Portfolio Piece 2 - Week 2 - Bell Zettifar (Jedi)

 

This weeks work is a couple hours behind on the sculpt, but producing a game res will be easier than last project as now 80% of Bell's body was originally modeled in Maya, and that geo is mostly reusable. The padawan braid was made with a hair braid that I bought from Artstation, I'll use a normal cylindar in the lowres and bake the braid normals into it cause otherwise 10000s of polys would go into the braid in its current state. 

From this point I just need to sculpt some wrinkles/folds and stitching into the clothing, as well as some hard surface detail onto the lightsaber. 

There's really no good visual reference for Bell's lightsaber. I'll make a pass through the novel he's originally from and see if theres any written description but otherwise will base his saber off of the standard canon lightsaber pieces. 

By the end of the next week I expect to be done with a UV'd game res and started texturing.

Portfolio 2 Week 1 - Bell Zettifar (Jedi Padawan)

 

My next piece is the character from the latest series of Star Wars novels, Bell Zettifar. I'm currently caught between 2 minds of modeling him more hyper-realistic (like the sith character on the bottom left of my board) or stylized like the Clone Wars series (like the character in the bottom middle)

I plan on using this character to practice using marvelous designer, and considering that he's 95% covered in clothing, I tried to spend time getting his proportions feeling nice and right rather than sculpting body details that wont be featured. I struggled a lot to get the head recognizably head-like, and frankly I'm still not happy with it, so I'll probably leave it for last until I decide on hyper real or clone wars-geometric body shapes. 

to get the proportions and body shapes going I've been using Nick's reference board to get me started and keep me on track.

Sprint 4 - Portfolio Mermaid piece (in progress)

    The amount of roadblocks I ran into over the final week, both in real life and with software, was somehow still surprising and clearly I didn't plan with enough leeway. Looking back there's also a very specific point when I tried to condense my subtool in Zbrush into a 3 or 4 meshes, and this has led to hours of trouble shooting bad mesh bakes/ fixing and redoing ugly UVs. 

    From here I need to finish texturing her, add some bones to pose her arms like in the original concept, and get some nice renders of her posed and portfolio ready. By tomorrow night I should be done with texturing, Tuesday I can get her arms rigged and posed, and hopefully by Wednesday night I can have all of my renders photoshopped and pretty and portfolio ready. 

Sprint 2 Contribution

 

This sprint I was assigned to create the mute doorknocker and send it on to Alex to be rigged. I accomplished that and slapped some generic materials to test the mesh map bakes, and overall the results are pretty positive.

My second task for this sprint was to texture Ludo, and after some trouble setting up UDIMs and an overall plasticy look when in-game, I managed to adjust everything into 1 4k texture map set. His roughness values and horn textures have also been adjusted based on what I saw in-engine. 

For this upcoming 3rd sprint I just need to finalize the textures for the door knockers as well, and make any improvements that I can optimizing or tweaking textures.

Week 3 Portfolio Piece- Mermaid Sculpt finished and Game Res created

Finished high resolution sculpt of the Mermaid in Zbrush. 

I tried to accentuate edges and natural highlight points along her body, both to stylize and make her feel otherworldy, as well as in the style of many art deco statues that I found as reference.

Close up on Hands and finger nails.

Her game resolution head in Maya. Wireframe below. Since I will only have time to get some renders that match the original concept, in which she is almost already posed, I let ZBrush ZRemesher handle most of the bulk of the body and I went in personally to quad draw her face and neck. Her mouth wont be opening but I still took the chance to practice making proper face topology.

 From here I'll UV her, texture her, and the add some a basic skeleton to be able to pose her arms and torso for the final renders.