Unreal Engine Character - Female Cyborg

Here's a real-time cyberpunk female character rendered in Unreal Engine. It was created on my spare time for a personal game project but I decided to not use it for multiple reasons. Still, it's not the kind of work I usually do and I had a lot of fun creating that character :)

The base mesh was modeled in Blender then sculpted in Zbrush, mostly to use its booleans to add details. Retopo was done in Blender and the bakes done in Substance Painter. Tricount is quite high since it's the cinematic model.

I tried an approach similar to what Epic Games did for the characters of Paragon to allow great material flexibility. The idea is to create a bunch of RGB masks (like edge/cavity/dirt/grunge/AO/material IDs) to procedurally create the Albedo/Metallic/Roughness/Specular maps in the Engine. That way, making the armor slightly more metallic, dirty and of a different color is just a matter of creating a new material instance and changing a bunch of parameters in it rather than using a new set of textures. There's no Albedo/PBR maps like you typically use, everything's driven by masks, all generated in Substance Painter.

A custom rig was created to build a fully fonctionnal reverse suspension rig for legs/arms but spoiler alert, don't do that! I learnt the hard way that creating bone chains that are too long lead to jiggly bones once exported because of animation compression (feet are shaky and don't stay in place). Plus, you can't use IK in-game with that kind of rig so it's quite constraining.

Anyway, hope you like it!