Reply To: [ENDED] BC2-1803 – March 2018 Class Homepage – Creating Stylized Characters with Blender

How did I miss this one? Beautiful hand painted textures @swikni ! Easy a 9/10!!

Would you like to go even further BEYOND?!

There’s a few maps you can generate/make that would make your character look in Sketchfab more like in the render. If you don’t have access to an specialized software to generate them, you can easily-ish create them in blender too. The possible candidates are metallic, roughness and Ambient Occlusion. There’s a few more that could be useful. Here’s a helpful video that explains what each do.

For these maps you paint white where you want the effect to show up, black where you don’t, a shade of grey will soften the effect. You could generate them, but they are so simple I think you can do it faster by hand.

AO on the other hand has to be generated, in Blender you can bake it in the render tab. Use a small (512×512 or less) test texture first to be sure you are getting the desired effect, baking can sometimes take a long time to finish. 

There’s also the thickness map, it’s used to make the subsurface scattering effect, but it’s a little tricky: You are supposed to invert the normals of the mesh and change the ambient occlusion distance setting from the “world” tab from 10 to around 1. Then you bake an AO map but the result is supposed to be the thickness map. Personally I wasn’t able to get a good thickness map in blender, I used Substance Painter to generate one and it was miles better and faster. Maybe someone knows a better way to do it.

Anyways, the other maps can be done in Blender and shouldn’t take more than an hour, and the end result will make your character pop out even more!

If you want to get an idea on how the maps affect the model, I went nuts for mine’s and filled all the map slots! It’s in page 38 and you can inspect the model by pressing ( I )!

One more thing, if you are going to do the extra maps, don’t use the viewport’s render mode, use it’s material mode instead. Also when you are going to bake a map, first move the object to an empty layer, and be sure it’s just that object in that layer. Have fun!