Gori Behind the scenes Episode: 3 Ohh that Gori! (Patreon)

Eyyyy!! Hello again everyone! =D

I hope you are all ready for some more behind the scenes stuff. =P

Today will be like I said last time a part 2 kind of thing of the Gori the character creation. So today I'll take you through some of the 3D work that went into making Gori.

So without further ado let's go!

So continuing where we left off last time... So after Caroline finished the 2D concept it was then John's turn to create the 3D character model. 

The 3D process for characters (most of the time) starts off with making what is called the highpoly. Highpoly means a high definition version of something that has all of the small detail. If you have seen the Unreal 5 demo xD those meshes are what most people many times would call highpoly. But you might be like why not use this then? Well.... game engines can handle alot of polygons (pretty much everything you see in games are made out of polygons) but.... at the level you do the highpoly is quite a bit too much for the game to run smoothly xD. I'll tell you soon how we are gonna make this work in a game and there are more problems that need fixing but I'm getting ahead of myself xD.   

So to get back on track, to make the highpoly John do something called digital sculpting. And it's just what it sounds like. It's just like sculpting (in a way xD) but on a computer. At the studio we use a program called ZBrush for all our sculpting needs, and it's an amazing software (we are not sponsored but if you see this Pixologic ;) call us!) that lets you do everything and is super versatile in how you wanna work etc. 

So above here you can see some of John's early iterations of Gori developing into almost his final shape. We went back and forth a lot on the shape at this point mostly focusing on the big shapes like the shape of his head and size of his ears. Trying to pronounce his feature as best as possible trying to get a "cute" face xD.

Sadly we... don't take pictures all the time. So I can't show like the early stages of the clothes and stuff from the highpoly stage. But after going through the same process like above enough times Gori looked something like this:

He looked a little naked xD. But this is Gori without his fur. So the last thing before the next step in the process was to give him some fur. And we did that by using a function in ZBrush called Fibermesh, which is a function made for adding hair and stuff. And it works a bit like adding hair and grooming it with brushes and stuff to get the shape. And after that he looked something like this:  

And that's the end of the step we call the highpoly step. Some of you that do 3D might wonder why we do hair like this but rest assured I'll get to that when we get to the shader part =P.

The next step in the process is called the lowpoly and UV step. It's not much to show here. but now I can explain how Gori is able to be in the game xD. So basically you use a process called baking. So instead of having all these details in like the highpoly you "bake" them down using a baking software of your choice (John uses Substance Designer) to instead be details in pictures. These  pictures are what is called Textures, you might have heard that word thrown around in other game related things. Through the baking process we also get other textures that we use to fake details in the Game Engine. So to "catch" this detail you bake it to a lower definition mesh called the Lowpoly. The lowpoly is also a lot more easy to later animate. So using the program Maya we create the lowpoly by manually building what's almost like a shell on top of the highpoly. In the picture below you can also see that we have some cards for hair that later also help too break up the silhouette a bit more.

What is the UV part then you might ask? Well, the UVing part is where we basically map the 3D model to a 2D Texture. Imagine it like this, if you wanted to UV an orange for example (A real one that is xD). You would peel it, you would have to tear the skin here and there to get the skin off xD but that's ok. The peel you would then have you can put flat on a table, with the orange side up. That would then from above be a 2D representation of the 3D version of the orange. Here is a couple of example textures from Gori:

For characters the UV can look kinda gross xD but ataleast you can see a bit  what's what like his face and stuff xD. Here you can also see that all that fur John modelled is now baked into the textures. And as a visualization on the 3D model how the right texture above looks, here is a picture:

So I don't have any pictures of any texturing being done xD. But for you who wonder what program we use for texturing it's Substance painter most of the time. I also use Quixel Mixer a bunch for environment stuff, but that's for another post xD. But here before I go a little into the shader stuff too, here is how Gori looks in Engine:

Ok now I'll show a bit of the shaders =P it's not the most complex stuff if you work with this but for a lot of you it might be a bit too nerdy xD. I'll try to explain as basic as I can but this is kinda deeper technical stuff =P. 

So starting out I must say that ofc we don't always make everything from scratch. And this is one of those times =P. We choose how to do the fur from Epic Games own assets from their cancelled game Paragon. And for eyes we also use their Eye shaders and setup. We tweak them a bit to for our needs sometimes =P but they are a crazy good starting point and are really high quality stuff. 

So even before John started baking Gori, me and him looked around a bit for a technique to make the fur. And we both knew that Paragon had really cool and good looking characters. And a bunch of them had fur xD. 

We first looked a bit at the character Howitzer that is like a rodent man in a mech (Looks alot like Rumble from league of legends for you people that play that xD). But looking at him we found his fur design technique a bit too long and not really fully fitting our needs. Most of his fur was built with "haircards". Haircards are like planes with textures of clumps or bundles of hair strands mapped to them. Putting them out is a really long process, best done manually but the result can look amazing if done right. Could have worked for us but we wanted to look a little more. We then looked a bit at the character Boris, a half mech bear but again he wasn't fully what we wanted, cause he used the same workflow. We then took a look at the character Zinx, a thundercats type of character xD. She used a mixed workflow for her fur. Using cards here and there to break the silhouette but the core was baked down depth that fake the look of short fur. This looked and felt more like what we wanted for Gori so that's what we choose. 

I can't show you pictures of all the characters I think but here is links to them all in the Unreal Marketplace:

Paragon: Howitzer 

Paragon: Boris 

Paragon: Zinx 

And if you use Unreal yourself you can for free download all characters and Environments from Paragon and use them in any way you like. It's a really good way of learning to deconstruct these and learn how you can solve problems like how to make fur. I really recommend checking these out and other content examples Epic has made for both people staring out learning Unreal 4 but also everyone currently using. =P It's an invaluable source of information. 

Here is the shader for Goris base fur (not the cards):

I know! Now you know everything right? xD No... Sorry. Well I will explain a little the core concept how the shader works. But if you wanna know a bit more in depth I think it's better to just download Zinx and open up her fur shader so you can pick it apart yourself. But to clarify here are the two material functions to look for in her shader:

So the shader in itself is actually not very complicated, and it doesn't use any parallaxing or tessellation. It's basically just using a depthmap of the fur (the black and white texture I showed before) to color the roots and tips differently and give them a slightly different roughness. So that's why John modelled the fur in ZBrush to bake down into the textures before =P. That's about it xD I'm not sure what more to say about this shader. I have some more fun shaders to explain in future posts that I made myself that I can maybe explain a bit more in detail and maybe do a tutorial type thing on =P. 

I'm not gonna lie... xD I was just gonna check the hair cards material cuse well, how much can be in it? ...well...

It looks like a real snake nest xD! Again though it's actually not too complicated and is commented so it's kinda easy for you to break down yourself if you wanna check it out. But to comment a bit on this. It uses a bunch of things made specifically for Paragon, like different damage effects like being on fire etc., some custom rim lights, optimization for low running settings etc. etc. I don't think it's a good idea for me to break this whole shader down here xD but if you people want to see that at some point I could make a separate post about it some time. Cause I think it would double this post's length if I did it now xD. 

But that's about it! I hope this was an interesting look into what goes into the 3D character creation part for Gori =D  And sorry if the last part gets very... technical xD so ask me if there is anything you didn't understand that you want to understand, and i'll try to explain it xD. 

Anyhow... The only current part left to show of Gori is back to Caroline again for some Animation. But I think I'll take a break from Gori Character posts to mix it up a bit =P so next time..... maybe we could look a bit into the sound / music part cuse i feel we haven't talked anything about that yet so =P I hope that sounds cool!

All right! You people have a rest of a good day and I see you next week for more behind the scenes stuff =D 

Laterz!!!