Brief breakdown of my AI -> Game workflow for characters using Midjourney, Adobe Photoshop (beta), @FoundryModo, valentina Mendez Mendez & Unity for Games 🧵 1/11 #Aiart #indiedev

Link to the breakdown and devblog: 2/11

Prompt “very old and weak man, cyberpunk point and click adventure game character, full body, model sheet turnaround, full color, front::4 view, side view and back view --v 4 --ar 3:2“ The secret for many views of the character was to generate all of the angles in one image! 3/11

I chopped the image into pieces to be used as a background reference in Modo for modeling. The mesh was rigged in Mixamo. I usually rig characters by hand, but this time I wanted to try automated tools. 4/11

To get the different views from the texture projected properly, I created morphs in Modo for each view to project the texture accurately on the mesh. UVs were also done by hand. 5/11

After I projected all the images to the UV map, I combined them in photoshop for the in-game texture. 6/11

For far away scenes this Midjourney based texture was fine, but I added some closeups to the game and the character really begins to fall apart. I needed to do something to fix this. 7/11

My solution was to use the generative fill tool in photoshop beta to get rid of the artefacts that were the result of the texture projection I used to turn the midjourney image into this texture. I also did a fair bit of painting by hand to fix the face and the shadows. 8/11

To fix the character mesh details issue I sculpted in wrinkles to the clothing and on skin and bear&hair. These added details make the realtime lights look a lot better on the surface and emphasise the cloth details. I also modelled the eyeglasses for the character. 9/11

This high polygon sculpt is then baked into a normal map for displaying the detail in engine, without having to make the in-game mesh very dense. The sculpt looks absolutely horrible by itself, but provides just enough normal detail to make the in-game mesh better. 10/11

I am personally very happy with the way this turned out. There is still work to do with polishing the mesh a bit, but I am now much more confident in using this character for closeups! 11/11