Week 15 - Final - 'A' Stage

 

UI Implementation on main screen and HUD

Texture fixes 

Setting up controller support for the Witch

Perforce Proof

Week 14 - VTube Studio PyQt Plugin

This project was brought on by one of my best friends who does Vtuber streaming, Kudamahou, sharing some of the aspects of her model, specifically the model's base PRISM Customizable Vtuber Model, which requires the use of numeric sliders to dictate the colour as opposed to a colour picker/limited colour selection. She shared how this can cause trouble colour matching when elements are similar and voices wanting some form of solution.

As a result I decided to experiment with how to make a small tool to resolve this, something to take the vector 3 value (RGB) with a colour picker and turn this into a numerical value that Kuda could easily use to fill in the model data.

I wanted to start off small on this project, since Kuda has a relatively complex model, I needed to build my way up to where she is, even if the math is arguably simpler. For this I grabbed a testing model by MOCHIPU Shop - 無料】絵描きLive2Dモデル - which relies on an RGB based system, but lacks a colour picker, to mess with.

The Art Meshes are the different aspects of the body, seperated into different groups, for example ArtMesh41 is the white highlights of the right eye - remember kids naming your files properly is important.

For the purposes of experimenting, im playing with ArtMesh41 which is the back pillow - you can see here we have a more complex, but better user experience selector - ideally this would be what I want Kuda to have, at a minimum the hex code in addition to the HSV sliders.

For my first attempt I was able to get the API to recognize my VS code with the mandatory information needed, this step was surprisingly easy to work through, but I can imaging going out-of VS code may have harder problems waiting for me.

This is the current state of the colour picker, bringing up a basic python menu labeled 'Kuda Colour Picker' with a singular button for 'Pick Colour' this then brings the user to a 'Select Colour' which is the ideal UI at the moment. If this could connect into the VTube Studio API I would consider this step in the process complete.

Troubleshooting

One of the bigger problems with this project is my lack of familiarity with a lot of the python-specific tools. This will be something that fades with time as I get more used to the material and get experience building other tools, however at the current moment its been really difficult to figure out some of the more niche problems - such as what is the entire range of UI I can do with python, when a lot of options are behind plugins or paywalls.

A fun resource:

Week 14 - Cyberpunk Character

Sculpting Practice

To better improve my sculpting ability, I wanted to continue doing at least somewhat weekly sculpts where I focus in on at least one aspect of modeling I dont fully understand or need to improve on, for this concept im targeting curve tools and hard surface sculpting in Zbrush.

Total time: 2 hours

Character Design Concept

Generated from Gemini.ai

Concept:

Ceryn Faelix is a back-alley savant of life and metal — a Medtech whose toolkit hums with polished chrome and resin-slick beetle shells. She's a walking contradiction — cold precision healer wrapped in flowing streetwear layered like insect wings, dark greens and midnight blues offset with coppery beetle carapace motifs. Her look speaks to rebirth, adaptation, survival — all things nature excels at, even in the concrete jungles of Night City.

Where others in the Time of the Red have turned to chrome alone, Ceryn has turned to nature’s oldest survivors — beetles. Armored, adaptable, resilient. Her medical techniques blend biotech, nanite-infused sap, and organic grafting from carefully cultivated rare plants she grows in portable hydro-beds strapped to her gear. She doesn’t believe tech and nature are opposites — they’re symbiotic.

General References

Easy Folds Sculpting Brushes

Stylized Ropes IMM Brushes

Week 14 - Procedural Foliage Methods in Unreal Engine 5

WIP Beauty Shots

Procedural Vine Tool in Houdini

In hindsight, maybe this as my first Houdini project was not a great idea. But then again, I've never been one for good ideas or healthy work mentalities.

Faced with the understanding that I had an incredible amount of R&D waiting to grab me over break as I tried to enjoy my break in peace, I decided to lean into the workaholic lifestyle and shape my Technical Art final to break some of those topics down. The biggest curiosity for me was how we could implment limited artists to make assets as fast as possible without losing quality or artists sanity.

As such, proceduralism and Houdini's open arms took hold. I decided to go with a procedural vine tool since it has the most potential to be used in the levels and covers areas that Speed Tree cannot, aka fitting vines to custom meshes.

An example of Parameters available in the system. I wanted to provide as much possibility for optimization support as that is a big concern of my team for the inclusion of foliage and city environments, these settings would allow for a range of polygong counts on the assets utilizing this tool. I also included some lesser-utilized tools, such as 'Growth', which will essentially dictate how much the foliage has grown up the asset, incase there needed to be tweaks in the future.

Assembling in Engine

For the specific hero prop of the church, and since this is a cinematic scene, it utilizes three different instances of the vine mesh: the base wood vines, a smaller leaf inner layer, and larger leaf outer layer. I am running into an issue in Houdini with getting the materials connect with the appropriate group, or even seperate into two seperate materials (vines and leaves) so I created a parameter on the options tab as a temporary solution (Full Bush / Seperate Leaf & Bush)

Scene Assembly

All 3D models are taken from Fab or are a Megascans asset with some slight editing to the church to remove the vine spawning from the inside of the mesh. I also made sure to put some time into lighting the scene appropriately so that all details could be fully seen and appreciated 

Foliage Master Material

I have to admit, this was not my initial idea; it was inspired by two of my mentees own personal projects - one made a master material for a small environment he was making to save time on making new materials for everything and the other has been doing a shader study on Breath of the Wild's grass - shoutout to both of them!

After digging through many AAA games, but most notably Wayfinder, I've noticed that many many studios use a small number of master materials to create all of their objects, instancing them with various parameters. I wanted to take a shot at this since I will be working with Regradable's Art Lead and 3D artists to develop further environment tools for them, including a procedural building generator to work with a modular kit.

In it's current state, this is very bare bones but allows for easy customization of foliage tools to the best of my ability. While I'm still working with the placeholder foliage I have the wind speeds set up on a Material Parameter Collection so they can be automatically updated as needed. However I do plan on updating this, or at least tweaking the formula as soon as I get further variations in.

Reference Board

For this project I knew I wanted to use this tool for Regradable (check out my other work for that here) which takes place in a futuristic dystopian city, which immediately took out the most fun option for scenery haha. As a result, I took inspiration from a buddy playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 and my favorite region, West Elizabeth, a region taking a lot of inspiration from Colorado, northern California, and the panhandle of Oklahoma

General Resources for this Project

How To Make Landscape Layer Materials with Natural Height Blending in Unreal Engine 5

HOUDINI 101 - 10 - Organizing Node Networks

Beginner PCG Tutorial | Unreal Engine 5.4

Optimized Stylized Grass texture by VFX Therapy

Project Titan Ivy Tool

Current Critiques/To-do

• Better naming for parameters - i know what they mean, but test subjects (aka random people in the cohort) do not - that is a problem.
• Material difference between vines and leaves
• Add more variety of plants outside of daisys, spruce_tree_01, and a vine texture from google

Caden (UCF GaIM Alumni)

• I don't think the lights inside should be flickering, it looks like a bug and is otherwise unnoticeable. I'd just remove it
• The depth of field causes a great deal of issues with certain parts of the foliage that should be in the midground, but for whatever reason appear in the fore / background because of the blurring
• your composition is good, but I think the actual model for the church is somewhat lacking. I can't put an exact finger on it, but it somehow seems out of place / noncontiguous with the rest of the environment. I blame the detail of the ivy - maybe some more grunge on the church?
• I think that, while the scene doesn't appear static, I think it is missing some points of intrigue beyond just the church. Maybe some particle systems of bugs or god-rays could add some interest

Chandler (Cohort 22)

• The ground texturing feels quite flat. It could be from the DOF but i think it could be pushed further regardless. If you're unwilling to push higher fidelity on the landscape mat (which is fair) then i'd up your foliage actors in general, the church is being overtaken by vegetation so it's make sense that the surrounding area is quite consumed by nature im thinking more of the context of the scene here

Week 13 - Ice Druid Sculpt

Character Creator 5

I took majority of this week to play around with Acurig on Character Creator 5 (big shoutout to Mark from CH21 for recommending it!) as it will help me figure out what elements should be sculpted in post-pose effect versus sending through Acurig - which is a pain since it has a max polycount budget of 300k.

I did a test pose just to see how the skin weighting would work and learned that most of the chain/bell elements would be better sculpted in motion rather than in A pose. I also took this chance to change her horns to closer what they appear in the concept and make small adjustments according to the feedback from last week.

Resources

Auto Rig Tool for Creating Skeleton Characters: Advanced AccuRIG | Character Creator 4 Tutorial by Realliusion

Posing ZBrush Characters with Character Creator & AccuRiG | Pose Tools & Pose Link Tutorial by Realliusion

Posing References

I wanted to pick a pose that was stable and powerful looking, however as I did more moving I realized this would hide a lot of the visual elements/fabrics and cause odd wrinkles that could be hard to sculpt/print.

Current Pose

I'm not 100% happy with how the pose is coming out so far, It feels far more active than anticipated and treaded the line of being scared/fearful for much of the process. I will likely pause and put time on the staff before continuing with this pose/returning to revise it.

Staff Design

Although Purah herself has a lot of art reference, her staff does not. The staff is a custom weapon made by our Game Master (who runs the game of Icewind Dale) as dropping from an Ice Hag upon killing her. 

This weapon is very powerful, as it has four different spells its able to cast, in addition to being able to fly. This staff origionally had a curse upon it, where if the user did not cleanse it with blood, it would suck away at the user's life essance.

Although the archetype of hags are commonly seen with weapons, I wanted to make this weapon feel unique, both due to it's powerful nature, but also because it perfectly compliment's Purah's character arc.

I ended up deciding on this concept (generated by Gemini.ai) as it ties in the more subtle design elements of Purah, that being the tiger skull of her home Nomad tribe, and the owl feathers, being representative of her dedication to her goddess.

I plan on sculpting small clumps of snow a the top of the staff and covering the bottom in a blood red to further tie it together.

Overall References

I added more references for, obviously, the pose and staff, however I also added more material to the skeleton clothing, hair, and alternative weapons that could be added onto her design from her character sheet as additional scope.

Known Critique

Dasha (Cohort 18)

• Emphasize that corset by making the dress underneath pop out more to show the fabric compression
• Add more anatomical forms on that spine, I think it's a cool design element and you can push it even more.
• I would also think about how the character would actually move, like how can she bend with that wide corset and those rigid elements around her lower back.

Week 13 - Houdini Workshop

 Building Scaffolding Demo

This lecture was a really fun assignment as it helped me get a much better understanding of procedural geometry generation for Houdini and Unreal. Specifically in exposing the parameters to Unreal to further edit. I wanted to go ahead and map out the process for future reference while working on my procedural foliage generation tool for my Tech Art Final.

Breakdown

This section focuses on making the core pillars for the scaffolding, the normal2 and rendered_collision_geo serve to  adjust the normals of the mesh and harden them, as well as add in collision geometry in our Unreal scene.

These nodes focus primarly on setting up the geometry at which to lay the columns out, as pointed out in the previous node normal1 and rendered_collision_geo do the same process.

This node section is focused on combining all of the elements shown, move_to_grid_points duplicates the column points and places them at the vertex of each of the base points. match_size places the points at the top of the column so theres no intersection.

Finally, the copy01 is what duplicates the levels of the scene ontop of each other over and over. This node is connected to the size of the column node at the top (specifically the size.y) with +.1 to account for size differencing. When exporting to Unreal Engine both the column_size.y and copy1_translate.y (renamed to Floor Number) as parameters.

Module in Unreal Engine with exposed Floor Numbers and Floor Height.