How I made my own Character for UNREAL ENGINE 5

hey i'm jay and this is how i made my own character in unreal engine 5. okay so i just finished my latest project called flex and it's just all about unreal engine 5. some of you may know i made a video on it before unreal engine 5 just the new stuff coming out really exciting to me i mostly in my personal work dabble in like offline rendering i make games uh for my job so i don't necessarily you know mess around with game engines for fun as much anymore but unreal is just so amazing all the little things it can do that i want to play with so i wanted to devise a project that i could have fun with and just use on religion 5 stuff i even purchased a pc computer that has the nvidia rtx 3090 card in it so that i could take advantage of some of this new stuff my mac obviously can't do the rtx magic and i need the rtx magic though so uh that's what this project was about the jumping off idea pretty simple i wanted to do kind of a cyber punky girl with attitude again just flexing like the idea is i'm flexing like i think it's a cool personality thing that i could do in a character like a vibe for the character but then also the same time it's flexing the new pc it's flexing the real-time rendering it's flexing the the capabilities of unreal engine now the stuff i'm doing with it um you don't really need unreal engine 5 i just wanted some experience using it but i'm using things like the ray tracing the the real time ray tracing i'm using strand based hairs instead of hair cards so i get to do my groom in x-gen using the skin shader and the cloth shader and i'm stealing a bunch of stuff from meta humans because those assets are great obviously made by the employees at epic so i'm just taking all of their heart and work that they spent all their time and energy making and i'm just stealing it and repurposing it from my own character instead of having to figure all that out again so it's it's a good learning opportunity if you're interested you can download these projects for free you can download the engine for free you know all that stuff is free what i'm doing and then you can take a look at their assets you can take a look at their materials so if you're interested in doing game arts you know what's stopping you you get to investigate like what the bleeding edge pros are doing and you get a state-of-the-art renderer for it that you could do presentations and renders and blah blah so all that being said let's dive in let's talk about starting to make this character i'll first show you my reference board so we can take a look at my inspirations and what i collected throughout the process that way i give you a clear picture of my starting off point and my influences along the way so here we are in pure ref this is like the bird's eye view we just zoom in here this is the main idea um got some clips here from the great reference that i captured from my um acting abilities you can see here this is the vibe right here definitely like i love the stank phase too all about this uh you can see here i'm trying to do this like i wanted to do this like i mean you know you saw the video it's like a cocky confident uh flexing on you you know like you just dunked on somebody kind of deal that's the idea so i got some reference here of things like the shirt the drapery like maybe wrinkles on the shirt i love this um style because it's this uh android girl and i love the bright colored background same with this so i'm stealing those kinds of ideas you can actually see that i have a color like main color palette up here that i whittled down just because i wanted to be bold i wanted to be bright and colorful and i wanted the color scheme to be somewhat homogenous so i didn't stick to this like rigidly but this is definitely like something that i was thinking about and i used it when i was picking my colors if you're not familiar this is just taken from this website coolers dot co and you can just like start a generator and then you can start picking colors uh and pinning them if you want and you can shuffle them up i think you have space bar yeah and it randomizes it and then you can like pin something right and then i can say i want to lock this and then it starts to make color palettes uh based on that so anyways i just copy and pasted an image there so i had these colors moving forward so i knew the direction i wanted to go you can see here also like yolandi always the vibe over here i have my shirt reference just something i was thinking about throughout the process like how short the shirt would be what material how the wrinkles would be so i got some things i liked like i liked some of this stuff this actually became really close to the final material and the cut and everything you can see here i actually have my own reference of the die and stuff that i can zoom in on and and try to emulate i wanted to go with this kind of acid black tie-dye type of look the hair uh right here probably the main style ref but then uh got some other references here this one too probably the main one too the like cut of it and then the other ones just for different reasons like these long side bernie things the back of the hair um obviously the color love this bright bold color this a little bit more green which is uh right you know remember like i have this green this is what this is supposed to be then i got my tech stuff i'm doing my arm you know i just wanted to make something ups another thing i wanted to do with this project is play around a little bit with hard surface stuff in zbrush designing and building it trying to be faster at that it's not something that i do so i wanted to get a lot of reference and kind of narrow it down so i wasn't going too crazy um but i did love this reference right here you can see more pictures of this arm which i think looks so sick over on tarn greenlaw's art station profile he said he did this um i think while working at weta right for this project and i just love the translucent muscle stuff just in general all their work's always great i haven't seen this movie uh but this freaking look right here is sick so anyways i saved this this is one of my references you'll see come up this is always a good reference something uh you know for you guys to think about if you're playing around with hard surface and stuff is this is a very simple shape but you can see how after getting a very simple shape doing these like little cuts and then adding these little details adding these like this cut that just makes a line having these like offset things like these are just this is just a great example of little things to add to make something that's very simple look complicated and then finally down here some texture and material reference you can see obviously chappy again wet his work because i'm obviously a stan of everything that weta does um but this texture works amazing i mean come on dude look at this look at it so obviously uh what i made is nowhere near this this is also super dope shout out to lauren and mike brainard from their work on evolve i think this is super underrated this is a sick design texture job presentation like i think this is epic and this is like seven years old or something now probably this is also obviously always a good reference i don't know if you've seen this floating around but yeah so here's some of my texture reference so here's my reference that's it you'll see some of these influences pop up throughout the process but this is an idea of something that i i collected uh throughout so i started with something and then as i'm working i'll need some other images so i'm kind of constantly refining this throughout the process and this is what it ended up as all right so we said all that let's jump in now and start making a character okay so jumping right into it i started out in zbrush like i normally do i started with my base mesh and then i just started pushing and pulling things around to get the general shape i was after i also knew throughout that this was going to be like a three-quarter up you know like i wasn't gonna do a full character so i tried not to spend too much time there i knew that the final image was going to be somewhat cropped up there so i'm spending a lot of time on the upper body i'm trying to get the pose in there really fast i'm just making this like in the final pose the whole time so i have a pretty clear idea of the pieces i need for this one it's not too many i got to make the shirt so i'm extracting off the shirt doing some quick z-remesh just so it's nice and easy to manipulate try to get that shirt looking nice too i'm constantly going back and forth with like the shapes of stuff like how short the shirt is and the arms and everything the arms are the big part to figure out for me this project another thing i wanted to do was try out some hard surface techniques in zbrush which i don't do a lot and i want to get better at that so this was kind of a way where i could have a project that had a little bit of it so i stayed in dynamesh for quite some time with the modeling of the arms that's kind of the techniques that i'm looking to get better at is fast iterative design work kind of for hard surface while keeping things kind of clean typically what i end up doing is modeling everything and that's kind of what i fell into again i ended up essentially just sub d modeling in zbrush so i'm just maintaining a clean uh mesh the whole time so this did take me longer than i wanted to but i i do think that the sketchy fast dynamesh stuff helped me define what i was gonna do and enabled me to be a little bit faster and play around that way but then i did you know go the long way around to rebuild all the meshes so that it's subdivided really clean and i could control everything overall i'm pretty happy with it i know it's simple you know i kept it kind of simple but for me it's a you know it's a little bit of growth there because i don't do a lot of hard surface actually it was kind of a pain to like redo these kind of bolt things on her joints because i thought i'll just make it dynamesh and then i decimated it so i made the topology all junky and then i realized you know what i i don't want to do that so i had to do the long process of rebuilding that i probably should have just rebuilt them from the start to be honest but yeah i remade them the long way around again to make it uh clean the hand i kept as dynamic subdiv so that's the typical way i work and that's how i ended up building the neck which i added later so the neck some parts of the arm and all of the hand are dynamic subdiv so i'm just controlling a pretty low resolution mesh and then i'm using crease in zbrush and i'm using the thickness in dynamic subdiv to show me thickness in a non-destructive way so i'm not committing to any of this so it lets me be iterative it lets me add and move around but giving me like a high-res preview and then when i'm ready to finish it at the end i apply those things that are dynamic and then now they're live so i can subdivide and then like smooth out the edges and then i can even like ding it up if i wanted to which i didn't do for this one but that's my typical method for making a hard surface stuff is using dynamic but the sketchy quick sculpting stuff i think helped me form a plan that was clear because to make clean meshes you got to know what you're trying to build okay so the hairstyle this actually ended up being pretty straightforward i just had a clear idea of going through reference and even the initial idea i just kind of knew i wanted this funky cut with the the kind of flippy back uh have some bangs and these long sideburn pieces so i knew that's what i was after and then it was just about playing with the proportions and stuff until i liked it i did split up the descriptions in xgin and maya again so that i can control the aspects differently it makes things easier and i learned that it doesn't matter when you're exporting to unreal if you have multiple descriptions so the bangs are separate so this is only two pieces and then i did the eyebrows and then i did the eyelashes so those are all separate descriptions and then i can control all of them and you know do what i need to do there i did start the hair in zbrush again using fiber mesh curves and then moved it over i don't know if that's a big time savings but it lets me start it in zbrush i think it's easier it's definitely easier to manipulate a bunch of curves in zbrush but i'm always finding myself converting those and grooming more in maya so i don't know take or leave it i don't know if it's like a shortcut but um it has been part of the workflow for me all right so after i worked on the hair i got the head kind of generally set up i wanted to break the ice with moving to unreal because the whole time i knew the whole point is to render this in unreal that was a big question mark i haven't gone there in personal work in a long time i haven't done it with unreal engine 5 that's for sure so i just wanted to dive in there and test some stuff out so i just took what i have right now and i did that so i started out by downloading the unreal 5 version of the metahumans project which you can just get on the epic marketplace for free and it's got all of the metahuman assets in it so i opened that scene up and i imported my character like this test that i just made as an fbx it also comes with their materials so i stole their materials so i actually just started cannibalizing all of the metahuman stuff because why not i even ended up taking the eyes this is something that's been true and unreal for a while is that they made very nice eyes which is important in any kind of rendering but real-time rendering eyes are tricky eyes are always tricky but unreal engine made some beautiful eyes but in doing so they had to hard code some stuff so if you use their stuff and they urge you to do that if you use their stuff the way you the way they build it you get all the benefits so rather than trying to reverse engineer i just downloaded the metahumans asset and i imported it and i just stole the eye mesh that way i knew i had the uvs right and i didn't have to think about it and i could just use the awesome eye shader that they had i thought i was going to make a custom iris but i ended up just playing with the color and i liked it and i just kept it like that making the hair material in unreal was something i wanted to do right away i wanted to import the hair and see if it worked how it worked if i could make a believable enough shader with some color because i knew i wanted to do some color dye stuff so i found out that the way you would import hair from x-gen is you convert it i use the traditional x-gen guides like the procedural sort of grooming i don't use interactive grooming but converting it to interactive groom is part of the process because ultimately what you're doing is you're exporting a cache a dot abc file that has the curve data that unreal can redraw curves from so you're not actually actually exporting curves per se or like a model you're exporting the data and then unreal is drawing the curves so i could just convert all of my descriptions so i did that in the first test i actually just converted everything so it's just one export and then i exported that as this cache file and then i imported it and it worked and i was like great and you can control the width and it's really cool the tool so i ended up splitting these things out like the eyebrows and the eyelashes later on so that i could have my own materials and i could have my own curve settings i ended up making the eyelashes thicker for instance so it looks like mascara and just more substantial lashes but for the hair shader i ended up finding out that there's a node in unreal already for the curves for hair and i could use some data that's in the curves already like the root to tip so i could drive like two colors that way and i ended up making like a little simple master material that gets me this green fade and i can make these color parameters so i can tweak it i end up liking how it looked it's not too complicated i thought about doing some more complicated things but i thought it looked cool even though it was simple and i thought hey let's just stick with this so that's how i ended up making the hair material i also jacked the metahumans skin shader which was pretty easy to do i ripped out all the junk that i didn't need because there's lots of like normal map stuff for animation like for facial stuff i just needed the basic uh setup and i also pointed it to my own normal map and then i could use the micro tile and i could even feed my own micro tile normal map to that too it just has everything set up and i don't have to build it from scratch so it was easier and faster for me to just rip a bunch of stuff out and i actually kept the base texture because it lined up to my uvs pretty good so i actually kept it for a long time you can see the nostril looks kind of wonky but this is just the default meta humans material on my head model and it lined up close enough to do these like tests where it stayed like this for quite some time until i edited it i actually later on ended up just opening the meta humans base color for the skin and then just tweaking it to my own needs like painting out some stuff and and lining up the nostrils and lips i actually later on used this same base color in substance painter i actually just imported the texture file there as a fill layer and substance i can just use it as the base color still there and then add a layer on top that i could do my eye makeup i decided to add some mascara towards the end and that's how i did that the skin on the torso i also made in substance painter this one was pretty simple i just used like fill layers and then some procedurals to make some noise to give it like some organic break up and then i tried to match the base color uh like the actual skin tone of the head as best i could so that it seemed like it was all connected to the same person but that one was just kind of a quick texture job in substance painter and then you can see it here in the engine once i had these basic materials and this model set up in the scene i started to like arrange the overall scene like the backdrop get the color dialed in start moving the camera tweaking that the lights getting the major uh light positions you know i wanted to make it very bright and bubbly so it's this kind of studio lighting setup so i have this kind of side light coming from the top i wanted to catch those reflections in the eyes so it's a little low and then i have a rim light on the reverse coming from over her shoulder just to pop her off the background and wrap around some of those forms okay so back to the full character so i did my preliminary setup i dove into unreal you know just to break the ice just to get my feet wet with that and to build confidence in the workflow so i knew that it was going to work and then i could just focus on the rest of the character so i did that i finished up the high poly made the nice meshes and part of that is preparing not only my high poly but my low poly so i ended up resurfacing some of these models mostly by z remesher and doing like tricks like that to get nice topology that would subdivide well but it would also allow me to use the lower subdivision levels to be my render mesh you know my goal here is to render in real time in unreal but it can handle a lot of polygons so i'm not like too precious about it it's not like i'm making a game character i just want it you know i want it to look really good but i don't want it to slow down my machine and i don't need to be too crazy so it's just kind of like a mid polygon count i'm not even keeping track of the number i'm just you know i'm just eyeballing it so as i rebuild all these meshes they're nice and clean for subdivisions and everything like that and also for real-time meshes so then i have to uv map them so to do that i would use the unwrap plug-in in zbrush a lot of the time that's going to work but for some of these fabrics i need to arrange them in the right way so that the micro tile looks correct like if you're doing a weave pattern you know like the seams need to be straight the neck hole needs to be straight and then some of these other like hard surface stuff with the arms i have to pack everything so even though zbrush doing automatic uvs is useful and you can do it for fast stuff i did have to be kind of particular so i ended up exporting some of these models when i needed like pinpoint you know control of the uvs into maya and i would finish the uvs in there export it and bring it back into zbrush and then that would update it so by the end my goal was i have this ztl the zbrush file that has my high poly and my quote unquote low poly and it's all uv'd you know so i have this one file that has everything because everything's been rebuilt so because my high and my low or my you know my render meshes are connected i just exported everything at its highest subdivision level as my high poly and then i dropped everything down to as low as i wanted to go exported that as my quote unquote low poly and that's what i used to bake and i used that to texture and then ultimately i exported that same thing to render in unreal once i was in painter i got it baked then it was fun you know i could start to lay out the materials start getting the textures and stuff feeling right for things like the paint the cloth shader i ended up stealing that from metahumans too so i got a lot of their fancy stuff that thing was really complicated but i ended up making this little rgb mask to test like how some of the functionality worked because i knew that i wanted to put the unreal logo on the shirt so i needed to be able to mask some of the cloth effects off of that and by like tracking down what channels what i knew that i could do that i didn't go so far as to build like custom channels in painter because you know i was doing this like fast and dirty so i used the actual rgb channels to do that so you can see like once i did that in substance the shirt looks wrong it's like all glossy but it's just because i'm using rg and b like all i need is the base color and then rg and b is you know for the pbr stuff is just to mask the logo out so that's why it looks weird in substance painter but it gave me the result that i was looking for in the engine these muscle fibers too i was kind of happy how this came out in the end i knew i wanted to do something special there was a reference by some work that weda did that really caught my eye the synthetic muscle and i thought it would be cool if i could achieve a similar translucent quality to make the muscle fibers of the shoulders you know look otherworldly or just look you know a little bit more high-tech so i did make a new master material just for the shoulders and i experimented with different shading models to get that translucent quality once i finally got that working then i went to substance painter to start playing around with like getting a tiling texture experimenting with different patterns and ultimately i ended up with this kind of small diamond type thing that ended up looking very grippy i think it ended up making it look extra strong but at the same time there's a softness because it's translucent and hopefully it makes it look like more of a premium material more of a futuristic high-tech material and it's another way to bring some of this color in you know for a long time i just figured they'd be black that was a little bit boring and i just wanted to do something a little bit more interesting and fun with it and uh yeah i was happy as another way to flex some unreal engine stuff that you can make real-time translucent materials so that's how i did the shoulders okay so back to the texturing of the character one of the things that i thought would be fun is i had this idea of her drawing on her own arms and a way to bring interest and lots of just like personalization to the texture things that you know it's just a little bit more individualistic and unique and then i ended up bending that into like the overall theme which is this unreal engine flex of using their tools and really leaning into that and having fun so i ended up doing a lot of little i don't know nods to unreal stuff like i put the three from unreal engine 3 i drew the gears of war logo on the arm and these are things that made a big impact on me like i still remember gears of war setting the bar for game art real-time art they've just been at the forefront for a long time so these are memories i have of things that were like personally influencing me i also played a lot of the games when i was a kid so i put the champion on the arm i also drew rtx on her other arm because that's what's enabling me to do a lot of this like real time ray tracing type of rendering i built a machine you know purely for this type of workflow and rtx is is the thing that's holding all this stuff up i even went so far as to look up some business information from epic games so i hid their original name potomac computer systems on her neck i also added their founding date on there so you know really really small not necessarily something people are gonna see i think it ends up being like a little bit of a detail but i did add those uh little things there i thought another opportunity for an easter egg and also just to add something to make it feel like it had a manufacturer mark on there all right i just want to take a second to thank this video sponsor skillshare skillshare is a platform that has tons of videos and all kinds of topics if you want to get into it pretty much anything that you're interested in learning more they have great online courses that you can watch just by paying a monthly fee i've been a member for years now and i use it for instance i've got these courses on notion which is a application i use to manage all my projects so this one right here from francisco seems cool and i might get some tips and stuff that i can use in my own workflow there's several notion classes on here that i've looked at because i'm trying to get better at the whole process of managing everything that i'm doing there's not only nerdy productive stuff but there's also things like the stuff that jazz is doing he just recently came out with one where he's doing a 28 day drawing challenge of characters then obviously he's done one too about his youtube channel which i've already saved because i'm trying to live that youtuber life you know but um if you're interested in doing like drawing and learning how to do characters and stuff there's something for everybody so the first thousand people that click the link down below in my description will get one month of skillshare for free so if you haven't already go ahead and click that and then learn some stuff for free all right so once everything was further along and i was getting happier with it throughout the process i was taking these high resolution images so that when i was ready i could make these big ones and i did something that i haven't used before which i think i'll be using moving forward is this little plug-in that you can just turn on for unreal engine called movie render queue and it lets you set options and then it'll save out images typically you have to just take a screenshot there's a tool called high resolution screenshot in unreal which just you know renders the frame that you're looking at and you can make it larger but there's sometimes some downsides to that and using this plug-in not only did i get to choose the resolution that i wanted but i can have it do super sampling for the anti-aliasing and that just overall makes such a cleaner image so i was really happy to like discover that i haven't used that before so that's what i'm using you can see like i do the settings for the resolution and for the temporal anti-aliasing and how many times it's gonna super sample and so i'm using the sequencer you have to use a sequencer to use this plug-in but also i'm using the sequencer to store shots so throughout the process like i can keep going back to the same angles i'm just checking like the progress of the character if it's looking good in those angles in those shots and then when i'm done i can render them out super big or in some cases i render out like videos because you know it's real time why not i can move the camera around and so that's exactly what i did so here are some of the clips of flex [Applause] [Music] [Music] do you see emotions [Music] [Music] [Music] so that is how i made flex my latest projects uh thank you for watching the video i hope you learned something uh through all that if you don't know already i just started a patreon where i'm adding all of the footage that i record during my project so like this one is up there right now along with this video when i posted it and my past projects like the orc project and cybergirl and some others so that's where all the stuff's gonna live i've been asked you know for these things before and i thought this is how i'm gonna do it so patreon will just be where i put all of the footage that i record for people to go through and i'll also be adding exclusive tutorials up there on like workflows that i do and answering people's questions so if you're a super nerd about all this then consider checking out my patreon at patreon.com art of jhill and hopefully you find something there that you like but that's it for this video thank you again for watching up to this point i really appreciate it i appreciate the support in the comments on the channel so thank you so that's it for now i'll see in the next one go out there and make some cool peace [Music] a [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 662,403

Keywords: unreal engine 4, unreal engine, unreal engine character tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine character creation, unreal engine character, unreal engine 5 demo rtx 3090, unreal engine 5 metahuman creator, unreal engine 5, metahuman unreal engine, zbrush, character modeling, zbrush sculpting, character creation, cyberpunk, girl 3d model, ue5 metahuman demo, metahuman maya, xgen, unreal engine hair, making a character in unreal

Id: x2t59qQzs_I

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021