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.

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. 

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!

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

Corpse Bride Summer Sprint #1

 Corpse Bride Summer Sprint #1

My main responsibility this semester will be wrapping up Emily's model, then helping out Lori with some environmental assets to finish out our game.

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

Sprint #1 - 5/28

Emily Head Model - Retopology and UVs  

Sprint #2 -  6/11

Emily Body Model - Retopology and UVs 

Sprint #3 - 6/25

Emily Head and Body - Final Textures  

Sprint #4 - 7/9

Beer Stein, Floorboards, Vase - Hi-Res and Final Textures 

Sprint #1  5/28  Turn in:

I touched up Emily's head sculpt to get her proportions closer to my references and sculpted her some hair. This was painful and continues to be painful because I'm absolutely going to have to retopo her hair again. This isn't a huge deal re: our schedule since the hair isn't being rigged to do anything fancy but sit there. That being said, her head and eyes are ready for rigging so, so far so good!

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.