LEVEL UP YOUR CHARACTER DESIGN

Character artist J Hill tells 3D World how he pushed his creativity to new heights with Unreal Engine 5

This project was motivated by the release of Unreal Engine 5. I wanted to have some fun and try out some of the new features, like the ray-traced lighting and strandbased hair. I also just wanted to experience the new editor. My goal was to create a character that encapsulated the feeling of making something cool in Unreal Engine, and also to flex the real-time rendering capabilities.

I’ve used various versions of Unreal Engine to make games, but I’m not able to take full advantage of some of the new cutting-edge features that I’d like to due to production constraints, so I wanted to have some fun creating something high quality that I wouldn’t be able to make otherwise. I set out to make a sci-fi girl with robotic arms and fun colours to play around with a different style and workflow than I’m used to. I love the cyberpunk genre because it’s so open to interpretations and styles.

My inspirations were from all over the place; I save any images that I find really appealing to a Pinterest account and go there to see what I can mash together. Various character designs, hardsurface models, art, and portraits of people were all inspirations and references. Building a reference board is the first thing I do with any project.

This was also an opportunity for me to make some hard-surface models in Zbrush, which I don’t do much of and would like to get better at. I used Zbrush for the high-poly modelling, Maya for the Xgen grooming, Substance Painter for texturing, and I rendered everything using Unreal Engine 5.

01 GRAB METAHUMAN ASSETS

Metahuman assets are an amazing resource from Epic and it’s free to use. For what I do there isn’t a need to make everything from scratch, especially when the best quality is out there for free already. I started by downloading the Metahumans project from the marketplace and duplicating it locally so I could start with everything and turn it into my own scene. Raytracing wasn’t set up however, so that is something I would have benefitted from by starting from a template, but it wasn’t hard to enable those features.

02 XGEN TO UNREAL ENGINE

Rendering the hair in real-time was one of the main features I was looking forward to trying. I created my groom as I normally would, then exported it to Unreal Engine. I converted it to an Interactive Groom which enabled me to export it as an .abc cache. Getting the curves into the engine did not disappoint. Seeing actual hair strands is so much better than cards.

03 HAIR MATERIALS

Once I started playing around in the Material Graph to make my hair material, I found the Hair Attributes node, which is a new node specifically made to use with strand-based hair. It allowed me to make a root to tip gradient, so by Lerp-ing a couple of colours I was able to achieve a pretty cool look with a relatively simple setup.

04 STEAL THE EYES

Eyes are always important for a character and can be difficult to get looking good in real-time rendering. Unreal has had a great Eye Material for some time now with a ton of features, and they actually encourage people to use it in their projects and games. Some of the features are hardcoded into the engine now so the material expects a certain UV layout and models. So, I just ripped the meshes from a Metahuman file to be sure I had everything that worked.

05 MASTER MATERIALS

In Unreal you need to have or make master materials to be able to create Instances that you can apply to models. By using the skin and cloth materials from the Metahuman project, all of the work creating the network for the features I wanted had already been done. It was just a matter of figuring out what kind of textures I was looking for, or what features to turn off. My material needs were fairly simple – the micro weave and fuzziness on the cloth were some of the key elements I was after.

06 MOVIE RENDER QUEUE

This was my first time utilising the Movie Render Queue plugin, which enabled me to render out large images and movies with various file formats, resolutions, and super-sampled anti-aliasing. The plugin has a lot of features, and I could create large and clean images that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. I even used it to render out the 8K version of FLEX for this article.