New Eyes

Old Eyes

New Eyes

I have updated the eyes. They now have added extra details, specularity and pseudo reflectivity. In addition to that I got rid of the black line by extending the area of the color map beyond the UVs for the eyes.

New Skin Shader

New Skin Shader

Old Skin Shader

Above is a comparison between the old and new skin shader. I am using a fake sub surface scattering in the new skin shader to give the skin more depth and color variation.

Nano and Sketch

This is my most recent attempt with UDK. Its another proof of concept. Here is also a link to actual animation. Video

The overall process of getting the blendshapes and animation into the engine was rather painful. However in the end I finally figure out the process and the limitations of this this method of rendering.

Problems and Solutions

Exporting Character Meshes

My current setup for animation in Maya is that all animation is done on referenced rigs. The reason for this is to allow my animator to animate on rigs even if they are not fully completed. This also allows me to update the rig without breaking or affecting the animators current animation. However, this setup came with unexpected problems. Since the rigs are referenced in Maya, the referenced rigs all contained an additional prefix. So that MyRig when reference would be named MyRig_MyRig.

Originally I exported the character mesh from the MyRig file. This exported all of the joints and skin clusters. Then I exported the animation from the referenced file. However, the referenced file contain the prefix MyRig making the exported animated joints be named MyRig_joint1 instead of joint1. This created a naming conflict causing my animations not to work. So in order for me to keep my setup of the animator using a reference rig, I reference the rig into an empty scene and exported it to UDK. This appeneded the additional prefix and resolved the problem. Hopefully that makes sense to anyone who is reading this.

Exporting Blendshapes

In addition to that, my blendshapes weren't exporting correctly. They all were the default unmodified face. The problem was due to my rig having expressions on the blenshapes caused by the blendshape controllers. So when ActorX tries to export and supposedly attempts to dial the blenshape it fails because of the expression connection. This forced me to have another file in which the controllers for the blendshapes were removed allowing the blendshapes to correctly export.

Anton Voytenkov Concept

This render was created using the CryEngine and the concept was done by Anton Voytenkov.

Ice Cube

This is my quasi failed attempt at making ice cubes with a custom shading network in UDK.

Tessellation UDK

I recently tried playing around with DirectX 11 tessellation feature in UDK. The results are rather interesting. I did run into some unusual problems when this feature is activated.

• When using static lighting there is no self shadowing from the displacement.
• Self shadowing occurs when using dynamic light
• When you switch to light only mode, tessellation disappears. This could be the reason why self shadowing with static lighting does not work because the light calculation is evaluated without tessellation. (I guessing here)
• Tessellation with displacement is degraded when the object is scaled. The image above shows how much degradation occurs by scaling the mesh to 3.
• Tessellation does not work if there are no smoothing groups, so meshes would need to be assigned a smoothing group in order for tessellation to work.
• Multiple smoothing groups would create seams and tearing as shown below

• 
  

Cavern UDK

This was a quick conversion of a scene done using mental Ray. Unfortunately I had to re-texture the scene. Link to map and package files.