So, I havent yet had the to get my hands on the scene (since we are still working on a way to get nice source control to make sure everyone from the team can sync and submit stuff easily), however lenz was so kind to give me a quick flythrough and also told me how he already achieved certain things. So I can at least just share some basics with you^^
Regarding the character, its actually not that technical, because its “just” (höhö) some very good character work getting the last finish by a now very nicely working skin shading model So first of all, kudos to for such an amazing model! Second…big thanks to the guys at Epic (points at Mittring) for making Jorge Jimenez´fantastic research work on Screen Space Subsurface Scattering a part of Unreal Engine!
Interesting thing about the character in its current state: the eyes are probably not shaded in the way that comes to your mind first To explain you a bit my thinking when I tackle materials and surfaces, I always try to start in finding out how the object is made in real life, which parts contribute to how it looks and what environmental circumstances further modify the look of things. I then try to find ways to mimic the observed behavior as close as possible. But sometimes, you start to realize that even if something should be like this or that…it still makes sense to not do it like that, because this effect is so rarely visible, that another effect that happens more often has the greater impact.
So, normaly eyes are made of organic, slightly translucent matter that reacts to light. So the first guess would be yeah…use sub surface scattering. This works nice and also does not look too bad. However, the eyes are always so small on screen and light has to hit it in a very specific way (eyes are also quite protected from the surrounding bones and skin tissue) to make the transmission or scattering visible, that it didnt feel appealing to me.
Also, you have very complex reflections on the eyes (which get faked often in video games) due to tha fact that the eye is actually a multilayered surface with different characteristics for each layer.
This made us try out the monte carlo clear coat shading model for the eyes which, in my opinion, gives us very neat and fully dynamic results without the need to fake any kind of lighting on the eye (not breaking pbr )
I would like to talk about the rest of stuff going on with the head since he built all of that stuff (I just helped with feedback on the shaders and lighting), but there is definitely some cool stuff going on
So, to quickly just give some specs of the scene:
- It is fully dynamically lit right now and the intention is to keep it like that
- It uses a movable skylight and DFAO, the raytraced shadows are something that I will introduce as soon as I can sync the project^^
- Right now it uses some fill lights. I want to change that, but if the artistic vision gets lost in the process, we might stick to a couple of them for the finished scene (push min roughness to get rid of point light reflections!!^^)
Yeah…thats all I know so far
Hope it gave you some insights and cheers!