[FINISHED] Eduardo Garcia's H3R Gog
quad damage
Hey guys! Guess what? It's me again.
With my Leona character being in the most capable hands of my animator friend, I've decided to finish the project I did take up last year. Some of you may have seen it a few months back. This is a character designed by Eduardo Garcia in his HoMM3 redesign series.
What I'll try to do in this thread is describe my work process in more detail, with hope that it will be useful for any artist that is still learning the ropes.
If you have a question about something I might have forgotten to mention, please don't hesitate to ask, I will try my best to answer.
Since the last time I worked on this fella I've done the retopology and bakes. Game res turned out a whopping 39k with separate mesh hair strands, horn wraps and overall high density. But that's okay. Since he's going to be diffuse only, It'll be pretty easy to optimize the mesh later, keeping essential silhouette details and animation-friendly loops.
Retopology was very much straightforward. I didn't set any poly budget for myself, mostly working towards animation-friendly loops and trying not to lose any silhouette details. I did the retopology in Maya, as it's pretty much the same as everywhere else. You put dots on the highres mesh and connect them
Just feels easier to do everything in one program.Then I exploded the retoped and unwrapped model and baked Normal map and IDs in Maya and then used Knald to get AO and Cavity maps
On a side note, I cannot recommend Maya baking feature enough! It is extremely precise, allows for baking both Surface and Geometry normals, which essentially eliminates the need for the baking cage in general!
Explode thy bakes
What I did afterwards is toss everything into Substance painter. Since at my day job I work mostly with realistic PBR pipeline, I've gotten pretty accustomed to using Substance painter masks and generators for creating pretty detailed base textures for hand-painted assets. It may be a personal preference of mine, but i've always found it easier to start working from 'something' rather than a blank canvas.
There is not a single brush stroke here. Everything is procedural or baked.
Naturaly, at first this method will take a long time. But I've been actively using Substance painter for a couple years now, and base texture like above takes not more than 4-5 hours at most. And of course, this is really only a vague idea of what your final texture will look like, 90% of the information will be painted over.
As you can see below, Substance painter layer structure is not very heavy, but still relatively extensive. This is a very basic texture so working with basic smart mask presets and editing them to your liking usually gets the job done. (If all of this is not making a lot of sense to you and you feel like Substance Painter is what you've been needing to get familiar with, you're not wrong. It's an immensely powerful tool and pretty much an industry standard nowadays. Look around on the internet, there's plenty of lessons on youtube).
What I'm aiming here for is mostly color variation and establishing basic readability of the shapes.
Same as with the usual painting techniques, I try to use not only different values, but also different colors, to be able to create somewhat vibrant variety and not have my texture look 'dirty'. If you look at the Skin folder, you can see that I went pretty ham with the color choices, but used opacity settings and blending mode to not let them overpower main color.
What is left is to start actually painting.
And that is where I'm at right now. Basically just started.
I've decided to change the visual style just a little bit. A little less Beksinski and a little more Tyson Murphy.
Thanks for dropping by and stay tuned! •ᴗ•
Replies
Trying to get some fake transparency effect into skin by painting very faint blood vessels. I've settled on the dark purple color to compliment the parchment-colored skin and add to that sickly look. Pretty okay with the arm muscle structure, definitely need to work more on the triceps and bottom of the forearm texture. Work out the tone gradient and texture details.
Also started working in some small designs into larger wraps. You can see them on the original concept. But since Im altering the style a bit, same happens for these markings. They are a little more blocky and more visibly defined. These two are just a tryout on a separate layer, Im currently tryng to figure out a good way to add some 3d feel to them without it being too sharp and noisy.
A super minor critique regarding the pop of the gold metal parts: right now they don't feel like they're standing out as much against the greens and browns, and could maybe benefit from a push of contrasting dark values (if that makes sense?). It might too soon to mention and could totally change based on the lighting setup later on.
Either way it's looking great so far so I can't wait to see how he progresses. Good luck moving forward!
Thank you guys! Actually, previous WIP only had arms and wraps painted. The rest was procedural base material made in Substance Painter.
Long overdue update.
This time it's arms, hands and whole upper torso
So that leaves wings, mask, legs and horns left to paint.
*edit* I noticed that the gold material was already mentioned so sorry for if I sounded like a broken record. Will leave this up anyways.
@murraymints
Thanks, Murray. It's totally cool, man. The gold mask is a placeholder material made in Substance painter. As well as the shawl and the rest of the upper body. I'll be slowly chipping away at the basic texture as im painting over it.
Update time!
I doubled back a little and tried a part of workflow explained in the article by the awesome Volodya Liubchuk
Worked on the model's silhouette and readability. Also painted some more!
Stay tuned!
@WadeWT Thanks man. I'll do another mesh adjustment pass once I'm done with painting.
Tweaked the shape of the wings and the horns. Added the 'pedestal'. Yey!
I used procedural textures as a base for hand-painting. I've set up the general color scheme, some minor surface detailing and overall vertical gradient using Substance painter.
I've ended up painting over most of it, so the end result is all painted. It's not the most optimal pipeline but im still experimenting with what could be done faster when it comes to hand-painting.
Apocrs1980, Piemaster
Thank you guys