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 progress pics on my Artstation.

Honestly my artistic growth at FIEA has been hard to wrap my brain around and I can't say I have any regrets coming here. I got pushed to my limits and at times I felt like I was going to break, but it was worth it. If any 18ers are reading my lame blog - you're in for a wild ride. Just strap in and try to enjoy it, roll with the punches, be kind, and make all the friends you can. Having that companionship is the secret to making it through this program and feeling like it all mattered, especially when things get really overwhelming and that familiar doubt inevitably starts creeping in. Hang in there, if my dumbass made it through, yours definitely can. Just please make sure you're getting sleep and food in you every day! This isn't worth your health - nothing is.

Feel free to reach out to me for advice or feedback whenever you need it! One of the biggest regrets I had was not reaching out to alumni during the earliest stages of capstone. Being an art lead is just ????????????????? (????????) and a super alarming amount of responsibility with very little guidance, so for real, hmu. I'll be around. :)

Demon Axe Week 3 - Textures

 My hand feels like it's going to fall off. This is going pretty well but I'm getting too anal about painting in every minute detail so I need to focus on the broad strokes and move faster...... I need this AND my cyclops done before Thursday so it's PAIN TIME. But hopefully it'll be the last PAIN TIME for a good long while! Let's go!

Demon Axe Week 2 - Sculpt

 This week I pushed my axe into sculptville. This went by surprisingly well since the proxy/game-res already had a lot of the shapes built in so a decent amount of the work was already done for me. This has been a relaxing and affirming break from characters! I definitely needed this self esteem boost, haha. I have the UVs cut but not laid out still but this upcoming week I'm just going to dive directly into texturing. My goal is to be finished or mostly finished by next weekend so I could use week 4 to finish the cyclops project.

Demon Axe Week 1: Proxy

 So for my next assignment I'm tackling a prop so that I could take a bit of a break from characters and give myself some time to work more on my Cyclops project (and go back and tweak the witch some more because I'm neurotic :) ). I was actually pretty anxious about this project because I have historically sucked ass at box modeling but I somehow actually made it happen and now have hope for the future? I also pushed a little extra and have the UVs shelled out, just need to lay them out. Anyway here are some pics.

Concept by Betty Jiang.

Also mini-update on Cyclops. He's all baked down and has base colors on him. Had to do a lot of cleaning up because my ID map was sloppy as hell and I still need to revisit the sculpt to fix whatever's going on with his red loincloth piece but he's coming along, albeit a little slowly. I'm just happy the arm pieces baked down as nicely as they did despite me doing a goofy ass job on the retopo for that (I lost the OG low res pieces, rip). Maybe not as goofy as I thought tho........

Cyclops Project Week 4

 This week I focused on playing some catch-up and aimed to get the retopo, UVs, and first bake complete. Here's where it currently sits.

I plan to take an additional week to complete textures and final presentation by next turn-in along with the proxy for my final project.

I also finally merged the arms with the back so here's where the sculpt ended up.

Cyclops Week 3

Life happened in a serious and difficult way this past weekend so I flat out barely got to work on this at all. I'm just going to take a 5th week (again...) to finish this project up because I don't want to rush it and make myself miserable. I think it'll just take me a day or two of solid work to get the hi-res finished and then I'll move on to retopo. I'm being strict about having clean polygroups so the texturing phase for this shouldn't be too painful. It's been fun focusing on anatomy for this project and trying out different ways to get engravings done, makes me excited for future projects!

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.

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!

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!!

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.

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. 

Witch Project Week #1: Reference and Proxy

 So to start off the summer semester I'll be making this cute witch character by Pedro Kruger (https://www.artstation.com/pedrokruger) who is real freakin' amazing. So far I have 3 projects lined up based off his work but as drawn as I am to them, I'll keep looking around to add some variety to my portfolio.

I'm sweating a little thinking about how Interesting texturing her is going to be and also the thought of cracking into Marvelous Designer for the first time for her skirt. I've already plucked around some tutorials to get an idea of what I'm in for and it honestly doesn't look too bad?? (???) We'll see how much future Yami hates me real soon, haha (I have 3 characters to finish within the next 4 weeks, please pray for me).

I originally wanted to rig her as well but given my schedule at the moment I'm just going to sculpt her in this pose.

My schedule is as follows:

Week 1: Block out pose/proxy.
Week 2: Hi-res complete
Week 3:  UVs, first bake, begin textures
Week 4: Final presentation

Island Project Final

Final shots! Showed these at industry review and they were well received. Our guests wanted a bit more smoothness/res in the trunk shape and felt that the wood grain veered a bit off style and into realism-land which I totally get. Overall, this was a fun project!

Iray:

Unreal:

Coco variants.