Character Art : Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag
Hey! here's the work I did on AC IV : Black Flag
More stuff on my website : http://mathieugoulet.tumblr.com
More stuff on my website : http://mathieugoulet.tumblr.com
Replies
Really dig that Kenway armor.
Thansk
Really inspiring work ! Finished the game over the holidays
Any chance you could share some more images ? I would love to see a shot of the high poly of the mayan Armour.
Could you tell me some more about the workflow for the costumes?
Do you use software like Marvelous Designer for the cloth,or sculpt everything by hand ?
And how do you achieve the really nice stitching on all of the costumes ?
All these cool images make me want to boot up the game again, and run around in that mayan armour :poly124:
For the stiches, I painted them in Photoshop and then put a tiled fabric normal map overlayed on top of the existing normal map, only where the stiches appear, don't know if it's clear haha!
Also the number of tris is around 12k per character, excluding the head and hair.
I used Marvelous for complicated pieces like blackbead's red belt, but most of the characters are sculpted.
Yeah, breakdowns, texture sheets and all that would be a dream, if you can make that happen i'll be the happiest girl in Springfield.
One thing that's always bugged me in black flag tho is the way alphas display for the hair.
The art is awesome tho
Really enjoying the sculpts images of the mayan armour, very educational.
It looks like you sculpted all the cloth pieces on that one, am I correct ?
Do you use any special brushes or workflows to get the cloth so nice ?
Also do you do any special treatment on your marvelous created cloth to make it work with sculpted pieces ?
Seeing you do a lot of the fine embroidery in 2D I can imagine that the sculpts for both Torres and Blackbeards costumes are quite clean.
Again super inspiring work !
And for Marvelous, I import it straight into zbrush, extract it to give some thickness, which also gives me polygroup for the extracted thickness, and then sculpt on it, even if the topology is crap, it gives nice organic look in the end.
BARDLER, I drew them in photoshop, and applyed a layer fx, and then transfered them in normal map and spec.
Do you think all the other character artist on AC4 will post their work online also ? Creating an art-dump similar to the ones done for AC 2 and brotherhood ?
Super inspiring, I'm trying to study the AC cloth techniques and those images are your explanations are really helpful.
You just made my day ! Great Art !
You did most of the important characters/ costumes, awesome.
Could you explain a bit more about your cloth techniques ?
What you do with Marvelous Designer, and what with traditional sculpting.
I can inmagine shapes like the assassins hood being sculpted.
Could you talk a bit about your workflow, do you work from low sub-division levels up when sculpting cloth?
Or going in with a clay brush directly on a very high level ? What types of brushes do you use ?
Could you show a higher-res render of the Walpole sculpt render ? That's my favourite costume in the game !
Great work !
Arno
Up on the wiki it goes:
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryReferenceGameArt#Assasins_Creed_4:_Black_Flag_.282013.29
cheers
About sculpting cloth. I don't use Marvelous Designer if I don't have too. I'm using it on the stuff I'm working on atm but it's because I was asked to do it so we can share patterns... so I do a base and start with that though at the end it doesnt look anything like it. Not that Marvelous is bad... I've seen some amazing stuff with it but I prefer to have control over my lines, flow and silhouette (that plus I rage/quitted way to often with Marvelous >.<)
My first (and reallllly important) step, is to create a base mesh that will subdivide well. Along with that, I carefully create edge that will follow the seams of the clothing. I do that for 2 reasons. 1st, I cant make subgroup of the different piece of fabric and easily mask some parts to do some nice seam lines. 2nd, having an edge that follow the seams allows me to create a crisp seam without cranking the geometry too high. When you try to sculpt a thin, sharp line that doesn't follow the topology you can end up having jagged lines. You can always crank the resolution but considering some ztool can get heavy quickly, I tend to avoid that.
For the sculpting itself, I use clay brushes (building or tubes) for a really rough sculpt. Play with the rhythm of the folds (use refs!), go heavy handed. When the shapes are there I refine with standard brush and a modified version of Standard brush. The modified version is simply a sharper alpha (don't remember which one) and the Brush Modifier crank at around 70 to get some pinching effect. I use it to draw folds that crease more than they fold. Inflate and DamStandard here and there.
Also I never do fabric details/texture in zbrush because it creates alot of unwanted noise in the baking that is really hard to clean after. You're never sure how compression is gonna behave on fine detail so I keep that kind of detail in Photoshop.
I would recommand 2 tutorial for sculpting clothing.
Mainly the first part of this one, observation.
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/products/tutorials/rsm02/
And oddly enough, this one. It's about wrinkles but clothing is like loose skin. It slides, bend and folds following the masses underneath it. Again, the first part, observation, is key.
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/891/Sculpting-Wrinkles-in-ZBrush#.UusIevldV8E
And yeah trebor777, alot of necklace >.<
Here's a bunch of other images:
Thanks for all the great advice. I am definitely going to watch out those tutorials again. And apply those cloth techniques you mentioned on my current project.
I hope you dont mind me asking again, But could you show a higher-res render of the Walpole sculpt render ? I find looking at 3D scans of fabric or really good 3D models can often be better reference material than actual pictures.
+That's my favourite costume in the game
All those heads look pretty damn sweet as well.
Cheers,
Arno
These are some amazing art, I really liked your models, texture. These have inspired me thoroughly.
Would you mind if I ask some question on the texture process?
1) what maps do you bake and what software do you use for making the diffuse map
2) how you treat those bakes (I mean blending mode, opacity and what is the order of placement of the baked maps)
3) I case of details do you try to make embroidery pattern and surface details of cloth by ndo2 or using zbrush
4) Any tips or suggestion for making the cloth texture details (decals, dirts etc)
I hope you find some time to answer these questions and I thank you in advance for your support. Wish you good luck and looking forward to see many more amazing art from you.
Cheers,
Kaushik Saha