Outdoor Parka

Personal project where I challenged myself to created short film in Unreal Engine and Augmented Reality experience. Main focus and first challenge was to recreate parka jacket which is unique and original design of my friend Dainius Bendikas. First step was to design it in Marvelous Designer using real patters shared Dainius. Since this jacket exists in real life I had really nice, real-sized reference. After simulation part was finished and I was happy with jacked shape I went to Maya to retopo it, add details like zippers, buttons and other small trims and UV it all.
Next step was to texture it using Substance Painter. I used real jacket as reference for this part too, but I let myself to have creative freedom ass well. At this stage my thinking was to texture avoiding adding too much wear and tear which are often overdone and makes garments look very "game-y", but also I wanted to avoid super clean texturing whcih could result in looking very CGI. So challenge was to keep nice balance of both worlds.

I used both procedural masks to add randomness on bigger cloth areas and more controlled hand painted masks on areas where procedural mask failed to make sense in this specific parka jacket. I tried to apply concepts used in skin painting where different jacket areas are painted in slightly varied color tones to break color blocks and and more randomness.

Its still work in progress, so my next steps are:
- Rig it on Metahuman character.
- Add cloth physics in Unreal Engine.
- Develop custom rain affected fabric shader
- Add Niagara rain effects
- Lights
- Environment
- Camera movements.

This is big project for me to use and battle test all my skills as 3D generalist.

Update 2025.01.16. All above implemented. Except rain part as I went for more foggy Iceland look.

Short cinematic inspired by foggy Icelandic weather. Used @dainius_bendikas parka as main character. This is my first Unreal Engine project during which I went from not knowing almost nothing about this engine to rendering my first cinematic. Things that went into this: Weight painting directly in UE, cloth physics using Chaos Cloth node setup (body collisions,self collisions, layers), Gaea terrain generation, landscape material setup, Motion Capture for walking animations, animation re-targeting from motion captured data to MetaHuman rig and finally figuring out power of UE sequencer. So learning curve was quite steep but it was so worth it. In the end it will get only better from this point.