Test and Reflection

Dev Diary #36

It's now 2025 and aftering stuffing my face with Christmas food for a week, it's time for me to get back to work on my self-placement project!

The first thing I did was review what I had completed so far and determine what I had left to do and what was next on my to-do list. It was at this stage that I reflected on what I wanted to get out of this self-placement year and the skills I'd like to learn and develop further.

In an effort to learn and demonstrate new skills on my portfolio, I wanted to explore the concept of baking detail from my high-poly sculpt onto my character model. Now in my head, I pictured this process as as almost applying a shrinkwrap of the sculpted model on top of the new retopologised model, shifting the position of some of the vertices to capture smaller details like creases that I might have accidentally smoothed over in the retopology process. After doing some research however, I learnt that it was actually a process of baking texture detail from the sculpted model onto a texture map. Knowing this and looking back at my character sculpt, I realised it would not be possible for my to use this process in my current project, as I purposely left the sculpt messy in areas such as the face since I knew I was going to retopologise over it anyway in order to save some time. That being said, knowing this now, I would like to change my approach to character sculpting in my next project to explore this concept and hopefully, further improve the quality of my character models.

With that out the way, I felt that now was a good time to test my model in Unreal Engine. Despite not having uv unwrapped, textured or rigged my character properly, I felt it appropriate the test it now to see how the mesh looked in realistic engine lighting. As well as this, my character model last year had a LOT of problems in Unreal Engine that I only realised at the end of the project, and so I'd like to avoid that this time with frequent testing.

After throwing the default Unreal Engine rig into my character, I exported it and imported it into Unreal for testing. For simplicity and to quickly and easily spot problems, I replaced the mesh of the template Third Person scene to my character mesh and watched how it performed with player input.

As you can see, my mesh deforms terribly with the movement but after what happened with my last project, I'm actually happy to see it behave like this haha.

I already knew that the mesh would look like this when I threw it into Unreal Engine since I didn't do any weight painting to it beforehand. The main thing I was looking for when testing it today, was whether the mesh would go almost horizontal and mess up as catastrophically as it did with my last project.

For reference, while I couldn't find any videos of its behavior, I did find these 2 screenshots which summarise what was happening.

I still don't know 100% what caused the issues last time (though I theorize it's due to the rig my lecturer provided, as others in the class who used her fbx file of it also encountered similar issues). Regardless, it definitely taught me a lesson of ensuring I test my projects more frequently so I can avoid it happening again. For now though, I'm happy with how my new character model performs in engine which means it's time for me to move on to the uv unwrapping and texturing!

Stay tuned! :3