Organic Sculpt- Alien Dog Week 2

This week for completing my secondary and tertiary detail I focused on the front facing view of the alien dog as that is the one the original reference was from. The GIO brush came in handy a lot for carving out wrinkles, as well as damstandard and inflate.

It was pretty easy for me to figure out what I needed to do for the secondary detail as the alien dog is essentially a giant ball of wrinkled flesh. I sculpted in the deepest wrinkles and some of the medium ones to pave the way for tertiary detail. 

While in my secondary detail phase I did a lot of sculpting into the model, to better emphasize the existing detail and create more I sculpted on top. I did the inverse operation of the GIO brush quite a bit to define wrinkles more, to build up edges and emphasize slighter details. I deepened a lot of the biggest wrinkles and used the inflate brush when I felt the flesh needed to sag and overlap over each other more. I applied clay polish to the teeth and claws as well as used damstandard for a bit more edge.

Organic Sculpt- Alien Dog Week 1

After watching the video about different methods to set up references images in ZBrush, I found the grid method to be the most intuitive and went into Photoshop to correctly scale my reference images. The images are cropped a bit oddly but the alien dog itself is all scaled to the exact same size from the front, sides, and back. I set imported the images as textures and set them up on on a cube grid.

I then made a rough blockout using polyspheres and then dynameshed the main body together for easier tweaks. I left the ears and eyes solo for now.

I made finer edits to the blockout, adding teeth and claws and made adjustments to the primary forms mostly with claybuildup, damstandard, and highpolish to refine shapes. Then I started sculpting in all the wrinkles around the limbs, joints, and eyes. I stopped (if I had to guess) most of the way through my secondary detail. Below is my working reference board.

 

Industry Review 2- Canon

 

 The canon was a several months long project that I was able to go back and adjust before industry review.

I started out with a blockout in Maya based on the references I pulled from artstation. I also grabbed various texture references for later. 

I then went into ZBrush to sculpt in texture. I have never done a realistic sculpt before so this was a learning curve, but I think in the end I did well. For the wood grain I used clay buildup and damstandard to achieve a rough, grainy effect that I then pulled back with morph target. I also used morph target on the metal textures after roughing them up with a noise brush. For variation I carved cracks into the metal as well as whirls in the wood for knots.

 I went back to maya to retopologize the blockout to be game ready. My goal was to get below 10k tris, and I just barely got there with 9780. I spent a lot of time working on realistic textures, adding in color variation, dirt and grunge, generators for AO, and more. I think adding in subtle gradients really helped push my texturing further.

 Below are some more renders from Unreal.

 

Industry Review 2- 2B Kitsune Outfit

This project was a big undertaking and my first ever dive into marvelous designer. My goal was to create an outfit inspired by a skin the character 2B (from nier automata) can wear.

I first gathered a bunch of references for the outfit and textures, and edited a base mesh to match 2Bs's proportions. 

I created the base clothing layer in marvelous designer, which I had to learn from the ground up. The clothing simulation was very fun to mess with, but a lot of technical work went into it as well. I had to create custom clothing patterns and sew them together while utilizing different tools and sub-settings to make everything sit as it should.

I then went into ZBrush to sculpt nice folds into the high poly mesh. I didn't like ZBrush's clothing brushes that much, and found I could still get a very nice effect with standard and damstandard.

At this point I baked the highpoly mesh of the outfit in order to texture it in substance painter, as well as textured the kitsune mask. I was aiming for a cotton-y look for most of the clothes and a silkier look for the bows. 

Common Art: Final 'A' Stage

 This week I went back to work on the texturing of the characters. I added patches, stitches, and different colors to break up the pure black clothing that was previously on the killer. I also added a blood splatter effect because the killer is, in fact, a killer. I exported the packed textures this time and put them into our unreal scene.

 For the old man I made his pants and shoes different colors to once again break up the clothes being all the same. I added a gradient to draw the eye up to his face, and added wine stains to his sleeve and shirt as he is supposed to be too drunk to realize he is being sneaked up on. I packed the textures and added them to unreal as well.

Canon Week 6

This week I went back and added more geometry to the cylinders in my game res mesh. I made it just below 10k polys while also getting rid of the sharp edges in my model. I deleted a lot of unnecessary geometry to get there.

The next thing I did was unwrap my model properly this time. I learned a lot of new features about texel density, because in my first bake the projected texture was pixelated so I had to mess around with UV and bake settings. I ended up in a spot I'm happy with, but going forward I'm going to learn how to use bake groups. I also know I could have utilized the empty space in the UV square better, but it was also my first time putting a lot of time and consideration into the UVs, so I'll give myself a pass.

I then started texturing the metal parts of my canon by first masking out all the metal bits and adding different layers of wear and grunge on top. I used metal edgewear and grunge to make it look beat up, and then started looking at some of the SP smart materials to see what they did to look like proper, beat up metal. I noticed that a lot of the dirt layers used mask builders to build up realistic dirt, so I created one with my own bake map, as well as adding a light generator and a linear gradient to add color variation.

 I then started the wood texture by masking out the biggest chunks of wood as a lighter brown, and smaller pieces like axles as a bit darker to add more variation. As I felt I had already sculpted a lot of wood grain into the mesh, I focused more on adding grunge and dirt, as well as more color variation with a grunged brush fill layer and another light generator.

On top of all the material layers I added a low opacity light to dark green gradient to give a more weathered, sullen look to the canon. I pushed my AO shadows to be a bit warmer to balance out the cool tones of the subtle gradient. 

 I set up a pretty easy display in unreal for showing off the canon. Set up my material, imported the humble infinity wall, and set up a three point light system. You can see my first render at the top of this post and two more below.

 

Cannon Week 5

The first thing I did this week was apply poly-paint to my cannon while in ZBrush to help with ID texturing stuff in Substance Painter next week. I then decimated the model down to about 15% of the prior poly-count, and exported the pieces out.

I then pulled the high res pieces into Maya to make sure the poly-paint info carried over. It did, and I then set up a lighting scene with Arnold render (and a handy infinity wall) to take a nice product shot of the cannon. If it looks low res, I have no idea why! I cranked up the resolution and the HD format in render settings, but it keeps looking fuzzy on my end.

Then I started working on my game-res topology. The rings on the cannon were massively increasing my polycount so I deleted a bunch of edge loops of them to lower the number. My biggest issue is sharp edges, so I did a lot of beveling to fix that. The biggest issue I ran into that I couldnt figure out how to fix were the wheels. As you can see in the top picture, the wheels still have sharp edges that seemed to me like they would have needed more geometry to fix. I ended this week at 9040 polygons (just below the goal of under 10k) and I didn't know what to do to fix it. As a temporary solution, because part of this week's assignment was to bake in substance painter, I smoothed the wheels as they were so the bake errors would be more minimal. The bake looks okay in some areas but the biggest issue I need to tackle is sharp edges, as well as the wheels.