There is nothing out of the ordinary in its setup for this example. The normal map works as expected in typical material setups, supplying the tactile texture to the surface by perturbing pixel normals. The color of the scatter is managed by the Subsurface Profile asset. Areas that are dark will exhibit very little scatter, such as the cheeks, while lighter areas will have higher amounts of perceived scatter, such as the nose and ears. The scatter map controls how much light is going to be scattered through the surface of the skin.
#Unreal engine 4 character creation system skin
This map boosts specularity at areas where the skin may be stretched a bit tighter, and dampens it in areas where we don't want to see reflection, such as the center of pores and within wrinkles. It is important to note that the default value for specularity is 0.5. The specular map scales the amount of specular highlight visible across the surface of the skin. Also note that the hair texture on the head is pushed out to fully rough (1.0) this prevents any stray specular highlights from the scalp, which will give a much more significant sense of depth to the hair. This causes those areas to appear less shiny, accentuating the look of depth provided by the diffuse and normal map. Note that the roughness increases within pores and wrinkles. This is a common technique used to minimize the amount of textures in use. The roughness map is stored within the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. Any darkening of wrinkles will accentuate the texture supplied by the normal map. At 4K, you can see the tiny capillaries just underneath the surface. The diffuse map supplies the Base Color for the Material. This skin setup utilizes five total texture maps: diffuse, roughness, specularity, scatter, and normal. The textures were then cleaned up and tweaked by artists at Epic. The textures used on the character's skin are all at 4K resolution and were originally produced from facial scans of the actor.
#Unreal engine 4 character creation system update
In this way, artists can standardize approaches to generating certain types of surfaces, knowing that a fundamental change to a single Function will update all instances where that Function is being used. This is done as a reusable authoring approach to creating Materials for Paragon. Note the use of Material Functions to set up the base for the skin Material. The character's skin is created through the use of UE4's Subsurface Profile shading model. To view this showcase, simply open the project and press Play In Editor to see the cinematic pan-around.įor more information on the tech used to produce this character, please refer to this Unreal Engine Livestream - Tech & Techniques Behind Creating the Characters for Paragon. For more information on each of these systems, refer to the sections below.The purpose of this showcase is to demonstrate the use of high-quality character shader techniques, similarly to those used on characters from Epic's MOBA game Paragon. When crafting AI in UE4 and using each of these systems, a good way to think about building your AI is that the decision making process is handled by Behavior Trees, stimuli from the environment (such as sensory information) is sent to Behavior Trees from the AI Perception system, and queries about the environment itself are handled through EQS. Additionally, all of these tools can be debugged with the AI Debugging tools, giving you insight into what the AI is thinking or doing at any given moment. From a Behavior Tree that is branching between different decisions or actions, running a query to get information about the environment through the Environment Query System (EQS), to using the AI Perception system to retrieve sensory information such as sight, sound, or damage information all of these systems play a key role in creating believable AI in your projects. Creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) for characters or other entities in your projects in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is accomplished through multiple systems working together.