Hino was the last project I tackled as a proper student at Gnomon. This was done for round two of Damon Woods' Characters for Games course, taking it as a free class after finishing my program. 

For this project, I wanted to expand my texturing ability and get more practice working with hair cards. The character is based on a great concept by Garam Jeong, and the aim was to achieve a bar of quality similar to the character models in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I got the chance to implement multiple new techniques I haven't tried before, including following Yuriy Porubov's engraving guide (but modifying it to use XNormal instead of Zbrush as the wrapping tool), implementing the use of detail normals in my PBR shader through an alpha or RGB ID map, implementing a second set of UVs for my hair cards to create a stronger Ambient Occlusion effect, and building a custom fresnel material for the character's pants.

I think this project was also where I really nailed down my process for generating eyelashes and eyebrow geometry, so shouts out to Damon and Jackson for showing me the way.