Portfolio 3 Week 3 - Ember's Textures

 To be frank I did fall behind on Ember this week thanks to multiple real life factors + other school obligations + end of semester burn out. But I know that all I need to finish for Ember is just the texturing along the legs/feet, the tongue and teeth, and add some bones in the neck to match the concept art pose. I should be able to get all of this done by monday night and spend Tuesday and Wednesday working on getting posed renders of Bell + Ember for Portfolio Review on Thursday. 

Research Project - Jedi Robe in Marvelous Desginer

 

    One of the unforseen negatives of working with marvelous designer is that since the tool is usually used by established pros, long term 3d artists, there is not a lot of help or guidance when it comes to ensuring a correct start to a project with minimal hiccups. For example, it took around 2 hours of repeated attempts of follow the most basic of basic starting steps,  and ending up with geo like that shown below, before I eventually noticed that the gridlines I was working with were much larger than those I was seeing in most every tutorial. No where had I seen it written or spoken about how important it was that these cloth sims be ran at reasonable scales, nor had I seen it used as a possible explanation when I would search "why is my marvelous designer garment exploding upon simulation."

 So. step 1 for anyone trying to work in Marvelous Designer, make sure your objects are at an appropriate scale! I personally made a simple dynameshed geo of Bell and scaled it by 5x to get something that can properly and effectively provides the structure for our cloth-simmed Jedi robes to fall upon. From here, the next thing I did was create a polygon shape in the 2d viewport, click X to add points to the polygon to give more adjustability and get the shape I'm looking for in the end of a panel of robes by adjusting the points after clicking V.  Do this until you have a shape vaguely like the shape on the right of the image below, and in the 3d viewport line up the plane just off set of the body with the white face side facing away form the body. From here I simply duplicated the panel and mirrored  until I had 4 panels that would make up the basis of our robes' front and back panels. 

Using the segment sewing tool (N) I connected all of the edges except the arm holes in the sleeves, the head hole, bottom hole, and the front most seam, as the Bell's robes are left open in the front. Once you've successfully sewn your edges together a simple tap of spacebar will run the simulation and allow the artist to tug the material and garment around to their hearts content to get the specific fit they were looking for. 

For my final project I plan on making the Robes out of a posed version of Bell, exporting the retopologized and simplified geo into Zbrush and painting my specific details there, and then remeshing and UVing the robes for texturing last. As far as my remaining work in marvelous would go I just need to tweak parameters such as thickness and elasticity to my liking before retopo-ing and exporting this geo out. It really doesn't get more simple than a robe, so long as your scale is properly set up before you get going in the simulating. 

Portfolio Piece 3 - Quad Draw

 

Ember is currently around 13k tris, and is coming along fairly well. I just need another hour or two to add in the teeth and feet and I can move on to texturing and finally rendering. Still pretty much on track!

Portfolio Piece 3 - Ember Sculpt proxy

 

I've started putting together the base geo and working on proportions. I still feel I've some work to do on the front legs, but once I add in teeth and hair and some scales it should come together fairly well by then. I hope to be working on game res geo and UVing by next monday. 

Portfolio 2 Sprint 4

 

I missed what probably would've added up to around 10 hours of work over the last 4-5 days with a stomach bug I caught out of nowhere and couldn't figure out how to make better other than just waiting for it to pass, and I would say my remaining work for this character is something around that amount of time. Clone Wars style texturing is quite flat in terms of implied height or bump detailing, but very scratchy in a hand painted/sketched looking manor, and that will take some time to texture in by hand. Since my next assignment is technically a part 2/companion piece to this, in modeling Bell's animal companion, I can pull some time from the beginning of the process, and as well later when modeling a creature that has little to no props associated with it. Retopo for that should also be much quicker than this was, with like 19 piece total in the end. 

Sprint 3 Delivery

 

For the final sprint on our VR project I finished creating and applying textures to our two door knockers, going for a weathered and oxydized look thats more metallic than the obviously rubber puppets used in the movie that were supposed to be brass anyway. 

Week 3 - Jedi game res assembly

 

As of now I would say I'm about 2-3 hours behind. By this point I wanted to be done with UVs on the game resolution model so that I could move on to modeling and texturing. I still need to quad-draw in the pants and boots but those are the simplest pieces on his body, and UV-ing should be easy as well. I'm currently at 43k tris, I wanted to max at 45k so I'll probably go back through some of the hair chunks and maybe the sleeves to see if I can steal any tris back to make sure the legs and feet look equally cared for as the rest of the body. 

No wireframe, smooth edge view. 

BPR of the final sculpt in Zbrush for reference. 

Full body. The Light saber will be Modeled and attended too if I have time this week, otherwise will be left to be done before I make the alien dog companion next month. 

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.

Portfolio Piece - Mermaid - Week 2

Due to some real-life complications and time losses over the weekend I'm not totally finished with the sculpt like I would have liked by the end of memorial day, but I'm not so far behind that a couple extra hours over the next two days wont catch me up. Some more minor detail sculpting on the headpiece, plus finishing up the bandeua/bra thing and sculpting the bottom tail fins will finish the sculpt. 

 

Sprint 1 Contribution - Labyrinth VR

 

For this first sprint I UV'd Ludo's gameres geo and tested how the normals would bake onto it; it went pretty well! 

proxy textures to get the point across...

I then moved onto to my Sprint 2 responsibility of sculpting the Muted Door Knocker using the above image as a reference.

WIP Sculpt in ZBrush.