Sunday, June 27, 2021

Cyclops Project Week 2

 So this week I'm supposed to have wrapped up my hi-res. As usual, I've fallen behind but one big reason why was because I finally got my work up on Artstation! I revisited some old projects to dust them off and make sure they're presented cleanly so I could finally start applying everywhere, so I'm behind for reasons I don't mind being behind for.

As far as this project goes - I finally sort of got the hang of polygroups and using them to get clean edges but still run into issues with my masks extruding jaggedly from time to time. Regardless, it's still pretty neat to get a decent grasp on another facet of Zbrush (out of 343243242...) and puzzle out how to fit it into my workflow!  

Once I'm done getting his big shapes into existence, I'm going to be making a few of his larger ornate details into alphas to drag out of the sculpt and paint the smaller ones in Substance via height.






Friday, June 25, 2021

Corpse Bride Sprint #3

My deliverables are highlighted on the schedule and will be as follows:



Sprint #3 Emily Textures

This sprint, I textured Emily and finally brought her to completion. Ta-da!



Sunday, June 20, 2021

Cyclops Project Week 1, Witch Project Week 5

 So for my next project, I'll be tackling this buff dude concept by Frankie Perez.



This week I worked on getting the model roughed out and in easily customizable pieces. Since his back's a mystery, I drew a side view to get a better sense of his weight distribution and put together a small PureRef with power lifter back muscle reference to help fill in the blanks. I'll probably have to draft what the back of his clothes looks like in the future.

Nailing the proportions for this was a little tricky but here I am with it thus far:






I wasn't able to make as much progress as I'd like because I was also focused on wrapping up my Witch project but my schedule for this project will be as follows:

Week 1: Proxy blockout [finish proxy by Weds]
Week 2: High-res complete
Week 3: Retopo and first bake, base colors laid out in Substance
Week 4: Final presentation in Unreal

And here's where I'm at with my Witch. She's basically done but I'm extremely dissatisfied with how her face looks and there's not a whooole lot I can do about it. I'm going to mess around with the skull placement as well as exaggerating the face drawing itself to see if it helps. I also want to make the lighting more cohesive for industry review but overall I'm moderately happy with how this came out. I hope I can look back at this in a year and know a myriad ways to make it better, haha.




Looks much cooler without a face!!

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Witch Project Week #4

 Well I was hoping I'd be done this week but it looks like I'm just going to take the 5th week to get her finished while I block out my next project. This past week I finally wrapped up the high res, began merging and preparing pieces for retopo, noticed how messed up my sculpt was thanks to said retopo, and went back to the sculpt for further fixes. This is what the final sculpt looks like:




I brought her into Unreal to get some rough lighting and also started trying to figure out her goo material and got a fun ghost effect, but its too transparent and has no control over the translucency opacity.


After some thinking and talking to Alex Harvey for some tech art wisdom, it looks like one of my original hunches was right which was that I would probably have to create a b/w texture map that masks out opacity - so basically an alpha map. I decided to do a quick test on a cube and turns out this is fairly easy!



 I quickly baked her body in Substance so I could test on her and learned I'll just need to do a lot of back and forth between Substance and Unreal to make sure it's looking good very frequently as transparency goes from 0 to 100 quickly.




My extremely simple baby material.

I've learned quite a lot in the making of this project which I'm grateful for, but I've hit a point with it where I can see just how inefficiently and assbackwards I approached it but it's too late for me to do anything about it. For my next project I'm definitely going to spend more time planning each piece instead of just kind of winging it and hoping for the best! Anyway, since I'm behind here's how my schedule is going to go this week:

Tonight - push to at least get her body UVed and baked so I can start testing the material with a texture map. 
Monday - get the rest of her UVed, baked, put down base color.
Weds - Get her clothing/skull textures close to finished.
Friday - Finish texturing. 
Sat/Sun - Any finishing touches, work on new proxy blockout and detailed project 2 schedule.



Friday, June 11, 2021

Corpse Bride Summer Sprint #2

My deliverables are highlighted on the schedule and will be as follows:



Sprint #2 Emily Body Model

For this sprint, I was focused on Emily's high res sculpt and game res. Unfortunately I didn't get the UVs prepared in time but those are easy to catch up on. 





Sunday, June 6, 2021

Witch Project: Week #3 Hi-Res cont'd

 Well this week was a huge fail, kept hitting pretty much every roadblock possible - getting smothered by other deadlines, personal stuff, and just a general struggle getting certain aspects of this project working. I was already behind so this is pretty discouraging! I'm going to spend the next couple of days really crunching the rest of the hi-res. Once done, I want to get clean polygroups, figure out my way around Zremesher to get acceptable topo, UVs, then break my brain trying to figure out how to make jelly. I believe I'm going to have to make a goo shader in Unreal and figure out how to mask some parts so they're more opaque on top of just the regular texture so...!

Basically I'm probably going to either die (dramatic) or just take a 5th week to put together a final presentation even though it'll bleed into my next project. This project was def too complicated for a first project but I'm gonna make it work somehow no matter what, though!




Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Witch Project Week #2: Hi-Res

So straight up I am behind this week partly because I got sick over the weekend and had a hard time getting myself to focus on work, partly because holy crap I don't know what I'm doing. I spent some time learning about panel loops to make her chest and belt piece, which was interesting but I think might have caused some messed up geo. This keeps me from making booleans so I'm in a bit of a pickle. I'm trying to do a workaround for now and focus on sculpting on some of the pieces I do already have.

I also attempted Marvelous Designer for the skirt with extremely questionable success. I will need to keep messing with it to see if its even worth the limited time I have currently or if I should just pivot to sculpting it instead. This has been a huge headache of a project but if I can pull it off I will be so happy, haha. 





Demon Axe and Jelly Witch Complete, RIP Cyclops

I finished this all up a week ago and got really nice feedback during my last industry review so.. here ya go! - You can look at more progre...