This is a remaster of my first attempt at the HUMAN course but with the main goal to apply what I learned from HUMAN into Unreal Engine for real-time rendering. I'm at the point where I'd consider this particular bust to be finished... but I may end up using this bust to make a full character in the future. (Rendered in Unreal Engine 5 (Early Access 2)
https://www.artstation.com/cjnedd
I love this! Creating a woman of a different ethnicity is a sign that you know how to apply the techniques in unique ways. THAT's what an instructor hopes to see 👏
Would you mind if I featured this in the "Student Results" section of the course landing page?
Sorry, I completely missed this. I wouldn't mind though. Go for it!
Fantastic job. You've got an eye for that kind of work.
She is beautiful - amazing work here
SS31GE, Thank you for your detailed response!
It sounds like you hit some challenges, but you found solutions to them all. I'm really impressed at both the artistry, and the technical skill!
If this can be rendered in real time, then the UE5 is really something to look forward to: I saw their early promotional video, and there the character’s skin still looked like parchment, whereas this—well, maybe still not ready to star opposite a real actor in a live action movie, but certainly closer to it than any game engine has ever come so far.
Congrats! I really like the lighting here. Really showcases that amazing hair.
SS31GE - This is really incredible work. Congratulations!
I'm curious, how was it moving your Blender character into Unreal 5?
Overall it wasn't too bad. The process was a bit long but well worth it. The Unreal Documentation covers most of what you need to know to make digital humans. Additionally, Unreal also has sample projects for Digital Human and MetaHumans that you can download and view directly. The hardest part for me was getting the skin to look decent. Essentially I baked and exported out my color map, specular map, roughness map, subsurface map, and normal map from blender so I can plug them into the skin shader in unreal. I also baked out a tileable texture of the micro normal map. I ended up sampling the metahuman skin shader from the Metahumans project because it was easier to understand. Once the shader was setup in my project folder I just plugged in the maps I baked from blender into wherever they needed to go in the skin shader. I also made my own subsurface profile for the skin shader to use. In my case, I noticed the color variation in the skin was way too prominient in Unreal Engine in comparison to Blender so I had to tweak the skin shader a bit in Blender and bake out my color map again so that it would look right in Unreal Engine. For the hair, I found out that you can export blender's hair particles directly into unreal as an alembic. So it was pretty simple to export out the head hair, vellus hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. I also found out how to create the hair shader through the Unreal Documentation . Lastly, for the eye I actually ended up using the same eye from the digital human sample project but replaced the the default iris texture with my own iris texture.
Nice work @s31ge,
Looks amazing!
Thanks!