Hello there !

This post won't be about Star Wars Redemption (sorry !), but about the new project I've been working on last weeks. If you've followed my twitch streams you may already know this new character, named "Maewenn". I want to go back on the very first steps of her creation, it's mostly about concept art and Akeytsu =)

So first of all, this character was meant to be just a skin variant of Mevenn from Star Wars Redemption that could be used anywhere I want to promote Akeytsu, but the more time I spent on drawing/doodling pieces of this new skin, the more it turned to be a new character. it was the opportunity to rework drastically the face, I always had issues with Mevenn, even after all these years of improvements I still needed to "fix" it once I was animating her face, same goes for her body. While Akeytsu offered me a quick way to test new proportions using the existing Mevenn, ZBrush was the final step to separate Maewenn from her big sister, the idea was to have a more dynamic character, taller, thinner, with more "matching" shapes and from a different universe, more about sorcerers, knights, potions, magic !

Here are a few doodles I made from time to time to capture ideas of designs for the new skin :

TIPS : Draw with pencil+paper any idea you may have, and at anytime (I always keep a sketchbook and a criterium with me ;)) 

So once a few of these ideas has been laid out, take your favorite app (akeytsu ;)) and open a cool rig, close to your design if possible (so here it was obviously Mevenn), and simply reshape the character rig up to your proportions needs, if the rig/skin are pretty well done it's fairly simple and fun to do, but the best part is that you can choose posings that are perfect in terms of perspective, and they will also give good clues and an overall idea of shape and anatomy on which you can base your character later on ;)
Here are the two main poses I made with Mevenn, for the wand object I simply used a few boxes as a landmark :

 Then I simply drew my armor designs over these various screenshots in Photoshop, at this step the idea was more to block out materials and shapes than anything, it's not meant to be definitive. 

The first one is not my favorite one at all, since it was a warm-up one, but there's still a few shapes that starts to comes together pretty well, I especially liked the left leather glove balanced with heavy metal claws, I think it adds both elegance and strength to this sorceress hand.

At the conceptart step : Iterate a lot and try to find matching shapes, here you don't see every steps of every parts, but I test a lot of lines to get something that have a cool flow to start with at the modeling step. I know this won't be final final final, but this helps finding the good shape in the end. At this step, feel free to imagine whatever you want. Place yourself into the character role and figure out what she would like to have in your hands, what to wear and how it feels to be under a hood or into a heavy armor =)

I've based my final design mostly on the 3rd concept but I've looked a lot to the second one, as well as my quick doodles from time to time when I was sculpting. At some point I made a few more sketches to define local parts a bit better. As you can see the initial name was "BattleMage Phoenix", this was about a heroic-fantasy version of a Jedi. The double blade was a difficult part to figure out once in sculpt part, as a lightsaber it's easy to retract and carry on your belt, but with solid blades, it's harder. That's why I finally ended up leaving this weapon really behind, which consolidated my will to create a character appart from Mevenn.

Then I choosed ZBrush to create the Highpoly character model (as well as some lowpoly parts), and I really liked the possibility to manage my poly the same way I do on 3dsmax while having no lag and the ability to turn any desired meshes into sculpt-able parts. Here's a WIP screenshot just before sculpting body parts

After that, I used 3dsMax mostly to cleanup my lowpoly mesh and do UVs, then Toolbag for bakes of my base maps (Normalmap, AO, Cavity)

and finally 3DCoat to handpaint the whole stuff. It's important to keep in mind that at anytime a quick draw could save you hours of processing, so at texturing time I wanted to help myself with a quick colorsheme test on the previous concept

Here it is : (based on the concept I made earlier with a few adaptations based on the final model of course ;))

 
And here is the final result in Marmoset Toolbag 3 :

Front/back views with all stuff laid out :

I'll stream the rigging/skinning process (and later I may do some on animation aswell =)) this Thursday ( 23th April 2020 starting around 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM, FR time), so if you want to joint in and follow how to rig this in akeytsu, or if you want to ask me questions about how to use this super cool animation and rigging software, feel free to jump in ! The twitch stream will set here : https://www.twitch.tv/vexod14 and I'll be doing this on my own initiative, so not in behalf of Nukeygara/Akeytsu, it's just a cool software more people may like, so I'll show it off, that's as simple as that ;)

That's all folks !

Des Bisous ♥

Hello there !

It's (again) been a while since I didn't post things about redemption, and as I've said in my previous post the production of it slightly decrease and I'm more committed to other projects (you should hear from it soon, it's not as big as Redemption, but it's something I make with at least as much love)


There's been a few things about the project though, in order to showcase a software that needs more exposure/use I'm also working on, I've made a couple videos which illustrates how cool it is to animate with it. You've probably heard about it if you're following me : Akeytsu

 So here are how I did two animations of Mevenn (I've reworked a few animations of her since Thomas is quite busy since nearly one year, I guess I'm shifting on animation too now. I especially like animating her face btw =))

I want to say here, again, that Akeytsu definitely is a strong, powerful, wonderful, brilliant software for rigging and animation. Yes. Even rigging, even if it doesn't have plenty of constraints or scripting tools, it's a software where tools are here for you to animate with, not to bother you or fix a little issue at one specific point. This results in a simpler user interface, a better user experience, well...a more efficient workflow that does the coffee, what else ? ;)
If you use the tool wisely, you can tackle complex rigs and bring things at your advantage. You can animate more than just bipedal characters. Each one of the Star Wars - Redemption assets I/Thomas have animated in Akeytsu, has been rigged in Akeytsu. This means yeah : Mevenn, Battledroids B1, Droidekas, Starfighters of any kind, doors, weapons, jetpacks, clone trooper helmets...AnyTHING.
And the best part of this software is that you can learn how to animate for the industry with it, no matter what's your skill level actually is.
I've made a masterclass at Emile Cohl last year to students who, about animation, only knew about traditional 2D pipeline. Half a day and they were already kicking-off pretty good stuff with complex characters like e-LysE (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRNGoE). Even my own parents who are definitely not into the game industry but medical field, learnt how to use it in one hour (basics of course, not the whole software, but enough for making animations and enjoy the process ;)).
So I MORE than encourage you to bring your characters/props into akeytsu, and enjoy animating again. Really.
Akeytsu offers a free 30 days trial, you can get it here : https://www.nukeygara.com/get-license/try-akeytsu

Now that's said, lets get back to Redemption project. Since November of the last year through the end of January this year, I've been working pretty hard on...this :

(Sorry about the image quality, I've only a quite bad phone for that ^^"). So yeah. An artbook. I've only printed a few of these for friends, family, and collaborators. This piece is about 96 pages only (so not a super big artbook but hey, I'm almost alone making this project and was completely alone on this part ^^). I made this to have kind of a final piece for this project, since it may never reach what I wanted it to be, at least this book tells the whole story behind Redemption, about its artistic development, about Mevenn's background, and about me at some point cause this project is finally a really important part of me, and I'll be quite sad to left it behind of course...

Here are a few artworks I made for this :  

 Ow and last but not least : if you want to read it, you can get a PDF version of the whole artbook here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8ipnxn11ms3ic/TheArtOf_StarWars-Redemption.zip?dl=0 (language is French only). Of course, please refrain from sharing the file once you have it. Share the link of this page instead (and please credit me). Thanks =)

And pour finir : Des Bisous !

Hello dear followers !

First of all, if you want to take a look at the two last things added to the project :

Geonosis : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w1L0V
Lumberia : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4AWaL

Plus a quick tour of the actual state of the demo :

An update about the current state of the project

I've been heavily focusing on it last weeks (curious thing as I've also a (super-cool) job during the day, I should rest more, but instead of it I work like a machine ^^").

So here is a summary :
- Now we have a build. Yeah. Game is finally standalone, playable on a (good enough) windows PC. That's something we should've had a long time ago but anyway, now it's there. And it's cool
- Since our only game designer left the project months ago we've faced a problem : we had to do blueprint. And as an artist, it's always a pain to dig into this for many reasons. But hey ! Look at the cool part of the solution : you're going to learn it ! And it becomes more and more fun to use finally
So now, I also take care of blueprints
- I've started working on Lumberia last year, because I had enough of desert environments of both Geonosis and Space corridors, and I've started to create modular environment assets to build a dungeon. You've seen some of these on the past updates when I was trying to create my master env. shader, now everything works I can show a bit more of it. Every environment benefits of it, and it speeds up a lot the way I worked them. But I'm not 100% satisfied with what I get, since I think it involves still too much repetitive task and could be more optimized. Next project should start from it and improve it.
- I've also decided to stop developing the project, not due to any strike (don't worry), but simply because I've figured out that I've mostly developed it alone, and I can't keep doing this. It's above my will now, I need to do something else than working again when I'm "off-work", and focus on shorter project. That's why, at next December's end, Redemption's updates will heavily decrease and hopefully reach 0 faster than light. I think this project could've been far far away than what we have now, and of course I'll be forever sad about it, but time has come to leave it behind and explore new horizons. Next project won't be about Star Wars by the way.

That said, there's still one big month to add more stuff =P


Des Bisous ♥ 

  

Hi dudes !

Some news since last time I posted something here (it was about 6 months ago =O)

FIrst of all, I'm so happy to work at Nukeygara since 3 months, I learn a lot of things there, and I work for one of my top favorite enterprises, makers of the wonderful Akeytsu ♥

I made this cute level to showcase animations ;) We'll see this later in this article

Now, let's focus a bit more on the animation part of the project done mostly by Thomas Chaumel (https://www.artstation.com/keyblack), I did only a few of these animations, mostly the new Idle with a focus on facial expressions (still WIP)

Whole new animset done on Droideka, here are some of these :

Retract

Roll

Deploy

Turn Right

Stun Attack

Our main character (Mevenn) had some upgrades ^^ Here is a first try on a new weapon, we wanted to have something cooler and we're damn fans of Darth Maul...soooooooooo(cisse) :

Finished design :

As well as her face :

(this "new" face wasn't exactly what I wanted on some parts, especially about her chin area (if you know the Bogdanov brothers...). So I had to fix it, but the main fix was to adjust her nose, remove lower eyelashes, adjust her texture work on her face (more stylized and assumed details), adapt her warpaints to a more "magical/nature-connected" look as she was born on a forest planet (Lumberia ). Her whole new armor set was about this as well as themed with "Phoenix" creature patterns and colors.

I've also increased the texture quality we had in Akeytsu :

(that's her final face btw )

Some cutted geometry on haircuts, so now materials are simpler in UE4, no more transparency, better perfs

I also tried some R&D to allow twist & roll joints, obviously not fully reverse-controlled automatically as Akeytsu doesn't provide such constrains yet, but it worked pretty well and you could create exactly your bends/arcs as you want, plus it's appart from your IK chain, meaning you could use squash'n strech with a red IK ON ^^

Here is the hierarchy, twist/roll joints are offset from their IK parent joints so you can figure out who controls who :

The only hassle we encountered then was about selecting our base IK joints ; as they were no longer weighted to any vertices we were forced to search them in the picker list, or reorganize them under your IK handles so you could "quickly" access them using up arrow key...just a pain tbh ^^"

I fixed this cool idea by simply avoiding the middle joint (or the first twist) of each chain and using only one MidArm/MidUpperArm joint, and swkinned half of each arm's part to each joints. But there's one little trick which allows for a quick & good control : while you will find logic to skin your "wrist-to-MidLowerArm vertices" to your "LowerArm-RollJoint" and vertices from this middle to the elbow to your LowerArm joint, the upperarm works differently. Skin vertices "near elbow" to your Arm joint (instead of the Arm-Roll ), and vertices from shoulder to mid-arm to your Arm-Roll joint. This will avoid breaking your arc on your elbow, allow for a faster "FK joints" selection which is cool for posing (these Arm+lowerarm joints will be clickable on elbow area =D), and finally allows you to adjust your shoulder shape with ease so you'll have perfect control over it

This improved hierarchy looks like this :

As I reworked the leg & arm rig, I also wanted to improve the facial one. There was some issues on animating the previous iteration, especially on Mevenn's jaw cause I decided to parent every mouth joints to a single mouth controller, which was cool and stupid at the same time ^^" So once improved, I can achieve all these movements with a few clics :

More details about this facial rig :

And here are some beauty shots done in a dedicated level in UE4 (really done just for rendering purpose, nothing else )

And last but not least : I wanted to make an homage to the guys who made this project possible ♥

It is also important to notice that the project "StarWars-Redemption" is obviously not affiliated with Nukeygara in any way, there was just an awesome team making an awesome software at the same time I wanted to simply pose some of my characters, then I animated them, created some environments on unreal, called for friends to help me on dev and on animation and that's it  

Akeytsu even gives back Thomas Chaumel the taste of animation (animator on the project and one of my best/oldest friend). It also gives him the will to work definitely in the industry. Now he works for TeamTo Valence (FR) and enjoys his new life as an animator. His ID "Akeyblack" on discord is someway an Easter-egg to this beautiful story

So, many thanks to Aurélien  Charrier, Cédric Vidal-Duvernet, Yannick Rousseau, Charles Sultan, Robin Ciron, Thomas Robin,  Charles-Arthur Bourget, Annabel Grindatto, and every others who worked on this wonderful software ♥ You truly are the Best !

Level art is also in progress. I had difficulties to create these levels only using boxes with absolutely 0 artistic feeling, and a friend of mine, Julie Pain (a great character artist btw, go check her art :  https://www.artstation.com/jumy), told me to bypass this first step and create levels directly by using the assets I've made. I know that's not the common way to achieve levels and that usually you have to make blockouts because your art department doesn't have produced as much assets as needed or simply does not exist yet, but here, as I already have all cool blocks under my hand, why would I not use them especially if I have to create level designs ?
That's by far the best advice I had for months, and I recovered the joy and emphasis of creating, simply creating, imagining worlds like I always liked to. Things may need adjustments or reworks, but at least I can feel faster the ambient, the mood...of the place I'll build =)

I've improved many assets and have also nearly finished a big bunch of temple assets which can be seen far away in the following screenshot ;)
I've also wanted to change the way I lighted my scenes to have a more artistic control over it, so here I diminished my sunlight intensity near 0, same for the skylight, in order to bring focus lighting onto points of interest in the environment. I also faked a godray effect using pretty oldschool techniques (a lowpoly mesh, some vertex colors and a panner for the base effect). This helps a lot to drive the eyes through the environment

Here the effect is much softer but adds a little atmosphere near tall rocks =) Clouds on the ground are made using a simple light function with custom handpaint noises (basically the same from those I made & use to texture the whole project)

That's it for this post, there's much more stuff I need to polish before showing them, but now you can take a look on my twitch you may sometime see how it's going on : https://www.twitch.tv/vexod14 (be kind, I'm a perfect noob when it comes to streaming my stuff ^^")

Des Bisous ! ♥