FMP - Week 16 - Part 3

Finalising the retop and beginning unwrapping

I've pretty much completed my retopping now with a couple of days' work, and I have some screenshots of how the face and hands came out, and I'm overall quite happy with them. 

Now its onto the unwrap and working out what to put on what texture sheets. 

Above is a closeup of his face retopology, I tried to keep it as even as possible whilst keeping it reasonably low poly and yet keep it animation friendly if needed. I feel as though the silhouette of the low poly is even more important with hand painted textures than any other circumstance because the silhouette is what will sell the 3D feeling of the textures once they are painted.

Finished retop front

Finished retop back

FMP - Week 16 - Part 2

Kael'thas low poly, working on good topology and lowering the risk of deformation whilst within a tri budget. 

Today I started working on the low poly for my character, luckily I've had some practice now and I do quite enjoy the process of retopping by now. I decimated my sculpt and imported it to 3Ds Max to then use the freeform tools to sculpt my new topology on top of the decimated mesh and create a new, neat retop with the same form! 

Here is an example of my retopping, my new low poly is the green mesh and the high poly is the light grey mesh, and I'm currently working my way down the arms trying to make sure I keep all of my polys as square as possible and that I'm adding extra loops around joints like the elbows, knees, sometimes waist, shoulders etc. 

Moving on from this I'm just going to keep retopping and then begin the unwrap process! 

FMP - Week 16 - Part 1

More Kael'thas sculpting and refining

This sculpt has been a real pain for me to complete but I'm finally getting it to a place where I feel a little more comfortable, I don't know how far to push the details as I don't want to detract from the hand painted textures that are going to be on the mesh itself. 

But here are some screenshots of what I have at the moment: 

I added some expression to the face to aid me with the texturing process, just because he looks like a baby doesn't mean he can't be just as badass as he is in WoW! 

The back of his cape is pretty bare and I'll add more later if I need it, but I need to know what the textures are going to look like as well. 

FMP - Week 15 - Part 2

Drop in feedback session with tutors, tips on Cyclops and Overwatch characters from textures to lighting. 

Today was a drop in session with our tutors on Microsoft Teams and we got some good verbal feedback, I asked mostly about my Cyclops and Overwatch characters today because my Kael'Thas character is going alright I just need to keep slugging with my Zbrush sculpt. 

For my cyclops character they taught me some cool texturing tricks with roughness and how to get more realistic looking eyes and skin, and also advised that I should add more grunge and texture to his loin cloth pieces.

As for the Overwatch character I was pleased with the fact that they seemed to feel like it fit the style guide of Overwatch reasonably well, and we worked through how to pose her and present her in marmoset more than anything. My tutors taught me a few things about how to pose professionally in marmoset like alpha'd off ground planes to add some texture and interest, and starting off with a very low lit skybox so that the lights I put in manually do all the work.

My Overwatch character is a tricky one as I had her posed on a very light background because that is how Blizzard poses and lights their characters and its what I'm trying to mimic, but for the purpose of making the character look as good as it can look, they advised that I go with a darker background to make sure that the light from my emissive maps and the overall tones of her hair and legs aren't getting lost into a grey background. 

So after some edits here is what I have so far with how she is posed and I'm reasonably happy with it at the moment, but who knows, I may change it further down the line closer to hand in: 

FMP - Week 15 - Part 1

Back to my Kael'thas character, more work on the sculpt and struggling with software! 😔

I've returned to my Kael'thas character this week and I'm trying to do more work on the high poly sculpt but I'm struggling with Zbrush as it is working really terribly on my computer, but we keep going! 

I'm also a little stumped as to how much detail to do on the high poly sculpt as I plan on hand painting a lot of the details, but any help I can give my future self when painting will always be useful.

This is what I had before I started working today, and the circled areas are areas where there are going to be cloth parts between his plates of armour, so this is a little bit of a note-to-future-self to make sure to put those shapes into the silhouette of the low poly later. 

FMP - Week 14 - Part 4

Working on belts, grunge passes and adding some height differences.

Quick update on what I'm working on at the moment, I'm currently on the belts that cover his abdomen and are around his chest. I did myself a favour with the high poly by adding stitching and a fair bit of texture in the sculpt itself so that a lot of the texture and interest can just be brought out with some curvature maps and masks in substance, I love it when I can do that.

After that I've just been having fun with making everything look so gross and dirty, I added some grunge maps to layer on some differences in roughness as the light hits his belts and I do like how its starting to look. 

Here is what I have:

FMP - Week 14 - Part 3

Edits to cyclops texture and working on skin.

Not a lot for today's update other than working more on the cyclops' skin texture a lot more, I'm trying to add depth and detail as much as possible without overdoing it and making it look messy, its a delicate balance. 

I've added some water droplets over his skin to try and make him look as if he's just come from the depths of the ocean to mess up some traveler's day, and I do think it goes with his overall fishy vibe.

I also don't think I showed any up close screenshots of the moss that I put around his barnacles and on random parts of his body so here's a screenshot for that, I tried to make it look like there's just these growths of moss and other organisms on his body that he doesn't even care about. 

And lastly here is and updated screenshot of his claw, I added in some more depth here and there but the biggest change is adding a bit more of that saturation back into his claw to make it that lobster orange again, just a little more beat up and moss covered now! 

FMP - Week 14 - Part 2

Back to the Cyclops, more work on skin texture and colour breakup.

I've now returned to working on my Cyclops as I got some more feedback on it in a recent handin and I wanted to work whilst it was still fresh in my mind. 

My tutor hit on the note that he liked the breakup of roughness and texture between his belts and abdomen, and if I could get that kind of look and contrast of textures in other areas like his hands and face, it would look even better. 

I was also told that I'd missed a good oppertunity with the barnacles on his forehead as I could have pulled them down more to obstruct his face and add more interest there, as well as adding more texture to his right hand. 

While it would require some backtracking, this is my FMP afterall and the philosphy should be no stone unturned, so I went back into my model in Zbrush and added more barnacles so that they covered part of his eye, as well as adding more texture to his skin and hand overall. 

After rebaking and taking him back into substance with the textures I already had done, I do really like how it looks now with the changes and I'm glad I went through the effort of doing them.

I was also told that the reduction on saturation on the Cyclops was good but that I'd potentially taken it down too much, especially on the claw and some of his skintones as they now look a little too bland. 

So with this feedback in mind I'm going to continue working on the textures, but here is what the sculpt looked like once I'd finished adding more texture:

More detail on his hand and arm

Barnacles now obstructing his eye

More texture on the skin of his chest and abdomen

FMP - Week 14 - Part 1

More blockout work, making progress with art style decisions and starting on some sculpting. 

Over the weekend I did some more work on the silhouette of my character and I've now gotten to a place where I feel comfortable with the silhouette, I continued to email back and forth with my tutors to make sure I stayed on the right track during. 

This is what I started working on in Zbrush over the weekend, and as you can see it looks much different than the way my first blockout looked, as I have decided to full man-child with his appearance and make his whole armour set look much more Zelda. 

My tutor assured me that I shouldn't worry about him looking like Kael'thas as the colour of his armour, eyes, brows and green orbs will instantly sell who it is regardless how I make it look, andthe exaggerated shoulders that he has in WoW aren't needed to achieve that. 

My zbrush is unfortunately very slow and due to COVID-19 we can't get into the labs to use the university computers, but we keep on pushing for now and I'll continue to work on the sculpt! 

FMP - Week 13 - Part 3

Initial blockout, tutor feedback and silhouette focus.

Today I started the blockout for my Kael'thas character and wasn't completely sure where to start, and so I took to the internet and pulled up some pre-existing armour sets for Link in BOTW, downloading fan versions and testing them out for the purpose of silhouette.

Disclaimer: I will NOT be using any downloaded content in my final character, this was simply for the purpose of trying out different silhouettes to try and get the right look for the character. 

With that aside, here is what I had at first:

Obviously it looks like an absolute mess, and I realise this in retrospect, but I was trying to work out how to merge the two styles whilst making the character of Kael'thas easily recognisable to the viewer.

So after this initial pass I emailed someof my tutors and asked their advice on what was wrong with this blockout, as I knew the shoulders were off and that I didn't like the face but why?

They responded with the advice that I was trying to merge the art styles in the wrong way, and that I needed to stick to my concepting rules in order for the character to look cohesive. Make him look like an adult like in WoW, or make him look like a man-child like in Zelda, but I had to choose one, at the moment I was attempting both.

So with that in mind, I plan on going back and doing some more edits to the silhouette over the weekend and getting to a place where I feel more comfortable. 

FMP - Week 13 - Part 2

The beginning of my third FMP project! Kael'thas meets the Zelda franchise. 

Today I got started on my third character to get the ball rolling on the iteration process (and not have the daunting thought in the back of my head that I haven't even started one project yet). 

The premise is simple, Kael'Thas from the Wacraft universe, in the style of the Zelda games. But while the idea is reasonably straight forward, the execution is going to be different. The style of the Zelda games while all maintaining a very simple and low poly fantasy style throughout the years, has varied a lot. Even Link himself varies in appearance from game to game, just see how he looks in Twighlight Princess vs Windwaker. (left and right respectively)

So after some brainstorming I realised to get the most contrast between the art styles of WoW and the Zelda games I would go for a game that still had good quality character models and textures, while still maintained the cartoon artstyle. And so I landed on Breath of The Wild! 

Now with the game in mind that I wanted to take inspiration from, I created my concept which I believe I showed in an earlier blog post. Here it is again: 

I wanted a juxtaposition between Kael'Thas' power/ moodyness and the Zelda style of making everyone look like oversized children. 

There were several design choices that I debated like whether to have his ears pointing upwards like WoW or outwards like Zelda, how big to make his shoulders and the colour pallet etc. 

But I finally decided on these hard and fast rules: 

- Silhouette of Zelda

- Colour palet of Zelda

- Textures of WoW

- Small character features of WoW (brows, orbs etc)

And with that in mind, it was onto blockouts!