Antique Iron: Sculpting and PBR study

atomander

Hi folks, I'm trying to tackle a subject that has always been a personal weakness: sculpting. I figured I would try to do study of an antique, something with a mix of organic shapes and hard surface detail, and get some nicely-defined PBR materials.

Here is my ref pic:


And here is my progress so far:



I've been using the Galen Davis "Intro to zBrush" tutorials on 3Dmotive to get the model prepped so far.

I'm looking for any advice or to catch any terrible mistakes I may have inadvertently done already. Thanks!

atomander

Sculpting Update: Hoping to call the high poly done and move on to baking and texturing. Most of my work so far has been low-poly hand-painting, so this is a bit of a different beast! Any C&C is super appreciated.

jhoythottle

Good start. I love the idea of this project and the concept is very cool. I think the 2 gear shapes should be interlocked more. and the goat's snout is much skinnier on the concept. The wide nose on yours makes it look more cow-like from the front. I'll be interested to see how this turns out!

Olli.

you have like a very big long gear in the body but in the ref it looks more like an accordion shape (not sure what the real word for it is).. Im guess its some sort of mechanism to pump hot air/steam out of the iron?

atomander

Thanks folks! Ill do some touch ups before baking. I thought that thing at the bottom might be some sort of hand-cranked wringing device. Does look like there might be 2 of them?

Steve Schulze

It'd be a setup like this one

You'd probably want the corners of the gears on the fluter to be rounded so it didn't wear on the clothes too much.

atomander

Ah, good find! Fixing those up.

These might be obvious questions, but I've been running into a few issues with my bake (high polys in zBrush, low polys in Blender, baking in xNormal).

First off, areas that I'm mirroring the normal map, I'm getting a seam in the middle:



Baked it with the mirrored uv moved to the right of the 0,1 space.

Second, I'm getting some strange normal distortion on the caps of the fluter. I tried adding in a support ring around the edge, but its still looking a little gnarly. Any advice?



Appreciating all the help so far!