The Freedom Fighter (Tech demo)

MikeCL

Some progress. Direct screengrabs from the Godot editor viewport. Reworking the textures for the armor from scratch as the old files seems to be missing, and the mesh needed some topology cleaning. Started playing with some moody lighting as well.

DJM

looks great! although i think the face is a bit feminin, but that may just be me.
the model also looks too perfect and shiny imo, are u going to add wear and tear?
i would also lower the armor to the side of the face. he cant see left or right with it. armor should be cool but also functional.

MikeCL

DJM Thanks man! About the textures. It's only the base colors right now. I lost the old textures. I'm afraid, so I have to repaint it. But the quality will come closer to what I showed in the first image. So yes... Lots of wear and tear. Same for the face. It just has some basic coloring, doesn't even have a roughness map yet, and is missing a big scar, stubby beard, etc. Normally I would also include subdermal, epidermal, primary, and secondary specular maps for the skin, but I don't think Godot's SSS shading supports that (If I don't create my own, it might also be overkill and bad for performance).

MikeCL

Here's a quick and dirty Keyframe concept storyboard

I might have to play around with these as I get a rough cut in. See how it feels when played

MikeCL

A couple of previews of the animation. It still needs a lot of cleanup and work. Captured from the Blender viewport

GodotBeginnerRich

Nice graphics, how did you do the mo-cap?

MikeCL

GodotBeginnerRich

Thanks! The mocap was done with my iPhone and captured using the Facemotion3D app with the Blender link. It's not perfect, but I am impressed with how far you can take things with an iPhone and software for 20 bucks. It took some experimenting to find the way that produces the best results with less noise and the best capture. It will be interesting to see how this technology evolves over time and improves. The only thing I'm waiting for now is an AI that can clean up the data for me 😅

The ARKit (Apple's tech for AR and capture) uses a set of shape keys to drive the facial animation. So, to save time, I used Blenders Rigify facial rigg to pose the different facial features quickly. I then have a script that converts those rigged poses to shape keys that can be used with the mocap data.

cybereality

Looks pretty nice for an iPhone capture.

MikeCL

cybereality
Yeah, what you can do with consumer gadgets these days is pretty cool.

MikeCL

Just a small update, a sneak peek captured from the engine in motion. Mostly working on cleaning up the animation as well as setting up all the shots.

MikeCL

Picked this project up again. Most work being done with animation, bringing the lighting and scene together. Here's a couple of light tests. Screen grabbed from Godot

LoipesMas

Looking good! Did you make the models and (previous) textures yourself? If so, what's your pipeline?

MikeCL

LoipesMas Hey! Yes.. it's all done by me 🙂.

Nothing too fancy, really. Back then these were the steps

Fast rough design sketch of character / illustration
Design sculpture in Zbrush
Retopology and modeling in 3D Studio max
Base color texture for head in Zbrush
Texture for rest and final textures in Photoshop
Hair/Fur system for the beard, eyebrows and eyelashes
Riging, pose, shading, lighting and rendering in 3D Studio Max with Mental Ray renderer.

For the skin shader, a subdermal, diffuse, epidermal, spec & gloss map as well as a secondary spec map was used for the top oily layer of the skin.
For the rest, if I remember correctly as I lost the texture files, a spec map and gloss map together with the regular color texture. (Back then PBR materials wasn't really a thing yet 😛 ) But I could be remembering wrong here. It's been a while.
The "energy" visor was just an emitting painted texture
and displacement maps for bigger sculpted details combined with normal maps for more high frequency details

LoipesMas

Thanks for the insight! I'm only now getting more seriously into 3D graphics and it's not going too great 😅 . Hopefully I'll post something soon 🤞

MikeCL

LoipesMas That's cool! I'm sure it's going to go fine, just need some patience and practice.

The pipeline/workflow I described was not optimized for games though. That was more done for rendering (vfx, animated film, high res still image etc) and not realtime. So I'm redoing some of the stuff to be optimized for realtime rendering this time around.

Looking forward to seeing your projects when you are ready🙂.

MikeCL

Progress has been slow as the forum has taken up most of my time lately. But here's a test on flying through space/nebulas for the background reveal shot. Captured in the engine.

This is all done with shaders.

xyz

MikeCL Nice. It's not all procedural I hope 😉

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