FMP - Week 18 - Part 3

Working on textures, base colours and hand painting 

As stated earlier, I set myself some guidelines for making this character to make sure that it stays cohesive even when combining two different art styles, and one of those rules was keeping in line with the handpainted texture style of World of Warcraft. So to stay true to that I will be hand painting all of my textures.

That being said, I've made the decision to still texture my character in Substance Painter even if it is hand painted for two reasons. 1. Even though most of World of Warcrafts textures look hand painted there are still some roughness and metallic variations to the textures and weapons that I wanted more control over in an environment like Substance. 2. Having not hand painted in the old school way in a long time, I attempted texturing straight over the UV maps in photoshop and the dissonance between working on this 2D plane and where the paint would be on the character was too much for my brain after working in Substance for so long. 

And so I began texturing in Substance! 

Here is how he looks with all of the base colours down: 

Don't mind the face, I'm still playing around with how to texture his face and I still haven't nailed it, but I'll get there eventually. 

As for the base colours I do really like how they look so far, the beige will be the gold trim on his armour once I'm done with it, and as you can see in the bottom screenshot I've started to play around with the gold trim pattern on the back of his cape as well. 

I find that its a delicate balance with hand painted textures between making sure the textures look stylised and hand painted and making sure they don't look messy. 

FMP - Week 18 - Part 2

Non destructive workflow and minor setbacks 

I began texturing yesterday, and working in programs staring at the screen all day can sometimes skew your perception of your work, however when working on the character's face I couldn't shake the feeling that he looked more than a little bit like an alien. 

Convinced that maybe I was being too hard on myself and before I went back and changed any mesh geometry, I took a break and decided to come back to the model with fresh eyes.

However, this morning I looked at it once again and noticed a few things. First of all, here is a screenshot of the face: 

See what I mean now? However all isn't lost just yet, I had a few tricks up my sleeve that I was still willing to try before I went to change the geometry. Firstly, I was trying to go for glowing green eyes similar to those in World of Warcraft (shown below), however I don't think that it is going to work with the enlarged eyes inspired by Zelda games. So I attempted to make the eyes look more like eyes from the Zelda games and it helped a little but still not enough. 

(Reference for the eyes of Blood Elves in World of Warcraft, the same that Kael'Thas has)

Below is my attempt at fixing the green eyes to look more like a Zelda character, but it still wasn't looking right at this point. 

Finally I made the executive decision that his face geometry simply needed to change. His jaw was too slim, and his eyes were lifted up too much at the sides, only further accentuated by how big I'd made his eyelashes. So with all of these things in mind, I went back to my high poly, then my low poly, and fixed everything one step at a time.

This is a good time to take a moment to remind my future self that the non-destructive workflow that our tutors teach us definitely feels like an annoying waste of time, but it's like insurance, you never need it or think its useful until you most definitely do. 

The fact that all of my meshes both high poly and low poly were still able to be edited easily without causing any major issues meant that the editing of his face geometry wasn't actually as daunting as I thought it was going to be, and here is what it looks like now: 

As you might be able to tell, I edited the eyes to make them work more with the Zelda style and I scrapped his face textures because they were making his cheeks look too gaunt, and overall I'm much happier with how it looks. I probably won't keep the amount of darkness that is around his eyes currently but thats okay, we'll revisit it. 

FMP - Week 18 - Part 1

Cyclops final render and ArtStation link

I finally managed to do it, here is my Seaclops in all of his glory along with the link to my ArtStation post! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RYP4zE

FMP - Week 17 - Part 4

Final posing and beauty shots! 

I say final but pretty much everything is subject to change before I hand in my work, but with that aside I decided to pose the Cyclops in a menacing slight lean.

 My tutor reccomended I make him stand with one shoulder slightly sloped to imply the weight of his giant lobster claw hand and I liked that coupled with his other hand clenched as if he was ready to murder som adventurer at any minute!

Here is my pose: 

This is obviously just with textures on in 3Ds Max and looks a lot better in Marmoset, which brings my to my next point! 

I've now taken him into marmoset and have been playing around with some fun scenes to put him into to make him look extra menacing and here is what I have so far: 

This is just the result of some black alpha planes with the silhouette of the boat and branches, some well placed fog and a plane with a random normal map from my character on it to look almost like water! 

Here's a peek behind the scenes:

Doesn't look as impressive from an alternate perspective but I guess thats the whole point. After this I took some good screenshots and then posed him normally for 360 inspection and made a marmoset viewer of it. 

Here are my beauty shots for it:

FMP - Week 17 - Part 3

Cyclops finalising textures & beginning to rig the character

Today I fixed the skin texture issues I spoke about in my last post, and I'm quite happy with where the textures are now, so I've decided to call it here for now and begin with rigging so that I can pose him and be done! 

Here is a before and after screenshot about his skin texture, I decided to go for a slightly geometric scaley pattern to add interest and juxtapose with the semi-circular fish scales he has

Before

After

Before

After

 Its subtle but I do think it makes a big difference in how the colour blends back into his blue skin and I really like it. 

Onto rigging! I started with a biped in 3ds as its what I'm most comfortable with, and just altered the default bones to suit my needs with the character rigging. 

As for the pose, thats a little more complicated because I knew that I didn't want him too bent out of shape so that he looked large and stoic, but I didn't want him to be mistaken for still being in a T-pose! 

As you can see he even has a little thumb on his claw hand in case I need to move the smaller part of his claw for the pose! 

FMP - Week 17 - Part 2

Microsoft Teams Tutor feedback and character revisions

Today we had another Microsoft Teams drop in session with our tutors and I sought some more feedback on my characters and definitely got it! 

We had a talk about most of my characters and they're for the most part on the right track, I was just advised to change some things here and there. 

My cyclops recieved the most feedback by far and it was because I was rather confused about how to approach the colour breakup that my tutor kept suggesting. 

I'd been sending screenshots to my tutor and the general consesus was that he'd become a little too bland since I'd cranked down the saturation on everything, and that I should add some colour break up throughout him so that he wasn't all one dull shade of blue. 

I understood this in theory, but in practice it seemed I just wasn't getting it in the way I wanted because nothing looked right, so in today's feedback session I think I properly understood. I tried adding some red tones in as shown in the screenshot below, and my tutors told me that its definitely the right direction but they can't just be thrown on with a soft brush, and that I should do some research to see how I can make them look like fish or lizard scales to blend them back in with his body. 

Here you can see the orange tones I'd added in, and now I'm going to work out how I can blend them in with his skin more to make them look scaley and cool! 

FMP - Week 17 - Part 1

Unwrap process, working with multiple texture sheets and multi-sub objects in 3Ds Max

I've begun to unwrap my character and have some orthographic screenshots of the final retop as well. The green of the character,(so his body and the orbs around him) are on one texture sheet and the deep red is another texture sheet. These are coloured differently because I've used the multi-sub material in 3DS max to allow two different texture sheets to be applied to the same mesh and I like to colour them differently as to not confuse myself in the unwrapping process. 

It took me a little while to work out what parts of him to put on which texture sheet, because it seems strange to have his whole body on one texture sheet and all of the little accessories and face on another, but I worked out that with how much space on the texture sheet his face needs to have, that coupled with his cape more than makes up for the amount of space taken up by his body on the other texture sheet. 

Anyway, here is what my unwraps look like now: 

Face/Cape/Accessories

Body/Green Orbs