Final Project P2: Character and Butterflies Creation

As time was restricted, I decided to use my favourite software Daz for human model creation. I have morphed my own characters so it was very convenient to pose them exactly how I wanted. The model also comes with its own textures that I can use later in Unreal Engine. My idea behind the pose is to later situated the model inside the leaf boat, then add some butterflies into the scene. I also wanted some movement so the model doesn’t look like a static mesh, so I animated the eye blink movement, tried my best to make them dynamic and as lively as possible. If I had more time I would have animated the whole body as well, but I feel good about the result nevertheless.

I was not particularly happy with the fact that Alembic import didn’t name or sort out the material, so it took me quite a bit of time to assemble and set up all the materials one by one. Luckily, I have worked with Daz model before in Blender and there is a particular order to each body part, so it did help me in guessing which one is which. Initially I got frustrated with this so I tried out different technique to import the animation in, from using Daz to Unreal plugin (which didn’t work), to FBX, etc… I decided that nothing looks better than the Alembic route so I went back and tried to finish.

After setting up all the materials manually, there were two problems arised.

• Firstly, the hair was really patchy and not looking great at all, especially at the root and area that has heavier shadow. As I imported the whole model in as a single alembic, there was no way I could separated the hair from the body for modification. I eventually took the time and imported a separated model without the hair first. Then I imported the hair into Blender and converted it to a particle system, exported as Alembic and imported again into Unreal Engine. The hair is now read with UE5 Grooming system, so i have more options to adjust the hair roots and tips until it looks better

• Secondly, the eyes textures turns black after importing into UE5. I resolved this by finding a few different textures to test until it worked out. I also had to set the Cornea material to transparent in order for the Irises to show.

I created two simple butterflies animation in Blender, using pictures I found online. Then I put them into Photoshop to create their normal maps and opacity maps. I would say this is one of my favourite technique to learn and can be used in so many cases in the future.

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