All started as a dream - WIP sculpts

skodone

Hey guys

finally i made it back here, just before i finished with the high
poly sculpts.

I started a new project and aimed big.
Its a girl riding on a squirrel :P
-- thread title: the characters are from a dream
Girl misses hair and cape, squirrel misses fur elements

Next steps would be
- watch out for critique of you guys and correct highpolies
- build stand because figure will be prosed and printed since i have the chance
- make lowpoly of the tpose meshes
- paint them in 3dCoat
- rig them in maya
- animate them in maya
- learn and bring them to ue4

thanks in advance








size

skodone

got around playing with tpose master today

mesh needs more cleanup still but i posed the squirrel and played with some color



next girl and then basesculpt

skodone

so wow...
i still have no clue how you guys are so fast doing retopo... this took me ages





so this is the squirrel without assets

would love some feedback on the topology

now assets... cant wait for first testbake O.O

Maxilator

If you are having problem retopologizing I would recommend Topogun, you can pretty much retopologize stuff in two hours if its not very complex, I heard that the new Maya tools are pretty good as well but I haven't tried them myself.

skodone

im using 3dcoat and its also super nice, thing is this is my second retopo so i have like no real experience in it and am very slow :P

skodone

yeah!

baking finished for normals and AO




crappy maya 2.0 render ftw

skodone

todays update
started painting the first model and wow... its so hard
painting on the uvs is way harder than polypainting in zBrush oO

skodone

so i spent the whole day on trying out hundreds of ways to do fur -.-
i think i finally came up with a method i like.
kept the fur on a separate layer too so i will add more depht in ps later

Tetranome

That cloth scarf is fantastic.

skodone

thank you

skodone

more painting progress
getting somewhere

skodone

more progess
im eager how all will look combined already!

skodone

yey! paint is done!
so next will be the hair cards, improving the hair everywhere and aniso, spec, gloss maps

skodone

today i did some hair card placement
and made a new map for the hair only

tomorrow hopefully i will try out some texture for the hair

skodone

first really quick try on the hairs. brush will work but i have to tune the card placing a lot and make the hair cards far more fuzzy and undefined to match the squirreltailfurlook :P
but im happy i managed to get the strains nice in 3 color gradient. also i will add more variation since my first try didnt work out and this was just a 2nd fast attempt.



the char will be mainly visible from top behind, meaning the specator is looking exactly into the card gaps... have to figure out how to preserve the grow direction of the hair and the viewer see the fur nicely. maybe i should place them more like a crosshatching

pixelpatron

skodone wrote: »

todays update
started painting the first model and wow... its so hard
painting on the uvs is way harder than polypainting in zBrush oO

If you have 3-d coat why are you not justing using your polypaint to bake your your low poly diffuse?

skodone

im painting in 3d coat and its quite like polypainting but in 3d coat you paint on the lowpoly, therefor on the uvs. its a bit different to zBrush, because of the masking method of 3d Coat.

i wanted to hand paint the texture and thats why i didnt use any zBrush polypaint. also i feel like i have more brush control in 3d Coat since i can use any photoshop brush and adjust the settings as in photoshop which i think zBrush cannot do so well.

skodone

more hair work



did complete new hair placement with cross hatched cards and got some
nice results, then re painted the fur the way i would actually like it to be and
the way its on my ref. now placement needs more tuning again and looks like i need more cards.

skodone

bad hair day 3


new clumps, new cards, now with 2faces (and double the tris tricount looks not so cool now any more 21k) but this works better from the back view

skodone

done by now
tomorrow retop of 2nd char!

skodone

so last few days i spent retopping and uving the girl
still got some baking errors i have to deal with but times out for today

bkost

Hey Skodone, great work so far

The polypaint on the squirrel is great, the one thing that sticks out to me is the tail on the squirrel. It's not too poofy as I would imagine




I'm excited to see the textured girl

skodone

i struggled so hard on that tail... but i will try to maybe scale up the planes a bit more... dont want to lose another day on a 5th hair pass

Docm30

It looks like the green channel on the woman's normal map needs to be inverted.

skodone

thanks a lot docm... every program inverting the channel again and suddenly its been inverted so often its wrong again :P

fixed that and finished baking... started painting but nothing to show yet

skodone

some minor painting
worked on shirt and one hand


ughh what ugly compression

skodone

more!

codyaq2

Whats this for?

skodone

will bring to ue4 as it says on my first post

skodone

finished 2nd bachelors thesis and finally can concentrate on this for a week now again




finished painting the girl!
also added a gradient map to the squirrel and made the fur longer

next ill have to add spec and gloss map to the girl and gloss map for the squirrel

then rigging!

oh i forgot... hair again :D:D

skodone

started with the hair today



pitily maya crashed when i tried to transfer the normals...
so this is just super basic, colormap just temp and as said lost all the tweaks to the planes... but will continue tomorrow!

skodone

thank god for procedural rigs!!! saved me days of work still weight painting... arghhh such a pain. but its coming along!

skodone

so its done...
i made a base too and posed the char!



also digged myself into renderman to get some better rendering result... still have to tweak the renderman settings more and gloss and spec bother me here and there...
buhuut its progressing and ill enter it to a contest so all good

codyaq2

Pretty sweet, thought about rendering it in marmoset??

skodone

more renders! i rly have to get used to the linear workflow... makes postproduction hard for me need to dig deeper with renderman but i feel like it can be super nice!

turntable:
https://vimeo.com/133809381


yeah it would be awesome to render it in marmoset, but i have to buy it first since my
trial already expired... for now i have to go with the resources i have

thanks!

skodone

so i figured out my trial was renewed so... marmoset here we come:)

hmm marmoset viewer doesnt yet seem supported..

heres the link!
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/squirrel-rider

skodone

so i reworked all the materials today to better fit with the pbr workflow since there were a lot of things that bugged me out



and the updated marmoset viewer
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/squirrel-rider

feel free to critic and comment

OctoKube

hey I really like the fur on the tail of the animal, the grass as well. I would fix the rock ( there are plenty f plp doing rocks on this sit for reference) and add more roots to the bottom of your composition.

skodone

thanks will look into that

yeah those were my first rocks and also rushed ones as one can easily spot...

skodone

new rocks, more roots





new Marmoset Viewer on Artstation
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/squirrel-rider

PrecisionClear

Really cool to see how you handled the fur and bushy tail. I'm trying to an animal and was wondering about how it would all come together.

Especially motivating to see other artists comment on something like, "it took me all day!" As after having to do something for the 5th time, I start wondering, "maybe my destiny is working at mcdonalds instead?" ;3

skodone

i think especially in sculpting and 3d its super important to re and re and revisit the own stuff until it really feels right... since one can see every tiny corner of the sculpts the artist has to look at things from so many different angles and this can get really demotivating or challenging... but if you get used to not be satisfied and let it be your fuel... then great things happen

skodone

https://vimeo.com/135201083

animation!!!!

i decided to enter a contest with the piece so this is how far i got with it..
its not flawless and maya has some isues with the weights as always -.- (see cripple hands)

buut all this will be gone in ue4 since the problems only occured in maya so far!

now off to vacation... 2weeks without 3d... luckily i can sketch some stuff fot eh ue4 envi !!

skodone

got the first concepts for the island map




next i will try to do specific on scenery paintings of the POIs and exactly define what and how the pois will look like

skodone

finished the first part of the island (conceptwise)



some more to come!

ladnscapes are hard havent done that much in this particular area ever

skodone

so long time no update here i know

but ive been trying to learn ue4 and also did some more concept art
as it seems the concepts are not really catching my attention so much and i tend to
start them and cannot bring up enough motivation to finish i went on to ue4

the more i read about ue4 the more i knew it would be rather stupid to just start with the island sooooo im gonna do octobers noob challenge instead and focus on polishing a small scene rather than going for the big shot which would result in well probably a big mess and not work out haha