Group Project Evaluation

 13/05/21 - Week 32

This project was quite a fun one but challenging at times. I have learnt a lot this project though which is a really good thing, I've expanded my unreal knowledge greatly and I feel like this will be useful for me in the future. On top of this, I haven't done this sort of style before and it was fun and interesting to experiment with stylisation in my texturing and modelling.

Working with a group was fun too as we had lots of ideas and were able to bounce them off of each other and I think our initial concept was really cool. Communication definitely became slower at the end so it made it a little harder to figure out where everyone was in the project and what style people were going for in terms of foliage and textures, this was definitely something that our group needed to improve on.

Starting with the design, as a group we wanted to try quite hard to match the style and colour palette of our levels which I think we have resulted in somewhat well though it is a bit hard to judge since others have not gotten too far into texturing yet. I tried to keep everything very low poly initially which ended up slowing me down as I had to go back and add some more polys on some models since I found out that it is actually textures and VFX that slow the engine down instead of poly amount - to an extent of course. I also feel like I improved my modelling a bit more since I tried to use multiple meshes for one item instead of habitually using just one which ended up making unwrapping and baking much easier and looking a lot better. Not initially doing this also slowed me down in the modelling process too. 

I stuck to my original concept quite strictly and I'm glad I did as I think the finished design of this project is probably one of my best environments. There's lots of small things which did push me for time but I am glad they are all there as it makes the level feel lived in and interesting to look around - which is what I wanted.

Texturing for this project was a learning experience and at first it was rather slow as I didn't really understand how to make objects stylised. I then began to learn that the majority of it was through not using microdetail and having heavily highlighted edges. I then would add some damage on top of this to show some wear and also some colour variation which was also new to me. I think the textures in this project is something that I'm really pleased with. Not only are the designer textures much more detailed and unique to what I have been able to achieve before, but also the painter textures look nice with the stylised features, I also spent a lot of time on them to get it right.

I also learnt how to do decals which I previously thought would be difficult, and though I don't think mine are the best I think it adds a lot more variation and depth to the scene. I tried to take more time with this project and get a better level of polish which has really made my work look more up to the standard that I would like to have seen in my previous projects. There are of course still places I could improve and still things for me to learn to speed up my texturing process. I think if we are talking in a stylised sense, I realised that the zbrush sculpted elements of the piece responded to the stylised textures much better than a lot of the regular models. I think if I were to approach a stylised piece again I would try to sculpt more to get the nuances in the edges.

Lighting in unreal was something I was really eager to improve on as I constantly felt that I was behind in learning how to light - I just didn't understand it. Through a lot of tutorials and a lot of project settings tweaking I finally created a lighting that I was happy with. Lighting is still an area that I want to improve in. To me, this scene is overly lit and I wanted more of an emphasis on the hanging lights rather than purely from the main window but I couldn't find the right balance and just ended up with the result I have, which I find is still warm and welcoming, yet serene which is what I wanted to portray. Some of the other things that strike out to me as a place that I wanted to improve was the hanging lights not appearing to be lit from the inside, my emissive were a bit strange this whole project and I am unsure as to why, so I have ended up with dark lampshades. On top of this, I did want the window to have the metallic parts show in the shadow, but I realise this would have probably only been possible through the use of modelling.

Overall, I improved a lot with my lighting but the combination of trying to work things out on my own and also my render times being extraordinarily long limited me in this project.

The foliage in this level is still something I am a bit hesitant about. I do like it, but I know it could have been improved by using zbrush to model it which would have created a more professional and polished foliage piece. I wanted the foliage to blend into the scene but I feel in some places it sticks out like a sore thumb, especially the ivy. I think this just genuinely needed more thought into it.

I do really like how I have added the effects to the foliage though and this helped it to blend more with the scene and also add a lot of movement and dynamics to it. I learnt a lot from adding these effects, though they were simple and it gave me a bit of an introduction to how to edit materials in the material editor.

As for the particle system I added, I had already known how to use this feature from the backyard project so this didn't end up being too difficult. I did run into some issues with emissives, as previously mentioned, and this meant that I was unable to add the fire effect onto the candles which was quite disappointing, but I like the effect of the dust and I think it makes up for it.

In conclusion, to apply this project to the brief I think it is somewhat of a success. I feel as though technically I have tried my best, this is something that I appear to struggle with a lot as I miss out things or not fully understand them, but I tried my hardest to research everything I was doing. This project has been a lot of knowing what you don't know and that slowed me down a lot. This slowness did allow me to come up with a decent result though in terms of looks and the aesthetics side of things is probably what I am most happy with in the end.

There is a lot that I would have done differently in this project but I think the majority is down to hindsight and would have allowed me to not redo things as much as I ended up having to. I would have tried to use programs like zbrush more or create more high polys in max and in the end create a much more polished environment with better modelling and more thoughtful texturing.

Overall, there's a lot that I am happy with on my terms as I feel as though I have come far in this project. Though, I know there would be a lot more to improve on if I wanted this to be up to an industry standard - I hope to learn how to make that big push soon.

Foliage & Particle Systems

 12/05/21 - Week 32

 To finish this project, I finally added the foliage and particle systems planned. 

For the foliage, I took the approach that I am already comfortable with, this includes drawing out the foliage on photoshop and then creating a normal map using the 3D functions on photoshop. I then took these onto its own plane each to prepare these for engine. I think if I had more time I would have liked to try a sculpting approach to the foliage but I was worried that I wouldn't be able to create good looking foliage in time, in hindsight I think it would have been very beneficial to the scene as I feel the foliage would have just looked more professional. However, the photoshop method does look very stylised so I think for this project it doesn't matter overly much as it somewhat blends in.

To put these into engine, I used the foliage tool, I haven't used this before but with a few bits of troubleshooting with the anchor points I eventually figured out how to place all my foliage. This sped things up a lot and the result looked much like how I imagined it. The only thing I was a bit disappointed with the ivy as I think that it doesn't look as good as the grass and clovers, though I am pretty sure this is just down to my foliage drawing skill.

I then manually placed the leaves and flowers as these were specific to some areas.

As you can see in this screenshot, there are some effects that have been applied to the foliage. This really made the foliage come to life.

I firstly made the material "2-sided foliage" instead of default lit and then added a brighter green to my base colour through the add function and plugged this into subsurface colour. This creates the translucent, halo effect that you can see mostly in the ivy and leaves that are being hit by the directional light. This makes the foliage a lot more realistic and also more interesting and aesthetically pleasing in my opinion.

I also wanted to add some wind that would effect the foliage. This also turned out to be quite a simple effect that was mainly created by the simpleGrassWind node, controlled by a couple of parameters for the speed and intensity. It effects both the base colour and normal by using the multiply function.

I didn't have too many issues here, surprisingly, and I was happy with the outcome I had produced for the foliage since it livened up the scene a lot more.

Another way I wanted to liven up the scene was through the use of particle systems, initially I wanted some dust and also some flames on the candle sticks. Unfortunately, though I tried a lot of things I couldn't get the flames to be emissive so I had to eventually give up here. I am not sure why this is but it just continuously looked dull. Overall though, I don't think the scene suffered too much without them.

For the dust effects, I followed a tutorial to figure out the correct settings. It was an average particle creation as it just included the use of colour over life to control the visibility over time and orbit to make it move a little bit. I also set the collision to kill when touching an object/other particle. This was mainly because I thought it would be more efficient though I did end up having to use 2 different particle emitters in engine because of this so I am unsure if it would have been better or not.

Here is the finished result. I'm quite happy with it and I think that the foliage and particle effects has made the scene look a lot more professional and interesting to be in the environment. As previously mentioned, there is a couple things I would have liked to change about the design of the foliage and I would have really liked to get the flames in but due to lack of time this has meant a slight drop in polish.

Texturing, Decals & Finalising Lighting

 06/05/21 - Week 31

Obviously, I have gotten an extension, unfortunately I haven't been able to sort out finishing my textures over the past couple weeks and therefore wasn't able to move on with the project and finish it. The texturing process has been slow and this was mainly down to my computer not being able to handle painter a lot of the time and so trying to view the textures on my screen with the edits I had just made could sometimes be very tricky and time consuming.

The texturing process wasn't too hard overall though, it was mainly me using my already existing knowledge of painter but slightly adjusting it to try to stylise it and not add so much detail - much like the designer process. I also found some tutorials on stylised textures and took the knowledge from here, which mainly used mask editors to create worn down, highlighted edges, which is a major part of the style I wanted to go for. This is mainly apparent on the wood and metal fixtures as I felt that these would suffer the most damage. I also used these tutorials to find out how to create some colour variation using the generator "light" which was very useful and created just a little bit more nuance.

Here are what all of the finished textures look like in engine currently:

I have also edited the lighting to be much more what I wanted, I used some more tutorials to improve my knowledge of how to light interiors, a lot of which was messing with settings such as bounced light and light scattering. I then created the large beam of light from the window using exponential height fog and some adjustments to the directional light in my scene to create a beam effect without obscuring the scene too much from the fog. I feel as though this is going to really look nice with my particle effects that I have planned, this is definitely going to be some dust and some wind in the foliage.

On top of this, I have also created my decals which weren't too difficult to do in the end as initially I was worried that I wouldn't be able to figure them out. They are pretty much just a stamp on the wall. I created these in designer with my previously made textures for the stone ones and I quickly made a crack shape for the wall where the tree is coming through then utilised transparency to finish them off.

Overall, I do not have too much to finish now, but the extension has really helped me to put polish on this project that I would have not been able to without it - without it I don't think I even would have had time to finish the texturing! I am very happy with how this project is looking, though some of the textures are a bit rough in places or not exactly up to scratch to the point where I feel they are perfect and I think that speaks for a lot of the project right now.

Base Materials

 18/04/21 - Week 28

I mainly focused on creating the main base materials this week. I chose to only create some of the main more unique textures I would be using in designer as I felt the stylised aspect would be easier to achieve than realistic is in painter.

I did some research on each material I was creating, mainly looking at stylised games such as overwatch to try to mimic some of the stylistic elements they have in their materials. One of the main things I noticed was the lack of microdetail, which isn't what I am used to, and the more rounded and enlarged details to create some variation. Here in my plaster I have done this by making some varied circular indents into the plaster to make it look worn down, but as you can see it is not too in your face though still descriptive. This is exactly what I wanted and this material in particular is probably my favourite. The plaster will mainly be used on the walls.

This is also the approach I took with the chipped paint, though a little more worn and including the pattern chipped paint makes to show what it is. I plan for this material to be used on the cupboard doors in the kitchen.

I then moved on to the stone textures, still taking into account the previous research I had done. In research for the floor tiles for the kitchen, I found a way of adding some dirt by using a node called height blend. The tutorial was using this as a stylised dirt for outside tiles, but since I want my area to be inside and also have some grass growth between the cracks, I decided to add a more grimy-plant like green tint to it which I think works quite well though I think it will end up looking better in context.

I also used this method previously mentioned to create the same sort of effect on the stone bricks, I will be using this texture for the floor in the armour room and I think also the large window arch. I made this one a more leafy shape which I really like, it definitely plays into the cartoonish feel I am creating here with the shape of the cracks and chips in the bricks and tiles - these created by slope blur which is also a new method that really helped me here.

Now I have completed these I can go on to start texturing in substance painter a long with my other designer textures too. I am a quite bit behind with my schedule as I wanted to be almost done with texturing at this point and I feel like I haven't even really started. After that I still have my foliage and particle effects to finish too, so still a lot to go but hopefully I should be able to get this done.

Collision and Lighting

11/04/21 - Week 27

This week, I have completed my collision and also started on my lighting to get a basic idea of what I want in engine.

I have not done collision before so this was a good experience for me, I did end up using a few of the auto generated collision but most of it is my own which I have just created using the suggested method of making basic boxes in max that are the general shape of the mesh and exporting them as a UCX. 

As you can see I have attempted to make the ladder work by using a sort of thin stair approach, this is obviously not a realistic way of climbing up and down ladders but I am hoping that the tutors will allow this as I really like the use of the ladder in this area and I would be a bit disappointed if I had to let it go. It does function for the most part anyway.

Here is my current lighting let up, as you can see it's very rough right now but this is generally what I want, having the main window be the main light source then having some assisting lights from the lights from the ceiling. I think this will really bring focus into the kitchen and if I can create some kind of misty effect here it will also make it look very pretty and inviting - the serene feeling we initially wanted. I think looking at these screenshots, I want to make the lights a warmer tone to blend with the warmth from the window light.

Now I have gotten everything in engine and created some collision I definitely feel like things have fallen into place a bit more and I am now ready to get on with creating some base textures.

Creating High Poly Models

 04/04/21 - Week 26

This week, I mainly focused on getting my high poly for the models that needed it done. This was the first time I have properly sculpted some hard surface and it was rather difficult to get it looking right though my more natural forms ended up looking alright.

I first started with a quite important aspect of the scene, this being the stone arches that I want to use for the door ways along the hallway. This was a little out of my comfort zone as I haven't sculpted rocks before but looking at some stylised stone arch references really helped me to get the style I wanted across. One of the hardest things was trying to make the middle sections as crisp as I wanted them and I perhaps could have benefited from having these as separate objects/groups but having just returned to zbrush I didn't think of this and just got straight into sculpting instead of planning more.

The next thing I tackled was another important part of the scene and could perhaps be the called the centre piece. This was the large branch. I again used a low poly to start me off here as I'd created the basic shape and size that I wanted it otherwise I don't think I would have been able to predict how it would look in the scene. Again, I should have used groups for the branches, but overall this wasn't too difficult to sculpt as natural shapes in zbrush are definitely a lot easier as smaller discrepancies blend in.

This was the most difficult thing I created, I did use different objects and groups here thankfully, but sculpting this to make it look smooth and like a crafted item was particularly difficult. I used my references from the mood board to come up with the design for this helmet and in the end I think I really like the product but the lack of smoothness and thickness continuity really shows up and is distracting. I would like to work on this further but I feel as though I need to speed up so I am going to leave it where it is for now. 

I also created a high poly for my frame, I did this in max using a method I found online. It mainly includes using the cut tool on a plane by placing the reference behind it, you then make this 3d and turbosmooth. This method was super useful and taught me a lot about the uses of turbosmooth and control loops to make the edges smooth in a desirable way. I am happy with the results I have here.

Overall, I think I am happy with the high poly I have created though I may need to touch up a few things to get some crisper edges and better looking hard surface if I get enough time.

Finishing Modelling

 27/03/21 - Week 25

The past couple of weeks, I have been working on finishing all the modelling from the initial blockout. This is where I currently am. I still have to put a couple things into zbrush to create some detail this is mainly the tree root, the stone arches and I would also like to implement a helmet that I would need to sculpt. I have taken all of this into unreal though I have not yet put in any lighting.

I am pretty happy with how this looks, I wanted to add quite a bit of detail to the kitchen area and I mainly have done this by filling it up with plates, ingredients and glasses. Hopefully I will still have time to texture all of this and make it look how I want it to. I am happy that the areas look a lot like how I initially wanted them to in my sketches and I think it will create a successful and interesting set of rooms for the group project.

I didn't run into too many issues but I think I definitely was very slow with modelling this, I did things like not name things as I went along or unwrap when I was modelling. I was worried I was going to change things but in the end I didn't change too much once I had placed it in so having to deal with the amount of duplicated things and renaming everything just slowed me down a lot. I will definitely take this into consideration next time I work on a project and hopefully it will allow me to speed up.

Thoughts on Animation

 12/03/21 - Week 23

My thoughts about my own animation in my level, is probably going to be a particle effect. I briefly touched when I created my own fire effect in my backyard project. Now I know the basics of particle effects I think I would most likely include some dust particles to connotate how left alone the area has been. I am thinking about adding some candles on the table so I also think it would be interesting to add some fire to the tops to make it look like they are lit. I am unsure if wind could be counted as an animation, but adding this to the foliage would also add a nice amount of ambience to the scene as a whole. This is something I will ask about. I am also unsure of how to do this in general so it will definitely be a good thing to learn if I do choose to add this in. 

I definitely think all of these will be easy enough to add in with the current time I have left. I don't think particle effects take too long, but this will perhaps need to be assessed again later down the line.

Blockout

 05/03/21 - Week 22

This week, I have been working on my block out for my room. This is still not finalised and I need to add some things to the room depending on several things. It was not too difficult to determine the placements of a lot of things and this is really down to the sketches I made that proved very useful in mapping my blockout. I am finding the current actual topology very difficult to deal with especially because changing anything will mean that the other person would then have to change their topology too, especially with entrances. I think this is something we will struggle with a lot in the beginning but eventually we will be able to make it coherent.

I am a bit surprised with some of the space I ended up having, but I think everything works and I am happy that I will be able to add more things than I originally thought in more detail. 

Natural vs Artificial Room Ideas

 27/02/21 - Week 21

After having another group meeting today, we have rounded off our main ideas for this project. We are planning to create a castle with the player supposedly the size of the mice that used to live there. Along with the mice, frogs also lived in harmony but tried to stage a coup and unfortunately it didn't turn out well for either parties and the castle now lies in peace, somewhat overgrown.

The room I have been allocated is room 3, as there is 5 of us this room will be the 50/50 natural to manmade. I plan to do this by just creating the outline of the inside of some of the castle and then creating slightly more overgrown-ness the further towards the previous room.

After exploring some ideas I wanted to do a couple of rooms within my room itself, this will include a small armoury and a kitchen. I really like the way this idea is looking right now, but I am still sort of deciding how I want to covey some of the overgrown nature. I think a lot of it will just come from damage within the textures and greenery sprouting out from that. I am also thinking about some tree roots in there somewhere.

We are also a bit hesitant on how stylised we want things to be, we are all putting down some ideas on a mood board and seeing how stylised we all want it and coming somewhere in the middle, so this will definitely be finalised next week.

Character Evaluation

  26/02/21 - Week 21

Here is my finished character along with a lit scene in unreal engine.

This project has been interesting, difficult at times but overall rather fun and has introduced me to character sculpting which I enjoyed a lot.

The sculpt of the character itself, in my opinion, is probably the most successful part of this project, applicable to the brief and I really like the design I have come up with for my character. However, it is very tailored to my own interests and aesthetics. The design didn't change too much from the initial version though I didn't end up having enough time to figure out how to create a good looking mask for my character unfortunately.

There is still a lot for me to learn with sculpting characters and this definitely shows in some areas, such as the hair which I struggled for a long time to try to get right and looking the same amount of curly as I wanted it in my design. The wrists, interestingly, were also hard for me to get right and I still think from some angles they are too thin but from others they look fine. Having this depth aspect to creating characters is new to me and I still have a lot to gain and learn from it.

Moving onto retopping of the character, though I have resulted with topology that has facial and body animation loops -  this was something that I found really difficult and it ended up being a really time consuming and tiring part of this project. I didn't struggle with the face retop but having to have to find my own resources to try to retop the body and clothing, I found it immensely difficult. In hindsight and from feedback, it would have been easier to create a very basic version of the body and then add loops to it. The way I decided to do it was through looking at retop reference and trying to approach it the same way as the face, filling it in and trying to create good animation loops.

The worst retop section is definitely the hands, overall the rest of the model doesn't have too much faulty topology, but the hands were very difficult to me and I couldn't figure them out and therefore they aren't up to scratch at all.

Another thing I have ended up with is wasteful use of topology, initially I wanted the shirt to be visible through the top but I ended up finding that this looked unappealing. So, all the topology that would have been visible now isn't and is a waste.

As for the textures of the model, I also struggled here, but mainly on the clothing more than anything else.

The skin texturing was really fun and I enjoyed putting nuances and story to the characters body. Though I do really like the face and I think its one of the strongest parts of the texturing, I do think some of the bruising and cuts don't read instantly which is a bit of a shame but I hope that to other people it looks better than what I currently see. Another one of the best parts of the texturing in my opinion is the arms and hands. This part was also really fun to texture and I think the results look realistic and to the quality I initially wanted. 

As for the clothing, there is definitely an issue here which is quite disappointing. I found it hard to get enough wear and tear without making it look really distracting, I don't think I managed to find this balance. The reason why I tried to put more damage than I would have initially thought is that last term I got heavily marked down for apparently not including enough damage into my textures where wear would be present - so I tried to amp it up. The combination of confusing feedback and not really knowing how to apply such damage to clothing has sort of resulted in a weird result.

Here is how I used the texture budget and some shots of the areas of texturing that I like the most:

After finishing the textures I moved onto skinning and rigging. Though, initially I didn't have too many issues here, I ran into a major one at the end. This was that part of the skeleton had somehow merged with my actual mesh. I don't how how I had managed this but the only way to fix is to merge the skin modifier which would include getting rid of the actual skeleton, losing any actual animation and resulting in just a pose. This is why I have been including both the initial pose and the posed character as I understand that a pose without a skeletal mesh is not as useful. I do want to make it very clear that the character was posed with proper rigging and skinning in Max, including weight painting. You can view the evidence of this in the previous post - due to time constraints I was not able to re-rig my model.

The resulting pose is not particularly exciting but I think it fits with the character and I think it looks alright in terms of awkwardness, though there's still things I could improve with the actual structure of the pose to improve on the shape language anatomical logic.

Finally, the presentation of the character in unreal. This was also tricky for me as I do struggle with presentation in unreal. I tried my best to create an interestingly lit character with a nice light rim on one side to separate the character from the background.

In some ways, I feel I achieved this and it is definitely the best I could do with unreal engine. I still feel that my character just looks so much better in marmoset and I haven't got the same sort of quality on the roughness and flatness in the lighting that portrays my textures the best and without such high contrast. For comparison I will show my character in marmoset and in unreal.

If my character looked like it did in marmoset I think I would be much more pleased with the outcome of this project as I just feel like unreal has shown a lot of faults in texturing and made my work look a lot less professional. Another reason why I just feel as though the marmoset renders look a lot better is because of the background, as recommended by my tutor I didn't leave the model in a black void but I felt as though this looked a lot better as the shadows and the light on the floor just is distracting. Marmoset has a really nice compromise here which includes a blurred background which I couldn't figure out in unreal.

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Overall, this project has been fun yet frustrating in some places. As mentioned, I sort of feel like the final renders in unreal aren't something that I am particularly proud of and it makes me notice a lot of the issues I had with this project, the texturing specifically. However, when thinking about this project in alignment to the brief, I think there are successes and I feel as though I have met the baseline requirements, portraying a good level of sculpting, design and pbr usage. The texturing itself, technicality , workflow and portrayal in engine is of adequate quality in my opinion. 

As I have described in this evaluation, there is a lot that I could and wanted to improve on and I think a lot of this is purely down to being inexperienced in the field of 3D character creation, I know that if I were to redo this project I would be able to do it quicker and of a higher quality. I could also include some of the things I weren't able to in this project, one of those being shaders as I did not have time to look into this and apply them to my textures. 

In my unreal file, I have included the model in the default pose as this is what I would wish to be marked on, though I also have in the files the posed variant, though obviously lacking any skeleton. This part of the project was a disappointment and I really wish that this had ended up correctly though there is no harm in having practice here.

There were some positives and a lot of negatives in this evaluation, though in the end this was my first attempt at high to low poly character modelling, having to practically learn zbrush and lighting in unreal on my own - I think I have created something that has just made me want to fix my mistakes and misunderstandings and do a lot better next time.

Rigging + Skinning

 21/02/21 - Week 20

This week, I have mostly been working on rigging and skinning my character. Though this wasn't really easy, it was a bit more relaxing than I remember so I enjoyed having fun with this task. I did run into a few issues a long the way, one of which I am a quite disappointed about.

This is the fact that I had somehow merged a skeletal mesh head to my actual model, this meant that in the end I had to collapse my skin modifier to modify the model itself. This means all my animation is now gone, but I still have the model the way I want it posed which is a plus, I guess. I have also made some adjustments to the face using morph targets, this was a new modifier to me but I think it is really useful to preserve my original topology. 

The pose has really improved the look of my model and I am pretty happy with it, but I am a bit worried about how it will end up looking with textures. I didn't apply them whilst working in max which I quite regret, so we will just have to see once I put it into unreal.

I think due to some of my issues I will have to display both poses in my final images, but I want to emphasise here that the model did originally use rigging and skinning to create the pose.

Texturing

 02-14/02/21 - Week 18 & 19

Texturing had its difficulties here and there and I don't think I am entirely done with it currently.

I was incredibly disappointed for my marks for the previous project and I seemed to get marked down a lot for not adding enough surface damage to my materials once they had been put into painter. This time, I wanted to try even harder to get a good amount of damage that is instantly readable, intricate and layered.

I achieved this mainly by creating a few of my own base materials in designer and then layering smart masks and adding specific details manually to create a unique and personalised texture. I have not yet imported my model into unreal and am currently using marmoset to view my materials on my model in a basically lit scene.

I think the method I used to create my textures ended up going quite well for me and I am happy with the majority of them. I am still currently struggling with the hair and I think I need a bit of a break from texturing to see what I should do to fix it. I also want to add some finishing touches with some alphas on the hair to add an extra level of detail.

I found the skin the easiest and most fun part of the texturing and I really enjoyed getting a roughness variation on it, though it did take me quite a while and I also struggled with getting things to the right roughness mixture so they weren't looking too wet or too dry when out of painter. My favourite part of the texture I have done is definitely the hands and arms, I think they look quite realistic and detailed.

One thing I didn't end up using which I think I should have is the use of material IDs and having more than one texture sheet open at one time in painter. I think this could have helped me tie everything together much better and not have to go back and retouch elements up in the early stages.

Overall, I still have a little bit to go before I am done with texturing, but I think a small break from it will help me realise errors and parts that aren't looking the best.