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Clowning Around (Process Thread, lots of talky)

Note: I'm going to talk a lot about process and inspiration in at least this first post, but will post latest WIPs at the top so you don't have to read all of my dumb expounding. Also, this is going to be mostly stream-of-consciousness writing, but hopefully it will make some kind of damn sense.

Second Note:This is largely an exploratory project of several facets of 3D with an end goal in mind:
Attempt to break down some of the character tricks used in Arkham City and create a decent looking project rendered in Unreal Engine 3. As a result, I will be asking all sorts of questions and doing research on pretty much everything from modeling, to texturing, shaders, rigging, etc. And would love any input from anybody on what works for them, how to make things better, if things aren't working, or if I'm just nuts.

So, to get this out of the way, there are few things I like more from a thematic standpoint than that of the Batman. It's dark, gritty, and a lot of the villains are absolutely fantastic to think about and to see interpretations done by different artists/teams. This project was essentially spawned by this line of reasoning: "Man I love Arkham City. But you know what I'd love to see? Batman taken back to his roots in the 1940s, reimagined with the same kind of hyper-realism and character that Arkham City has, with the characters grounded like the Nolan movies." Thus, a project was born. Over the Christmas break, I kept my art noodle going by doing reinterpretations of the more venerable/famous Batman villains in some attempt at a Dieselpunk/Art Deco style.

Now, mind you, I was basically flying by the seat of my ass for a good portion of it, and didn't actually bust out the google image search for ref until I started doing sketches for the "Gotham City Sirens". But in this search for reference and dinkum thinkum, I spawned a vision of Gotham City, a fabulous blend of the animated series' Art Deco lines and tech, film noir, the pure distillery of the characters from the Nolan films as well as bits from the first Tim Burton film, and the grit and despair of the books The Long Halloween and City of Crime.

"Had you ever considered that all this is your fault?"
The above quote is easily the best way to describe what I love about Batman as a series. It's food for thought while giving the sense of doubt and hopelessness that I think really embodies the best of Batman. With this mood-set in mind, I set out to create characters that were distilled down in terms of their basic personalities, and added artistic accoutrements in my sketches to reflect it. This thread will currently only show the Joker and Harley Quinn, but I will discuss my process from what I have in my sketchbook as a whole (scans may come later, I dunno yet).

"Why So Serious?"
The nice thing about working with the Joker is I have many, many shades of his particular insanity to pick and choose from in order to create something that I personally find disturbing and somewhat frightening. In my iteration of the Joker, I wanted a blend between the skin-bleached, gag-toting maniac of the comic books and the pragmatic, genius-level terrorist of the Dark Knight. To this end, I kept the bleached skin idea, and added a Glasgow Smile along with gnarled, spindly fingers, dark, dark eyes, crooked teeth and a wicked underbite. I want to convey the simple, predatory intelligence of the Joker while adding in that touch of twisted clown brought forth by both of Mark Hamill's interpretations (technically the same, but the universe is technically different so what the hell).

This is the first iteration after pooping around in an afternoon during Christmas:
545498_3997633141671_433415538_n.jpg

Now, after a couple of months of dinking around, gathering proper reference (I've only sampled it for this board, I tend to grab a lot to pick and choose from) and working on it in my spare time, I've come up with something I think is heading in the right direction:
JokerRef.png

And the Sculpt thus far:
Joker05.png

"Damaged Goods"
To be perfectly honest, I don't like Harley Quinn near as much as other villains, but that's mainly due to the fact that I feel that she's a bit of a one-note character that has plenty of potential to expand in terms of character facets while still retaining her "bubbly" personality. Actually, come to think of it, I think my favorite interpretation was her in the trailer for DC Universe. It was a step beyond the spandex bodysuit, but wasn't the oddly off-putting biker gang corset and pigtails in Arkham City, and still had the side-kicky vibe. So where does one go from her standard jester outfit to something indicative of Dieselpunk '40s?

Lose the tights-This is actually a bit of a misnomer, but it's still somewhat true. I ditched the spandex tights in order to give her something with more character and a more interesting silhouette as well as possible opportunities for secondary motion animation for her acrobatics (I'm not an animator by any means, but it's always good to try to consider things in motion). I wanted to have something along the pin-up aesthetic as I seemed to recall many of the costumes being more theatrical with sex-appeal, which is basically exactly what I wanted for making 1940's ladies, especially since something more noir-esque basically requires a femme fatale flavour. During my sojourn through the googles I found plenty of pin-up art to choose from, including wouldn't-you-know-it, a jester lady. Paydirt: struck. But the costume wasn't a big enough departure for me, because while the painting's costume was a good starting point, it was still bland as hell to look at because:

Cookie Cutters are dumb, and Barbie Dolls aren't cool anymore- Now, I'm basically gonna say go read Swizzle's Boss-Ass Thread about making cool ladies if you're not subscribed to it already. But anyway, I wanted a way to get an interesting silhouette without hitting like, every single stereotype of game character lady out there. I wanted her body to have a few things, Harley Quinn's bubbly personality, a teasy, pin-up kind of sex appeal while still retaining functionality in the costume and having a bit of class still (I still can't shake the white-trashy feeling I get when I look at Harley Quinn's model in Arkham City, I really have no idea why it bothers me so much, it must hit close to home or something). Here's a sample of the reference I've gathered thus far:
HarleyRef.png

Shame about the face...I'm likely going to offend one or more people in this section, it's not intentional I assure you, my wording can be a bit blunt, and as such, may be... insensitive. I'll stop myself from plugging Swizzle's thread any further, as he does go into a lot more and better detail than I do about this, but anyway. Symmetrical faces are really boring to look at, and lack character. So what do we do? Well, in the words of Paul Richards, "F$%# it up a little!" Adding a history adds character and weight to anything visual, and faces are no exception. I'd like to think that my design choices happened because they were naturally the right choice, but I think shit happened more at random. But, what did I do? One of the first things I decided on was to give her a bit of a lazy eye. I remembered Harley doing that cartoony thing in the animated series where they roll both of their eyes independently when they're being goofy, and I wanted to convey that somehow, and add an imperfection to give her more of the tragic clown vibe. After that, I broke the nose once or twice and added small laceration scars as mementos of her encounters with the Big Bad Bat, as well as adding a bit of droop to her other eye as more of a long-term facial tissue damage.

Here's the sculpt thus far:
Harley01.png

"Let's put a smile on that face."
So where is all this going? The end goal in mind is to create a scene in Unreal Engine 3 to expand my knowledge and practice more in using that image with a little composition, which I have made a bit of a scribble of:
ClownCarWiP.png
I'll need to tweak the poses some when I actually get to that point, but that's the general idea of what I'd like to finish out with as far as a pose. I'll likely make a simple room as well to give it some background.

That's all I have for now, if you put up with the whole thing, thank you for reading, hopefully there's some insights in here for someone or maybe at least enough information for someone to tell me I'm doing it all wrong.

Cheers!

Replies

  • Der Hollander
    I've dome some more sculpting and tweaking to the characters, and bouncing some realtime ideas around with my roommate. One of the biggest things I'll need to worry about is going to be realtime/baked cloth sim for the Joker's necktie and Harley's skirt/headdress.

    I'm still trying to go for some sort of realistic style, but I'd gotten critiques from colleagues that the silhouette needed to be a bit more dynamic for the Joker at the very least, I haven't gotten much feedback about Harley yet.

    JokerTweak.png

    HarleyWiP02.png
  • BARDLER
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    BARDLER polycounter lvl 12
    Something about her proportions feels off, but I am not sure what. I think it might be her shoulders being to small, and her arms being to skinny? Maybe? Hopefully someone with more anatomy knowledge than I can weigh in here.
  • Der Hollander
    A quick update, I adjusted the arms a bit, made them more substantial, and added seams to the clothing. I've updated to ZBrush 4R5, but I've been having issues with stability so progress has been slow.

    Harley03.png
  • Der Hollander
    Progress has been slow, but is fairly substantial. Barring any glaring issues, once I build her shoes and get a little more definition in the legs, Harley Quinn's high-poly model should be done.

    Sometimes you really just gotta do things the hard way. I'm sure there's always an easier way, but when the standard tricks like using alphas in the Surface tab with a proper UV layout fail you, you just gotta knuckle up with the plane primitive in Max and make the damn lace yourself. This took a lot longer than I would have liked, but I got the result I wanted so I figure that's the main objective anyway.

    LaceShot.png

    From a process related standpoint, I had a revelation that will bring my Joker High Poly back a step or two. This is probably old hat to experienced artists but for the sake of argument, I'll put it up anyway, maybe someone besides me can appreciate it.

    The Devil's in the Detail Normals
    It finally dawned on me how game artists were able to get such nice, clean material reads on knit clothing that I hadn't considered before. This is, of course, that forever unsung hero, the Detail Normal Map. I had seen it used in games like Battlefield: Bad Company and the like, but hadn't understood it until after I had done some material building in a game engine. Here's the polycount wiki article about detail normal maps, but I'll give the basic rundown anyway. Detail Normal maps are tilable texture maps that are generally smaller resolution than it's parent map, due to the fact that they are largely more simple textures than their larger, uniquely mapped counterparts. These maps are then overlaid on top of the uniquely mapped texture and tiled to create smaller detail that can increase the visual fidelity of the original texture.

    So let's take a look at some pictures. First we have the wrong approach. The concept is the same, but instead I've added high-frequency detail on the sculpt of the model, which will alias a bunch and basically bake out a mess, so I'll have to fix it.

    Woops.png

    I had the right idea, but I implemented it about 5 steps too early. Let's take another example where it is being used correctly.

    DetailExample.png

    As you can see, the actual base texture map for Wei's denim jacket is actually really low-res, but that's okay for looking at the model farther away. But, when the camera gets closer, instead of the jacket looking completely like a blurry mess, detail normal maps swoop in to save the day by adding the weave definition you would notice on denim up close.

    I plan to use this technique in multiple capacities when I get to the materials building stage as I will need to worry about nylon pantyhose, velvet, and possibly satin.
  • Der Hollander
    In the midst of some pretty big life changes, so not a lot done. This is the second diffuse texture pass I've done on the Joker, the first I ran into some texel density issues when trying to optimize it down to one texture sheet to which I finally said "Fuck it, we'll do it live" and as such, the head uses a 1k x 2K sheet and the body is a 2k X 4k sheet.

    WipProgress.png

    Flat shaded:
    WipProgressFLAT.png

    This is still a rough texture pass, I'm going to add in some more shaded details as well as dirt and grime to the character and some weathering.

    As far as Harley Quinn is concerned, I found an awesome picture someone did that sums up where I'm going to be headed proportion-wise with her, as I really thought something was missing. I really like the way the form is silhouetted and still has the bottom-heavy design I was trying to achieve in my initial sculpting pass.

    harleyquinn5252012_resize.jpg
  • Der Hollander
    A small update after I got done moving, new job and no Internet. I think I'm getting close to having the diffuse done, I need to get my hair alphas figured out.

    JokerBodyWiP.png

    JokerFaceWiP.png
  • garriola83
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    garriola83 greentooth
    I like your thought process and how you think about approaching the problems. But you still need to work on execution. To me, the Joker heard seems formless at the moment. Areas where it's sunken in shouldn't be and areas that needs form isn't there.
    The Harley look good. Good lace technique. I'm sure it was a pain in the ass, but it sure looks nice. Good luck!
  • Der Hollander
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean, is there any chance I could get you to expand on the critique with more specific details or a paintover?
  • LongJh
    Great stuff man. I think its really cool when artists share their thoughts and process in their works. You can always learn new things from it. And yours was a pretty fun read!

    One thing I feel is that maybe the wrinkles on Jokers' face is a bit too intense? It's making him look way old (unless that was your intention of course)

    Anyway, looking forward to your progress! Ill be keeping tabs on this for sure.
  • Der Hollander
    Took me a bit to get back on track with this project. In response to everyone's comments, I'm glad that people like to see a process written up.

    Concerning my wrinkly-ass Joker it was indeed a design choice. I wanted to have something along the lines of some accelerated aging due to the chemical bath he took that turned him into the Joker in the first place, a general lack of a regular schedule due to him staying up many nights in a row to come up with plans, and a possible drug addiction.

    In process-related news, an update on a probably now fairly antiquated form of making hair!

    "Bad Hair Day"
    I went about creating hair for the Joker by way of making a hair sim in 3DS Max and running a render. It was a good learning experience in creating something in Max that isn't some straight up modeling, and understanding different tools to use to get different effects.

    Here's a sample image to kind of describe the process a bit visually, I will go into more verbose detail below.JokerHairFlow.jpg

    I had to do quite a bit of experimentation, and eventually referred to this Autodesk guide in order to make more sense of the sliders. After I found a result I was happy with, I did a basic camera setup to make sure I got the render I wanted, selected the basic color I wanted for the hair, and rendered it out. I then placed the images in the empty space I reserved on the head UV map and created some template planes in Max, then made several copies, divided appropriately and placed them across the head. In a fit of laziness, I did use symmetry for the side of the head, but I can add a few more planes to break it up a bit. To be fair, though, adding all those planes manually is a lot of work.

    In order to check my work, I placed the hair with an alpha channel active, and was using the Nitrous viewport renderer, as it does not suffer from the same alpha sorting issues (sans specularity) that the D3D viewport does.

    Here is the fruit of my labours, rendered in the Nitrous viewport. Lighting isn't super accurate, but it gets the point across.
    JokerHair.jpg
  • Der Hollander
    Holy Moly. It's been awhile since I last updated this thread, a lot happened, and I also don't like to update things piecemeal. I will post a post-mortem later along with things I learned, and some material tricks used in the final renders, etc. But, for now, since I chose to finish it as part of a portfolio class, the Clownboat has finally sailed. The characters were posed in ZBrush due to time constraints, and rendered in UDK.

    ClownboatClose.png

    ClownboatPose01.png

    ClownboatPose02.png
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