, then rendered inside Unreal Engine 4. This test has nothing to do with the story of the project, but a lot with the quality I´m trying to achieve!

First of all thanks to David Marmor for the model and blenshapes, and Baongoc Vu for letting me use and tweak his eye material. I was in charge of making the UVs, all the texturing, materials, secondary blenshapes, re-rigging the whole thing for game engine, lighting, mocap setup and animation. One of the main goals while planning this test was not only to show quality, but to know how the engine would manage to handle a complex model.

Zbrush was used for all the skin details and secondary blendshsapes. The normal maps created in Zbrush were 8k resolution. If you want to know more about my future projects, follow me at: http://www.facebook.com/BraVlio.FG

[youtubehd]Ff5bmk00Auw[/youtubehd]

Attachments

Front_Screenshot.jpg

Eyes_Screenshot.jpg

Nose_Screenshot.jpg

Mouth_Screenshot.jpg

Zbrush_01.jpg

Zbrush_02.jpg

Zbrush_03.jpg

#2

Some images of the creation process:

braulio-fg-hairexample.jpg
braulio-fg-hairexample.jpg1500×410 447 KB

UV_Shells.jpg
UV_Shells.jpg1500×724 835 KB

braulio-fg-ue4-screenshot-03.jpg
braulio-fg-ue4-screenshot-03.jpg1689×841 334 KB

braulio-fg-innermouth.jpg
Skin_Passes.jpg

#3

First of all - as always - the facial animation is still a bit uncanny. It’s just the current limitation of our tehcnology, but nevertheless it’s pleasant enough to look at. Still, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon, that the uncannines withers away the more you look at certain type of animation work on a video game or a CG movie. Recently I played PS4 game Until Dawn, and its facial animations came a bit uncanny for a while, BUT after playing the game through multiple times I got used to it and suddenly nothing was uncanny anymore. I guess it’s just that developers of the game have been looking at their animation work for months, even years before releasing their game, and they get “blind” to the uncanny things and everything seems to be perfect. For a player playing the game for the first time, it’s a lot easier to spot uncanny areas, such as movement of mouth and how eyes are focusing on the camera/person/object etc. Usually it’s eyes’ focus which can be off most of the time.

Anyway, those materials and textures you’ve done look crazy good for real-time rendring inside Unreal Engine 4. I’m used to the simpler texture slots of Marmoset Toolbag 3’s materials and that node spaghetti in UE4 looks intimidating, haha. I’m very nood at creating materials with nodes. I would be interested to see a breakdown of the material nodes for skin, eyes and hair shading if you have time.

Her mesh topology seems kinda weird to have so many oddly placed poles here and there, and still being animation friendly. This is the topology work I’ve done for my current upcoming character:
http://i.imgur.com/kEdpYx8.jpg

Hair is looking good, and I like those stray pieces of hair separated from the main hair cards.

#4

Thanks for your reply! :slight_smile:

-Yeah your theory that the more you look at something as a developer, you get blinded and need a fresh eye, is true, been there.
I created this test with a low budget technology, a Kinect for Xbox 360 to be exact, so from the start I already knew that I couldn’t break the uncanny valley :laughing: but I gave it a shot . Also I think that the uncanny valley in videogames is more accepted, than film for example.

-Thanks for the compliment over the materials! I like to create my own parameters in the material, because I usually need a lot of precision or control, and sometimes those already prepared materials don’t allowed me that. Creating materials with nodes is not that difficult as it seems, I really encourage you to give it a try. I wrote an article talking about skin texturing and materials in here, maybe it could help: https://texturing.xyz/pages/brav-fg-texturing-a-realistic-face-for-real-time-rendering-inside-unreal-engine-4

-Yes maybe the topology seems weird at first glance, but the idea behind it is to help deform the face accordingly to the wrinkles of the face, worked fine at the end hehe :laughing:. Your topology seems ok, very dense where needed, seems like a topology for a cinematic quality :+1:

-Yeah the hair was very symmetrical in this case, so I needed those small details and loose hairs to try to break that, glad you like it :slight_smile: