Character Exploration - "Maya" Photoshoot

Practicing retopo / clothing workflows from Marvelous for my game:

www.dystopiawars.com

Based on the original Marvelous piece available up on Marketplace:
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/qNee/womens-red-leather-dress

This started as just a 'retopo practice' exercise to learn Maya more, but then as I started experimenting with the skinning and needed more ROM movements for the character to validate the skin weights, it ended up becoming a full-blown 'photoshoot' project to introduce a new character for the Dystopia Wars game!

Basic workflow:

Step 1 (Marvelous):
- Resolve the clothing to my base avatar (Character Creator 3+ base)
- clean up UV layout, export source mesh, export 'flattened 2d' version as per my write up here:
https://www.gamedev.zone/character-pipeline-2-clothing-retopo-from-marvelous-with-maya/

Step 2 - Maya
- Quaddraw retopo on 2d flat mesh
- Transfer retopo mesh , retarget to the high-poly mesh
- Cleanup / Weld mesh
- Bake normals

Step 3 - Substance Painter
- super simple bake maps / export the rest of the maps that Unity wants (AO / etc) . I'm an utter substance n00b so nothing special here (load high-res, bake maps)

Step 4 - Rig clothing (Character Creator)
- setting up all of the clothing in Character Creator so it can be integrated into the customization system that I've been working on.
- did a number of iterations from character creator into Unity to validate the skin weights across the various poses

Step 4 - Export FBX & Material setup in Unity
- Character Creator export an FBX and bring that into Unity to setup the materials

Step 5 - Pose / Animate (iClone)
- sent the character CC into iClone for the animated sequences

Step 6 - Export Pose / Animation clips from iClone to Unity
- iClone's animations work great for Unity, in this case, just publishing the clips into Unity

Step 7 - Scene setup / lighting / tweaks in Unity
- Unity's timeline is fantastic for setting up different sequences like this, slap down a few cameras with Cinemachine and voila
- I'm using a custom set of post processing shaders & fx for the project, which I feel helps me get a unique look from the default Unity post stack.

Total time was about a day on and off to do the retopo, but then I spent almost as much time again settings up the photoshoot & grabbing all of the images...