Katarina Tesmer Spring 2019

I ported the hairstyles from this project to Fallout 4.

Available for download on:

My final video showcasing my Project Planning project! I made 4 block hairstyles, 3 hair card hairstyles, and 1 XGen hairstyle.

Greetings blog! Spring semester is finally done! Thus, I am ready to share with you my final deliverables.

For Real Time Characters, here is my final full video. I’ll be honest I put a lot more effort into this video than Project Planning’s

Here is some more renders of my final four characters! I’m not finished with the models completely, I still want to make more clothes for them and put them in new scenes, for fun. I’ll be posting that on my new side Instagram account @moobish.aliens

For Project Planning I am focusing on improving on my existing hair versus trying to fit in the dynamic hair. My hair card hairs are all getting minor adjustments. Here’s my improvement of Fetryshrik’s hair shape

I doubled my Ekeno hair and have it a sparse alpha and it looks better, but it takes forever to render now.

Time spent on hair this week: 6 hours.

For my characters, I am refining their looks and finishing them up. My Alex character I am basically done with a made a turntable but I have issues with the turntable and will be redoing it. Time spent: 15 hours

Okay I was looking over my blog and I haven’t shared pics in a while of my WIP characters. I finished the personalized armor textures but don’t want to hook them up yet. Right now I’m doing skin textures and fixing up individual models.

I started with Ekeno, the top picture’s skin set as both the male characters have caucasian-like appearances and it’d be easier to test subsurface scattering and such. I blended my texturing.xyz face into a skin material in Substance and did some additional blending. I looked at some skin tutorials, and set the skin and eyes to 100% subsurface scattering. I experimented with Ekeno’s skin materials a lot but am not quite happy with it. 

For RTC I am working on skin textures for all the characters, and testing the materials in Maya. The details like eyebrows and such are being tweaked per character, Hours worked: 8

For Real Time Characters I have finished the textures for the Vivixen Army armor. This includes the pristine versions shown in an earlier post, and the personalized textures for each character. (Total 40 hours) I haven’t set these up in Arnold yet but I will after I finish their skin textures, which is next. Project 3 requires an assortment of things which I have to finish as well. There’s an Unreal aspect, so for that I think I will just port my character Alex and her assets into Unreal. Meanwhile each character will get final renders and turntables in Arnold.

Finished the XGen hairstyle! It was a little difficult to get going, but once I remembered how to do things I got going pretty well. This was my third time using XGen, and some things didn’t quite work right, but I ended up with a decent product. This took about 7 hours.

Final renders of the pristine version of my Vivixen Army armor.

Overall, I am pretty happy with it. I think it looks pretty good in the renders, with a few hiccups. I think I could have made it look a bit more sci-fi with sharper edges and more nuts and bolts, but I am fine with it as is (it fits my concept art) and this is the first time I’ve ever attempted making armor. The whole thing I am estimating took 35 hours, but it may be more. Next, I will make personalized textures for each character with varying levels of scuff and scrapes.

Here are the turntable of my the pristine version of the armor my characters will wear. Here’s a description about this armor and some backstory since I’ve been avoiding saying anything really about the lore:

This armor is the military armor used by the Vivixen Army during the Mobish-Daanshi War, a 14 month war between two alien species. The Daanshi sought to colonize the Mobish’s homeplanet, Ubbilious, and a neighboring, more primitive alien species’ planet, Elaadan, as their own was depleted of resources and nearly unlivable due to millenia of pollution. The Daanshi greatly outnumbered the Mobish, but the Mobish were stronger and more technologically advanced. Over a million Mobish were involved in the war effort, which was almost a third of their population, and most were sent to the Daanshi’s home planet, Voern, to destroy their ships and stall them until a more permanent solution, a planet-destroying bomb, could be completed.

For RTC, I worked a lot on various aspects over this week. Each character was fitted into the armor, and put into a basic pose for Project 2. Then, I worked on the eye textures and hopefully have that good enough, but I will have to see with that and the skin textures. These eye textures were made in Photoshop and Substance painter, and are partially from old drawings of mine. Time spent: 4 hours, as I was also testing how in looked in Arnold render:

Then, I modeled at helmet and a breather on the armor as an option for some renders. It has been UVed and took 5 hours due to some complications.

Then I have started the texturing for the full armor, which is now 3 separate parts. Here is the chest and underarmor texturing (WIP)

The armor is all going to be black, but I hope to break that up with different textures. I’m thinking of having a base, mostly pristine armor and then having a variety of scuffed up versions based on the character and their backstory. Texturing so far has taken about an hour.

For Project Planning, I am about to start my XGen hair. I have been conflicted as to what head model to show my hairs on and to build this on. The characters I have made are all either aliens or elves, haha. I don’t want to distract from the hair so I’m thinking of finding a basemesh somewhere, but haven’t found the one to use yet. 

The hair I think I want to model in XGen will be based of this hairstyle:

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do something simple, or something more complex with a braid or something, as my dynamic hair with likely be a simple loose hair. However, I think if I try to style this hair nicely then the two will be sufficiently different. (Or I could add in a small braid)

one day late i’m sorry :,{

I finished modeling and UVing the armor for my RTC characters. This took the bulk of the week and took around 23 hours, it is not textured yet. 

For Project Planning I textured my last hair card hair, but want to go back to at the end as it’s not quite looking how I want. Spent 5ish additional hours this week on the to UV and texture the hair model, the UVs were a mess because I Zremeshed it. 11 Total hours on that hair.

The hairstyle for my Ekeno character, finished and textured.

I mostly reused my hair textures from my Fetryshrik hairstyle for this. My thoughts on it are I really liked the original model in ZBrush, but had some missteps constructing it. When I used the IMM brush to make the strips, the poly count was too high so I ZRemeshed it. This looked OK, but when I tried to UV it, the strips were a bit of a mess, all turned odd ways or distorted. It took me probably 4 extra hours sorting through the UVs, I should have either started out with a lower poly IMM brush or tried decimating the strips or something. 

Also, when I textured the hair, it didn’t look as smooth as I wanted, the more sparse alpha seen on my Fetryshrik hair didn’t work on this hair as that hair was more densely packed, and this one you would just see through to the scalp too much. I may go back and edit the strips/textures in the final weeks.