FMP - Week 13 - Part 1

Feedback from tutors and some edits to colour scheme and overall vibe

I emailed my tutor as I felt something was off with my character but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and he told me that the saturation on the character was a little too high if I wanted to go for the God of War grungy vibe, and as soon as he said it I saw it instantly. 

So I went back to my Cyclops and edited the overall saturation of the character, toning things like his skin and claw down, and his shoulder piece all the way down from the bright pink that it was before.

I also took away the ropes on his arm and leg which were previously a separate subobject on my low poly character, but decided that they looked better just baked straight onto the body of the character, I lost a little in silhouette with the ropes, but gained a lot in detail and believability that they are now scraps of cloth wrapped around his arm and legs. 

Here's what I have now: 

I feel like it looks like night and day in comparison to what it was before, here is a side by side just to show.

FMP - Week 12 - Part 3

Update on texturing process: trying to work more with roughness levels to add interest. 

Something I struggle with in texturing is that it is not a 2D plane like with digital art. Within the realms of digital illustration, you have values, colour, contrast, many different topics to explore to make a painting pop, but all of them fundamentally two dimentional. 

With character models, however, the character can move within a 3D space, it can be rotated any which way the viewer likes, and more importantly, you as the artist are no longer in charge of the given light source for this model. Therefore you need to think about how lights would reflect off surfaces like metal, leather, skin and seashells in different ways so that no matter what lighting the character is in, it looks believable. 

This concept is all well and good in theory, but implimenting it in practice can be quite tricky, and the advice I'm trying to work from is to work in passes and always pay attention to the different view ports so that I can actually see the roughness levels on the surface of my character. 

But that aside, here is where I am at with my character so far: 

It's certainly nowhere near finished yet and there is still a lot to do, but I am liking the textures that are slowly building on his skin, and I really love the colour gradient of his claw, and then from his claw to his arm, I think it adds interest and it definitely looks like the focal point for my character. 

Moving on from this I'm just going to be adding more depth and detial, maybe changing the type of fabric for some of the cloth pieces to add some variation here and there! 

FMP - Week 12 - Part 2

Texturing characters, and the wonderful world of baked texture maps. 

I was taught recently how to go through and use texture sheets to add dimention to characters without even busting out the graphics tablet yet and it turned all of my work up a notch I swear. 

The process works as follows ⬎

1. Take a baked texture sheet such as Ambient Occlusion, Curvature or Position
2. Add it to a fill layer and colour it
3. Add a levels to it to control the intensity of the map
4. Voila! Depth of colour and contrast with barely any effort.

Just to show how incredible it is, I'll show the difference here. 

Before the maps were applied to the body: 

After the maps were applied:

It never fails to fascinate me how cool it looks! Obviously there is always a limit to how far to push the values of these maps, however fun it may be, so I need to make sure I stay on top of that, definitely. 

FMP - Week 12 - Part 1

From baking to texturing, working with passes and base texture sheets. 

It may just be me, but I feel that texturing models is the area in which I've improved the most while at university. A lot of the software we use we often just bumble our way through until we figure it out, but I realise the importance of asking for help and feedback whenever my tutors show me something new about the software I thought I was accustomed to by now and it blows my mind. 

Substance Painter is the software I've used and will be using to texture, and I've started by going through and using the vertex paint map (created from colouring my subtools in Zbrush and then baking the map out in Marmoset) to block in colours for all of the parts of my model.

This is what my character looks like after this initial pass:

He's handsome, I know. But as clunky and strange as this looks at the moment, this first pass was mainly to just get a feel for the colour palette I'd be working with. 

Moving on from this I'll be going through and texturing using the baked maps themselves to add dimention and contrast, something I learned only recently and has opened up a whole new world of texturing for me! I'll try and document that here on my blog as well. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 3

Final bake (for now) and then we're onto texturing! 

After lots of work, and lots of back and forth as I talked about in my earlier post, I'm finally in a place where I'm quite comfortable with my bake. I documented this in my posts during the creation of my Overwatch character, but I am very new to baking in Marmoset, having only done it once before, but I already see why it's favoured over Substance by many as you can effectively sclulpt the cage around the model itself to create your desired effect. 

But rambling about the wonders of Marmoset aside, here are the screenshots of how my bake is now: 

It's worth noting now that as you may have noticed, the body of my Cyclops has this light blue hue and his belts and accessories have the sea green. These colours reperesent the two texture sheets I have applied to the model, one for the body, and one for his armour. 

There are still some areas that I would go back and tweak if I had the time but I'm conscious of staying on track with my schedule so I'm going to be moving onto texturing for now, and I'll return to these issues if I have the time at the end. 

I do like how none destructive the whole character modelling process is and how on the most part, you can go back and fix anything you like from any stage of the creation process should you wish, it'll just require a little patience and reimporting here and there. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 2

Onto baking, and how your unwrap is never as good as you think it is. :(

Today I got started on baking my model and I always seem to forget just how much of a pain baking can be. 

Effectively it's a trial and error process, and every time you bake a model you get a little bit better at it because you know now how to fix X problem and can do it faster next time. But, as it must sound, its incredibly time consuming to do this back and forth between the unwrap of the model and the baking program to see why certain things don't align etc. 

Straight off the bat my brain decided that it wasn't going to work and forgot that you need to specify within Marmoset that you need to use 2 texture sets and I was ridiculously confused that my preview bake looked like this:

But that only takes the click of a few buttons and then fixed.

Then the feet of my model were not baking for some reason and I couldn't figure out why, so I went back into 3ds Max and realised that the foot of my model was actually teeny tiny amongst the unwrap and wasn't getting anywhere near enough texture space. 

Fixed. 

Then I realised that the ropes on the characters arms were baking really strangely and looked awful so I tried to bake the ropes directly onto the body of my model but that looked even worse so I evenetually decided to go back to the idea of baking the ropes onto the separate mesh that I had made and it finally worked.

I think you can tell how I have a love hate relationship with baking now. Love the outcome, hate the process, but I suppose that sums up art alltogether. 

FMP - Week 11 - Part 1

Unwrap time! 

The title is short and sweet and so will be this post, over the weekend I got stuck into unwrapping my model so that I can then get started with the baking process ASAP as I keep trying to remind myself that texturing requires waaaay more time than I ever think it does and I need to allow for that. 

So here is how my unwrap went: 

The top image is the unwrap for the body of my cyclops, coupled with the most beautiful face unwrap I've ever seen in my life on the top right of the image, with that big eye he looks like such a happy boy! But all jokes aside, the top unwrap is the body of the cyclops plus the skull and cross bones on the front of his belts. Underneath, the unwrap there is all of his belts, the cloth scraps, his shoulder piece, eye and teeth. I call it 'Accessories' usually because I just throw all of the misc parts together in one texture sheet here. 

FMP - Week 10 - Part 3

More low poly modelling, tri budgets and trying to maintain good topology! 

This week has just been dedicated to doing more work on my low poly model and figuring out how much of my budget should be designated to each of the parts of my model. 

Here's my progress so far: 

As you can see at the momen't I'm working on the torn pieces of cloth hanging from his belts and the ropes around both his arm and legs. I'm not sure whether I'm just going to bake the ropes straight onto the model or not yet, so they are there as a precaution.

I also finished the face topology for now but I'm really not happy with it just yet, I may go back to it later but for the time being I don't have the time to work too much longer on this and I need to get started with unwrapping!

FMP - Week 10 - Part 2

Onto the low poly and how to make a batman mask for only one eye?

I'm currently working on my low poly model for the cyclops to then be baked and all of my lovely details to be projected onto a lower poly, game ready mesh. I say "lower poly" because this is the highest tri budget in my entire FMP project with an insane 40k tris to work with. That may seem like an exaggeration but I am very much used to working within the realms of 15-30k so this definitely feels like a luxury. 

So the next dilemma I'm coming across his how to maintain even geometry with this tri budget. My initial thought is to start low and work my way up, but then I fear parts of the geometry will end up looking cluttered and at this point my eye is trained to notice when certain loops aren't needed so I reeeeally want to take them out but I don't need to and I'm confused! 

Nevertheless, this is what I'm working on so far: 

It may look a little strange and confusing but the grey here is a decimated version of my high poly model to be used as reference to build the low poly from, and the light blue is what I have modelled so far for the face. His mouth was not too difficult for me as its the simple circular loop of polygons that radiates outwards. His eye, however, is proving to be a little more difficult because I'm used to making what we call the 'Batman Mask' which is a loop of polygons that goes around each eye and then meets in the middle. Like so:

But my struggle with this project is that my cyclops only has one eye! So I am a little confused as to how to adapt this mask topology into only having one eye so that all of the loops are intact. But I'm sure I'll figure it out!

FMP - Week 10 - Part 1

Finishing up high poly detailing and adding tertiary texture.

Not much to update today other than some more screenshots of my progress with the high poly, I've added some more interest to his large claw and I have some up close screenshots of the barnacles and shells that I added to put here as well. I do like the barnacles that I've added as much as they disgust me, they make the Cyclops look even more like he's meant to belong in the water. 

I feel like I'm doing a decent job if I creep myself out with my own sculpt and that definitely occured with these barnacles and the claw. 

FMP - Week 9 - Part 3

Finishing up the new high poly and tweaking problems that we had with the previous model. 

I unfortunately slipped a little with my blog posts this week as I've been in pure focus mode trying to catch up on lost time with this new cyclops model, so I unfortunately don't have too many progress shots of my high poly.

I did, however, do a lot of work on my high poly model this week to the point that it's nearly finished and I have some images to show here. 

I really like how the much bigger claw looks, I feel like it looks much more menacing and once he is rigged to look like it is as heavy as I want it to be, it will look even better. 

I feel much more confident about the model this time around and I feel like taking the time to really focus on nailing the anatomy (as much as I could) really helped the whole model come together. I did keep some elements of the old piece, such as the texture on his skin, the gills on his neck and the cloth coming from his belt.

 I also decided to add a few more details to make the model more interesting. I added many more belts onto the model than before and I also reduced the shoulder armour to only one big chunk of coral. Moreover, I added the skull that is in the original concept image and some ropes around his right arm and both lower legs similar to the God of War reference image I showed earlier. 

FMP - Week 9 - Part 2

Understanding fundamentals and working from the basics upwards. 

After starting my piece again I'm feeling much more confident about the way that it looks. I'm a little concerned about the time lost but at the end of the day I should do what is best and there is no way that trying something again could ever be wrong, practice always makes perfect.

So I started with the anatomy, referencing body builders and one particular reference from God of War as well. 

This is what I have so far in terms of anatomy and I'm feeling alright about it so far, I really like the torso and shoulder muscles but I'm less confident about the legs and how thick the ankles are. However if you look at the image below taken from God of War, the monster there has really thick almost swollen looking lower legs, so I wanted to achieve that. 

FMP - Week 9 - Part 1

Cyclops attempt number two - improvement is made through practice. 

After my feedback session last friday, it was safe to say that I was a little bit overwhelmed. Nothing is more fragile than the ego of an artist and I felt a little crushed after hearing that it was best I start all over again. But being melodramatic aside, I asked one of my tutors for some 1 on 1 help before I left on Friday to set me off on the right foot this time around. 

This couldn't have been a better decision, every time I ask for help from my tutors I'm always crushingly mortified at how bad I am and then have an epiphany over something they teach me and am excited about how to improve! 

So after sitting down with him we ran through how to study anatomy properly and my tutor brought up several images of heavy weight lifters and body builders to show the type of body I was aiming to create, one that was muscular but with that layer of fat over the muscle to add a stocky yet strong appearance. 

This is what my PureRef document looked like after the talk and it is night and day in comparison to the way that it looked before, the images in the bottom area were all I had before but he made it a note to tell me that while inspiration images are fine, you need to ahve reference images for all of the materials that you're creating as well. 

After this conversation, my to do list was this: 

• Spend a few days focusing purely on anatomy
• Lower the arms from a T pose to a more natural pose with the arms out to the side
• Figure out exactly what materials I wanted to use for his clothing
• Remove one shoulder pad to have only one to make more interest 
• Potentially photo bash a new concept image to help with putting the vision of the new model in my mind
• Make the crab claw much MUCH bigger to look as menacing as it should.