New concepts, might start sculpting some of these soon.
3D printed Johnny Jupiter, soon I hope to have the rigging system up and functional so I can pose Johnny Jupiter and 3D print him in a cool or fun pose
Lastly, I decided to see what the ShaderFX plugin was all about and boi was I not let down.
ShaderFX comes with a couple of premade graphs, one of them being a PBR shader called "Stingray PBS". While Stingray PBS sounds promising, it is a little lackluster since it does not support channel packing right away. In comes the Norrsken PBR shader made by Pontus Canback. Cheers to Pontus for getting such a good looking shader that supports all of UE4's usual maps, as well channel packing. After the Norrksen PBR shader solved my most of my shader woes, the only other struggle with ShaderFX was figuring out how to use its API to automate texture connections, which I go into it here.
After automating material creation and texture connection via script, I assigned the Norrsken shader to all of the current characters in Maya. The image below is from Maya's viewport, real-time!
Comparison between Maya Blinn with only diffuse applied (left) vs. Norrsken Shader with diffuse, normal, ambient occlusion, roughness, metallic, and emissive (right).
I did not apply a normal map to the Maya Blinn because it looks like butt, and since Maya Blinn is not a PBR shader, there are no plugs for me to put in ambient occlusion, roughness, and metallic.
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