Evi: Digital Human with Breakdown
"Evi" is the research theme of my bachelor's thesis.
The idea to make a Digital Human (or try at least) came to me after I've found "Digital Human" project from Epic Games in Unreal Learn Tab. I thought it would be interesting to learn their pipeline and to create my own character in the process.
Evi was made in about 2 months and I've learnt a lot thanks to her.
Additionally I've made some facial expressions to test animated albedo and normal maps.
This project was a lot of fun.
Close Ups
Emotion Palette
Sculpt in ZBrush, UV and the rest done in Maya
To sculpt the skin I used Kris Costa's method of sculpting one single pore in ZBrush(which he shows here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfen-BSwWcE&t=3085s).
Additionally I made some custom skin brushes by turning real skin photos into alpha maps.
To make Evi's hair I used XGen and the amazing timelaps from Hadi Karimi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Cl_5gc7LQ&t=3165s).
Her hair had ~2.8 Mio. tris, so to achieve better performance in Unreal I deleted the big part of hair strands on the back of her head (dark-blue layer), reducing the tris count from 2.8 to 1.8.
The picture on the right shows the visible lack of hair.
So I used a layer of cards, that should hide the missing hair. The transition is still visible but mainly by zooming in.
The eyebrows and eyelashes are also made in XGen.
To make the eye, I used the technique, that Epic Games used by their Digital Humans. An eye consists of: eyelid occlusion, lacrimal meniscus and caruncle blend layers.
I also added plica semilunaris to achieve better transition between the eyeball and the head.
The final result.