* * *
Riddick
The aim of this project was to model and rig a character from a randomly chosen list of film series, presenting them in-engine using optimized shaders and advanced texturing techniques. With Riddick as my focus I was able to replicate the titular character because.. Vin Diesel !
The reference board ended up being fairly large to accommodate references of the actor, the overall mood, film screenshots, and real prop references I could find from movie prop databases online.
Zbrush high-poly renders, without texturing and hair
After sculpting the character, modeling the respective props and simulating the clothes in Marvelous Designer – keeping in mind to add any additional details I could find in my references – I moved onto retopology.
Being the most time-consuming part, it was best done in steps, keeping it as easy as possible. This meant doing things like retopologizing the flattened clothing patterns before morphing them back to their sewed-on shape using modifiers... In some cases, it was even simpler to just keep the lowest resolution from the model’s subdivision menu on Zbrush. However, I chose to manually retopologize the body, since it was to be rigged and animated later. The total polycount adds up to 80k triangles.
For texturing, I chose to create unique textures for the props, which fit into a single texture map and could be mirrored after importing into the engine for further optimization. For the cloth, skin and any other shaders I would’ve needed to make, I opted for creating tiling fabric/skin materials using Substance Designer to apply onto pre-baked masks that cover the whole model. This is a really powerful way to get models looking detailed from both up close and far away, as well as saving on texture space.
For instance, only two 1024x textures were used for the entire clothed model, which are used to attribute masks, in addition to the global normal map. The rest of the textures used for Riddick's clothes consist of a handful of 512x tiling textiles applied to the masks below, with their respective normals + combined maps
In UE5, the maps are plugged into a master material that blends each channel of the first map to create an individual mask slot for each type of textile. Using the textile's individual AO/Rough/Mask texture, the color and tiling can be easily customized and changed at will.
I used the same approach of optimizing as much as possible when working on the skin and texturing the rocks I had sculpted for the backdrop scene. All that was left was posing the character using Unreal's control rig feature and lighting the scene appropriately.
