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Tifa Breakdown and Integration in Toolbag

Intermediate, Practical

Description
A three hour detailed breakdown of Tifa Lockhart’s character model from Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

We cover:
  • Material expression and the use of detail maps on surfaces.
  • The unwrapping strategy used on Tifa.
  • Numerous observations about Tifa’s low-res model.
  • How to integrate a model and set up shaders in Marmoset Toolbag 4.
  • Setting up lights, cameras and post-process effects in Toolbag.
  • How to quickly render out and tweak a beauty shot.

Disclaimer: Tifa’s model is the property of Square Enix. We do not distribute or sell any of the data nor discuss how such data can be acquired. This data is used as a teaching aid because it holds academic value.

This class is reserved for members.

← The Character Art Pipeline

8. 3d Model Breakdowns

The Character Art Pipeline →

10. Free Class: Creature Creation with Ben Erdt and Sam Alicea

← Texturing

5. Materials and Costume Design

Texturing →

7. Grooming and Shading for VFX

Discussion

6 comments

  1. Angel Santizo says:
    December 14, 2022 at 5:02 am

    Hi Laura! Its great to have a how to integrate a character into marmoset. My question is kinda related to the previous one.

    Let say you need a detail map for the skin, another for clothes and another one for leather (for example), and everything is in the same texture set from our work in Substance Painter. Do you need to apply a different material in Maya to each Subtool/part before exporting to Marmoset? How would you name them?

    1. Laura Gallagher says:
      December 14, 2022 at 12:59 pm

      Hey Angel. Yeah, Marmoset’s shaders only allow one detail map per material so you’ll need to split the skin, clothes and leather as separate materials in Maya before export. Marmoset’s shaders are pretty basic. If you take UE5 for example, you can have multiple detail maps in the same shader (so the cloth and leather could share the same material) and use a mask to define where the detail maps are applied. Naming-wise, name them whatever is clear to you!

  2. Larisa Beliaeva says:
    May 2, 2022 at 12:42 pm

    Maybe I missed an important point somewhere in the lecture, but it’s still not clear for me when we need to use a separate mesh+separate texture map and when we use a single texture map+several masks instead. I mean, based on which criterion do we need to make a decision? Thanks!

    1. Laura Gallagher says:
      May 2, 2022 at 2:58 pm

      Hi Larisa, there really isn’t any hard and fast rules. Different artists and different studios approach the question differently. A lot of it has to do with shader limitations. In Marmoset for instance we can only have one normal detail map per shader, but a custom shader built in Unreal could easily support four different detail maps, each using the RBGA channels of a mask. Marmoset isn’t a great engine for heavy detail map work for that reason.

      1. Larisa Beliaeva says:
        May 3, 2022 at 5:36 am

        Hi Laura! Thanks for the answer. As regards integration to Unreal engine, who usually does it? Does a character artist need these skills? Thanks!

        1. Laura Gallagher says:
          May 3, 2022 at 12:56 pm

          Yup! A character artist needs to know how to integrate a character in an engine.

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