Bionic Dog WIP: Fixed UVs, Face Edits, Arm Engravings, and Hair/Ear Physics

To start the week off, I decided I really wanted an accessory on my character to help break up the silhouette better and bridge the model between the torso and the shorts, which looked a bit off before. For this, I felt a flannel or sweater tied around his waist would do just the trick.

This is what I came up with! the weight painting isn't quite done, and the texturing needs some work, but overall I like it. I actually modeled it using the same technique as the hair, then stretched it out in edit mode to fit the contour of the legs.

Then the tail geometry! Again, same method using curves as the tail, and then just a matter of painting the weight and getting it all affixed.

Lookin pretty good! Gonna add detail with normal maps later too.

And then came the sad realization... I wanted to engrave the arm with detailing, but my UVs were a mess.

I needed to redo all of my UVs by hand.

Pain.

So basically I split the outward faces from the inward, and overlayed some of the inner UVs to save space, and then just kind of fit everything together best I could to leave enough size for the details.

One lengthy remapping, heres the results! I did the best I could, and actually have some other edits to make (namely overlaying the tail and hair UVs onto each other where I can.

I also added roughness, metallic, and bump mapping for the engraving! Rougher in the interior of the graving, and less rough on the surrounding metal.

Roughness

And Bump...

And the result!

The engraving is pretty noticeable from a distance thanks to the roughness. I still have some detail to add like scratches and rough spots, but it's mostly done now!

Another thing I did was redo the eyes and paint the mouth. The eyes were really small and didnt fit the sockets properly before, and the sockets weren't properly rigged to the eye bones so they didn't deform properly before. Now it looks a ton cleaner.

And because of the higher reflection from the roughness mapping, you can actually see the pupil reflected in the shadow. Looks super menacing!

Almost done! Here is just a quick demo of the hair physics I added. I added a physics system that works with bone rigging in blender just for tests, but after export to unity/unreal it could use an actual proper physics implementation.

And finally an idle animation render using all of the new changes! A ton of progress these past 2 weeks, but still quite a bit to do before he's all done. Stay tuned!