Let me introduce you to my very first game made with Unreal Engine 4.
It’s an old school breakout game with an 80’s design !
I am using UE4 for 2 years for R&D and I think it’s time to take a try with game design. So this is a video of the alpha version, a lot things have to be done but it’s still promising !
This month the demo will focus on the scene lighting in Marmoset Toolbag!
The workflow remains the same as the other one about Dress up a character with Marvelous Designer, part 2 , I always use the chain Daz -> Marvelous -> Blender -> Substance Painter -> Toolbag.
I confess that I was not at all satisfied by the rendering of previous pinups, so I had to spend more time on Toolbag to improve my understanding of this wonderful tool.
That’s why this month I offer you a description of the methodology I used. To do this I drew heavily on the following two articles from the site of Marmoset, the first is that of Emmanuel Lecouturier and the second is that of Vadim Sorici.
First of all, as mentioned above, the beginning of the work is exactly like the October pinup, I made a night outfit with Marvelous Textured Designer with Substance Painter.
Now let’s get down to business with the Marmoset Toolbag part explained step by step.
But before starting I draw your attention to a new feature that will be very useful for the future. If during the process your PC becomes too slow to display and manage the settings, you will only have to activate the degraded mode via the small rocket.
This disables the Post process and camera calculations on the screen display without canceling them on the rendered render.
Your character can be in Obj or FBX format, whatever. The most important thing is that it is finalized, UV and materials need to be adjusted.
At this moment you can already enjoy the template with the default settings of Toolbag. Consider that it is now necessary to check that each textures are correctly adjusted (skin, hair, eyes).
It’s about starting to create the scene environment, so choosing the image is crucial. Here I chose a night view of Shangai from hdri haven.com.
It is already possible to steer the skybox to create the effects will highlight the body of the pinup.
Here I add the outfit and some simple elements to create a light staging.
The first light source, front light allows to highlight the subject, here I chose a directional light so that it also illuminates the rest of the scene.
When you want to highlight a character it is common to use one or more side lights. They will help to accentuate the contours of the subject, especially if we play with colors. Here I added a pink spot and spot blue to stay in agreement with the environment map. Be careful to adjust your spots so that the outline of the shadows is not frank but rather progressive. For that you have to play with the parameter “width” which makes it possible to modify the concentration of light by the size of the cone.
The addition of a fog is not mandatory and can provide a specific effect. This is why it is used here with lightness.
This is where your frame rate will fall! “Global Illumination” will bring a lot of consistency to your scene. Also test the “secondary bounce” to see the impact of your decor on the subject’s lighting. Adjust the Ambient Occlusion to find a good compromise between shadow and darkness.
It is possible that the global illumination is source of luminous artifact like those that I surrounded on the screenshot.
To eliminate light flaws, you must play on the Resolution voxel by changing it to HIGH or by decreasing the Voxel Scene Fit. Be aware that going into High risk of dropping the performance of your PC. In my case I went in HIGH because it offered better results.
If there is one thing that is easily forgotten, it is the camera setting. When I started with ToolBag I did not care about the camera, and it was a mistake!
Even virtual shooting is still a shot, the choice of the lens is one of the basic elements gives character to the scene, even if this simple setting seems harmless. Without going into big debates, usually in photography to make portraits, we use lenses from 50 to 85 or even 100mm. Try different depths and keep the one that gives you the most sensation. Here I chose 85mm. The change is clearly noticeable.
As for fog, playing on the depth of field will affect the mood of your scene. Here I want to slightly blur the environment, this setting is relatively simple, just click on the subject with the mouse wheel for Toolbag focuses itself. Then it remains only to accentuate the blur as needed with the “Far Blur” or “Near Blur” and voila.
The post process is a bit like the icing on the cake, it must be just enough to make fun without putting too much to avoid indigestion.
Different presets are present to guide you towards specific atmospheres.
Here I made my own preset with Sharpen to accentuate the features of the pinup that the Fog had blurred. The Bloom brings a small aura that gives charm to the scene, just like the Vignette that slightly obscures the edges of the image. Here the Grain had no interest and I opted for a Tone Mapping in ACES for more authenticity.
The result is rather convincing!
Here I hope this article will have been useful, I invite you to browse the gallery of this pinup.
See you !
Hello everyone !
I will present here a summary of the design for this second pin-up.
The frame will be more or less the same as the previous one, with some details on certain aspects.
Here are the versions of the tools I used: Marvelous Designer 6, Blender 2.79, Daz Studio 4.10, Substance Painter 2018.1.3 and Marmoset Toolbag 3.05.
With this pin-up, as with the previous one, it’s the outfit that defines the theme.
To model the dress, I use the patronage as a reference by loading it as a texture on a plane.
To better understand this method I invite you to watch this video, you will quickly understand how to proceed.
As I said above this dress is relatively simple because I’m still trying to validate a workflow. This achievement allowed me to test the elastic elements that make up the dress and give a more realistic look.
Here is what gives the dress once completed on the final model.
It takes a bit of time with Daz to make a perfect pin-up. The “shaping” tab allows you to customize the anatomy of your girl, while “parameters” and “posing” will help you give it a sexy pose.
Once the model realized, I exported it in .OBJ format in 2 different positions, one in T-pose and the other in final position. The idea is to use the T-pose to adjust the clothes with Marvelous then migrate from T-pose to the final pose in order to calculates the deformation of the dress.
What’s really great is that Marvelous allows you to successively import a model with 2 different poses and change the simulation of falling clothing accordingly.
It is therefore necessary to export the model twice, the second must be loaded as a “morph target “!
Please note, the option ‘convert maps’ allows to recover the textures that use the opacity for the lashes of the manikin, it is very useful for the final representation.
Pin-up scenes always need decorative elements to make the sense of the scene. That’s why I added various elements designed with Marvelous.
The handbag was made with Marvelous, Blender and Substance Painter, but before that, it was necessary to find inspiration on the internet before starting to make the model.
Once the model is finished with Marvelous, I export it in OBJ to Blender in order to rework the distribution of the materials by merging all the elements of identical texture, and also to realize an ID_map with the excellent addon Textool for Blender. The model is then exported again from Blender in Obj format to be textured in Substance Painter using the ID_map. I followed exactly the same process with the panties, so I will not go into detail.
The elements are introduced one by one in Toolbag in Obj format with 4K textures.
In addition to the pin-up, the stage consists of a simple base and 3 lights.
The luggage comes from the Cadnav site, and the soil texture comes from CgBookCase.
That’s it for today, I hope this article will give you some information, feel free to contact me for more information.
According to the requests I will surely make another articles to deepen some points.
In the meantime, see you in November for the next pin-up!
