I’ve begun building the foundations!!!!!
Character Creation!
I decided to use DAZ3D for character creation a lot of 3D artists I like used it and It’s branded as an easy way to create 3D characters. if I’m being honest, i’ve never used it before, but it seemed like it would be simple enough to grasp and seemed to have easy pipelines for exporting models for use in Unreal and Blender.
I would say it’s quite easy to grasp, especially once you’ve installed additional content it was kind of like a videogame costumisation screen.
Maybe it was because I had just rewatched sucker punch but when I was creating the main character I had the main keywords bopping about in my mind so hyperfeminine, robot, and cyberpunk I was also thinking about other female game characters whose designs I liked like Tifa, 2B, Bayonetta and Samus to name a few. but I was also thinking about maybe a brothel as a potential location, which was the main reason for the outfit. I wasn’t 100% sold but I decided to test out other things before reworking the character again.
I also randomly rememberes Unreal has their own character creation system called Metahumans and played around with it for a but but decided to stick with using Daz models as the Metahumans felt a little too lifelike and I still wanted a bit of a doll-like quality if that makes sense. It also just felt like I would have to do more work to customize the Metahumans.
Getting the character playable
Before I started creating characters I was also looking into gamelay mechanics mainly around creating and triggering cutscenes.
I then went on to trying to get the character playable. which was quite easy as I was able to retarget the default third person mannequinn animation onto my imported model (Thank you YouTube <3) However there were still slight issues…
There was an easy fix for this though. Always watch tutorials all the way through
From this test I learned a lot but came across issues I really wanted to fix. The main thing was the fact that due to the heels on the character her feet were deformed
The hair was also looking like playdough 🙁 although she’s bald becuase you have more control and can add hair physics if the hair is added as a seperate entity!
I went back into Daz to redo the character once again and was very pleased with the results. I really wanted her to feel sexy but I also didn’t want to sexualise her if that makes sense? I find this will most likely a personal thing for players again I feel like sucker punch has a nice balance of characters that are sexy but don’t feel sexualised even in the context of the film and I was also thinking a lot about a lot of the dancers I am around who do the most insane things in stilettos and skimpy outfits but the environment never feels sexualised even if the vibe is meant to be sexy… very nuanced conversation, I think
I then went on to import this model into Unreal
It took me an embarassingly long time to figure out why she looked so different and long story short there isn’t a way to export the modified textures into Unreal so I just had to play around with the nodes and shaders in unreal as well to get it looking close to the original.
After hours of searching I also figured out how to fix the issues with the deformed heels feet. This involved modifying the bones in the original mannequinn model to raise its heels.
The last piece of the puzzle was hairr. Thankfully someone created a Blender that let’s you convert the playdough hair into hair that looks a lot more like hair in Unreal and Blender.
This process went super smoothly! I played with the colours (still haven’t figured out how to get the ombre effect) but it was quite late and I was tired lol but overall I was happy with the results.