@gfelton - Wouldn't be warhammer without some severed head trophies somewhere!! haha. Loved war online man, such a good game. @Wendy de Boer - Ah this is why nothing was happening when I was playing with the lighting stuff! Duh! Thanks for this, i'll be able to play around with adding some rimlight now for sure @Brian - Up until this point I'd say almost every subtool has been SubD modelled, imported and detailed up. The only exception so far really has been a few of the arrows which i copied from one area and pasted to another (shoulder to ankle for example) then dynamesh smashed together with other trim models. I tried making some extracted elements when i split the armor pieces into halves recently, but i preferred the look of manually sculpting them into the mesh. @Kihlstrand - Thanks dude! @stickadtroja - I both agree and disagree with you on this man. I agree that when isolated his legs are pretty flat when it comes to the silhouette and could do with breakup, but I kinda feel like that was a deliberate choice on Adrian's part. You already have all this crazy detail laid on top of the base layer of armor, especially around the legs, if you were to go in and make that base have all these extra angles going everywhere I feel like it'd become really hard to read. Especially when the cape and everything is in there too. Plus I want to stay 100% on concept with this if possible, appreciate the input though! @lotet - Totally agreed on all counts man. See below! @Leinadien - I've got a big ol' library of armor pics at home I've been referencing while I've been making this dude but obviously outright realism is taking a back seat to staying on concept. Can you clarify what looks odd to you specifically or is it just the feel as a whole? @ryebot Thanks man!! Glad you like
Also @tierzilla Sorry dude I totally forgot I said I'd do a breakdown of my process for these pieces, here you go! This is probably not the best example but this is one of the only tools I actually took the time to make a layer for each step of this process, normally I'd just do it in one go (I'm lazy). I generally store a morph of the raw subd and hit it with a scratch pass using an alpha I just grabbed off google. Then I do a noise with erosion at basically the default settings, apply it to the mesh and trim dynamic the top off anything I don't like (or morph brush to completely revert back to the smooth subd, good for removing scratches from extremely recessed areas). Extra scratches and dings are added with dam std, slash3 or orb cracks. Excuse the crappily put together pic complete with forgotten brush thumbnails! Since last post I've been working on completely finishing off the legs, pretty happy with the details and such, just need to add chainmail to his butt and crotch and touch up the spikes to finish the job. I'm tempted to maybe make the left calf's trim a little more unique as it has less spikes than the right, not sure yet. Fixed up the area @lotet mentioned on the hanging head and fixed the chalice to be a chalice! A bunch of other small stuff too i think, oh and made a new decorative skull+chain for the cape and the one hanging from his waist. Slow progress but still progress!
Mateus - I think I get what you mean and it depends on the program and the object, generally though I tend to work on pieces in their final position. If a piece is very symmetrical and I'm working in max I'll often build it off to one side, make an instance copy, position it then continue from there.
@Leinadien I had a reply typed up here but you're banned now so ;_; @mateus Glad I could answer your Q dude! @tierzilla No probs man and thanks for the pic, I've been looking for a nice high res of the game version! I am planning to retop and do a game rez version yes, after I pose up and do some renders of the sculpt. @TheWinterLord Thanks dude, appreciated!
Not had a lot of time to work on this lately, seems to be a reoccurring theme. Finished detailing out the cloth elements over the past night or two. I've been playing around with marvelous to simulate the loincloth and cape, it looks real nice and is way closer to matching the concept but the idea of trying to rig something as one off as this for the lowpoly is stupid. The loincloth I can get away with but not the cape. I'll stick with what I have now for the game rez cape so it can be rigged, but I think I will detail out the marvelous version for highpoly presentation shots. Other than that I've been doing lots of proportion and scale tweaks as well as some more accessories. Getting very close, here's some current shots! Also, hooray for taking the time to make pieces on the back of the torso that will literally never be seen! Worth.
Next up is a detail and finish pass for the weapons which I'm pretty excited to get started on
Ended up having to redo the axe because I accidentally overwrote the newer file with an older one while backing up. Skills. But that aside, I think I've finally reached the point where I'm ready to call the highpoly done! Every tool has surface detail that 99% of people won't even notice but I know it's there, lol. Looking at it as a whole now I feel like he might need some more large, unique battle damage spread across the tools, though he's very 'undamaged' in the concept. I'm undecided. I may also add some skulls just nestled in there with some rope bindings (I've been mega inspired by @crazyfool's TW:Warhammer characters), but again, i'm undecided.
Anyway, have some ridiculously big BPR's
Before I head into the lowpoly I want to pose him with transpose master for some highpoly beaut renders but right now he's sitting at 124Mil spread over 219 subtools Zbrush will save and load the ZTL ok so it's time to see if transpose master will work too, or shit it's pants.
He's so fucking sexy, holy shit! I do agree with you a bit on adding some wear in some spots, though at this point it feels unnecessary. Amazing job dude!
super awesome so far! I agree that some more unique macro damage here and there could be a nice touch.
but I also think its time to move on to the next stage. I think its unnecessary to ad a bunch of extra detail just for the sake of it. I love how accurate this is to the original design and I think you should keep it that way.
@gfelton Yeah man i feel the need for more big damage but at this point i've had to just call it, time to move on. @Poinball Thanks dude!! @lotet I agree dude, 100%. I've called it done. I may add more things (aka, more tools, im thinking skulls on the pelt) but i'm not touching what I have any more. @amirabd2130 Thanks @Ootrick Total including the weapons is like 150mil, probably 250-270 total subtools? Most of em are spread across 4-5 ZTL's, but i combined them up for those last renders. Zbrush wasn't happy lol
So, posing this guy with transpose master proved WAY harder than I thought. I ran out of ram in like 10 seconds flat, hiding and unhiding polygroups just eats it up. I think if i had 64Gb or something I could pose him up for some tasty renders but I'm learning a hard lesson here that if you want a posed highpoly, you should pose it early. I may go in and attempt to lower the base level polygon counts of all the subtools and try again (200+ subtools ) , but for right now I'm moving on to the lowpoly.
Some quick and dirty bake tests, because the post isn't complete without pics.
First of all, great work modelling all that. It's a super impressive show of skill, and all the little parts look great on their own.
It might just be me, but as a whole it gives me detail overload. My eye feels like there's nowhere to rest. Too much detail and information for me to take in. Maybe that will be remedied while texturing, but as it is now, all one solid color, it's not super aesthetically pleasing. But then, I don't care for Warhammer's aesthetic in general, so maybe it's just not for me?
I'm curious about how other people feel, with regards to all the detail.
Warhammer is a maximalist universe, and I think the model fits perfectly into it. It's all about excessive detail. Plus I think the colours will really help break it up.
the detail overload really is a warhammer thing :P
as for posing the highpoly, it really is a mess when you get to many subtools. What I could recommend, if you still want to pose the highpoly, is decimated it, run UV master. then pose the lowpoly version, bake out a hightmap and then reproject the detail.
but its a lot of extra work that could e spent on a proper lowpoly.
@Joopson You don't need to sugarcoat it dude haha! Honestly i'm in total agreement, he's super noisy right now. Esp with just the flat grey it's a bit much to look at. I'm hoping textures will bring back a lot of readability, the concept is still really busy but at the same time it's a lot more pleasing to look at.
@lotet Nice idea dude, could be worth a try! I think a decimated mesh might be even more of a bitch to pose than what i currently have though. The problem i'm running into is ram. Too many subtools, too many polygons. Even after manually ZRemeshing every tool so it's base level is never more than 5k or so, it still brutalises my RAM when i hit the transpose master and start hiding and unhiding polygroups. My options are limited, but i can push the lowest level of the subtools even lower (there's room for that) and only pose little bits at a time. I think it's totally possible and i want to do it, but it might be a thing i do at the end now as opposed to before the lowpoly.
Speaking of which, i have some lowpoly progress! Intricate = time consuming, who would have guessed. I'm doing a lot of this stuff on stream now to reduce the monotony and it definitely keeps it more interesting, but fuck if my voice isn't used to so much yappin'!
Looking nice, and also like a living hell retopping all that.
you can probably dynamesh a lot of stuff together though, like spikes n stuff dosnt have to be its own mesh. but I dunno, honestly its probably better to just finish the lowpoly. you can always bake a highmap for the real lowpoly too.
@lotet re:decimating - thanks for the advice in the stream tonight dude! Decimating some of the more fleshy but non-moving adornments definitely seems like the faster and more time efficient way to go
Here's a quick snap of the retopo as it stands after a week or so of evenings, I've been UVing everything as i go too so there' not too much left to do now. Finally on the home stretch, looking forward to getting into the texturing!
Looks awesome! How will you be doing the fur mantle? From the sculpt shots I'm guessing a butt load of hair cards, which would be another type of hell.
@TomGT Probably hair cards yeah, though i saw a really sweet method on artstation a few weeks back that i'm eager to try out. Will definitely keep the thread updated with progress on that front! @Bolovorix Yeah it's been a struggle man, no lies there, but rewarding to see it all come together at the end for sure! Bakes should be real soon, working on UV's atm @gfelton,@SveinY thanks bros! @lotet yeah thanks for the input dude! I did have to do a bunch of cleanup work on the decitopo meshes (as i've affectionately named them) it made lots of really dirty thin tris that ruined the shading even when normalmapped, but i'd say it probably took a little less time and effort than manually retopoing so, success? Also yeah for sure here's a pic with wireframe, totally forgot to show it! When everything is properly symmetried he's sitting at around 82k tris, with the cape, pelt and some more accessory stuff still to go. It could be way, way lower in places but i really want the details hold up to some extreme closeup/highrez action.
Looking good! cant wait too see how it holds up with normals and AO.
80K tris isnt that much really. I do think your gonna get a lot of nice detail in there though, it can most likely hold up pretty well even for closeups.
Hey man, that polycount is fine... i mean, sure there's a lot that could be saved on some of the little greebles, the skulls and heads and such, but i mean... there are reports of ps4 characters hitting 200k so... /care?
thanks @lotet. Dude, I'm so excited to bake and get a swatch of him in marmo3. Chomping at the bit to start texturing @almighty_gir Yeah man that's what I'm thinking, like, budgets these days? What are those? I could definitely pull a few thousand from non silhouette bearing areas but even if i did that's what, around 5% total reduction? Plus this guy would be a super hero char, literally twice the size of a normal human, so I feel it's kinda warranted. If i'm honest I'm more bothered that I had to use 5 texture sets to get the resolution clarity i wanted with 2k maps, but that means 4k will be....
I don't wanna post without updates so here's a snap of the UVs for anyone interested. I've made the cloth slightly lower texel density than the rest because it's just so large, it would take 2 maps alone at the same rez as the body. To save space and scale everything up a bit I thought about doubling up the uv's for the main chunk of the inside of the pelt (because it's almost impossible to see) and hiding the seam to the bear paws with alpha cards... But the way i have it now has left me with loads of space in the cloth map for hair cards which is needed, so that neatly puts all alpha on the same map. There's a small space left over in one of the sets, with a few other little areas in others, so i might end up making a few more accessories to fit in there if i can be bothered! Baking tonight!!! I'm super hype.
@lotet it's in public beta now man! go GRAB!! https://www.facebook.com/groups/ToolbagUserGroup/ and nah no stream tonight, hitting some focus mode. Will likely stream tomorrow once i have a workflow down for marmo baking
UV's look sexy, I guess I'm just weird but seeing a perfectly packed neat UV tile is so satisfying. Can't wait to see the bakes, hope the normals don't give you too much trouble!
@lotet it's in public beta now man! go GRAB!! https://www.facebook.com/groups/ToolbagUserGroup/ and nah no stream tonight, hitting some focus mode. Will likely stream tomorrow once i have a workflow down for marmo baking
had no idea, thanks for the heads up! didnt know marmoset 3 had a baker now, crazy!
@gfelton, thanks man! @lotet, get on it dude!! its pretty slick
Makin progress. Bakes are.... i'd say 95% done. I'll post some closeups tomorrow, it's 2am here. Gotta try and get *some* sleep. Almost ready for substance...
Bake looks solid as f*k. are you planning on trying out the material baker? personally I found that almost more interesting then the classic normal map baker.
@almighty_gir Dude, marmo3, SO smooth. Much love @lotet I didn't try out the material baker. I'm hitting up substance so there's no need really if i'm thinking what you're thinking. I pre-prepped vertex colours in zbrush with a swatch (so my substance experience is as smooth as possible) and used the albedo baker to capture those colours, just made sure to throw a material with the albedo set to vert colours on all the highpoly pieces. Job done!
I'm having way too much fun with marmo3 haha! Model's all set up for substance now but i'm too busy playing
Happy birthday and holy shit, this looks soooo goooood! I do think the metal could use a bit less metalness/specular, it feels maybe too shiny in comparison to some concepts.
Yeah @gfelton i agree. There's a dissonance between what marmo3 and substance painter think when it comes to the roughness values. Objects often come out super shiny in marmo compared to how they appear in painter where they often look very dull. Needs some more tweaking for sure. Good shout!
Yess looks so good! If I had any crit maybe you could vary up the saturation&hue of the yellows on the gold, have some areas more eroded and greenish/discoloured.
Hope u had a good birthday and all that stuff! as for the model its looking really cool, have to agree with @future-fiction though, its looking very saturated, and the gold parts are looking a bit plasticy at the moment.
but i assume this is more of a first pass then final textures
Replies
@gfelton - Wouldn't be warhammer without some severed head trophies somewhere!! haha. Loved war online man, such a good game.
@Wendy de Boer - Ah this is why nothing was happening when I was playing with the lighting stuff! Duh! Thanks for this, i'll be able to play around with adding some rimlight now for sure
@Brian - Up until this point I'd say almost every subtool has been SubD modelled, imported and detailed up. The only exception so far really has been a few of the arrows which i copied from one area and pasted to another (shoulder to ankle for example) then dynamesh smashed together with other trim models. I tried making some extracted elements when i split the armor pieces into halves recently, but i preferred the look of manually sculpting them into the mesh.
@Kihlstrand - Thanks dude!
@stickadtroja - I both agree and disagree with you on this man. I agree that when isolated his legs are pretty flat when it comes to the silhouette and could do with breakup, but I kinda feel like that was a deliberate choice on Adrian's part. You already have all this crazy detail laid on top of the base layer of armor, especially around the legs, if you were to go in and make that base have all these extra angles going everywhere I feel like it'd become really hard to read. Especially when the cape and everything is in there too. Plus I want to stay 100% on concept with this if possible, appreciate the input though!
@lotet - Totally agreed on all counts man. See below!
@Leinadien - I've got a big ol' library of armor pics at home I've been referencing while I've been making this dude but obviously outright realism is taking a back seat to staying on concept. Can you clarify what looks odd to you specifically or is it just the feel as a whole?
@ryebot Thanks man!! Glad you like
Also @tierzilla Sorry dude I totally forgot I said I'd do a breakdown of my process for these pieces, here you go! This is probably not the best example but this is one of the only tools I actually took the time to make a layer for each step of this process, normally I'd just do it in one go (I'm lazy). I generally store a morph of the raw subd and hit it with a scratch pass using an alpha I just grabbed off google. Then I do a noise with erosion at basically the default settings, apply it to the mesh and trim dynamic the top off anything I don't like (or morph brush to completely revert back to the smooth subd, good for removing scratches from extremely recessed areas). Extra scratches and dings are added with dam std, slash3 or orb cracks. Excuse the crappily put together pic complete with forgotten brush thumbnails!
Since last post I've been working on completely finishing off the legs, pretty happy with the details and such, just need to add chainmail to his butt and crotch and touch up the spikes to finish the job. I'm tempted to maybe make the left calf's trim a little more unique as it has less spikes than the right, not sure yet. Fixed up the area @lotet mentioned on the hanging head and fixed the chalice to be a chalice! A bunch of other small stuff too i think, oh and made a new decorative skull+chain for the cape and the one hanging from his waist. Slow progress but still progress!
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/36/a4/c3/36a4c32196afe2089b3108e99d4876db.jpg
i believe the ragged clothes add so much character and btw are you planning to retopo ?
keep em coming!
also i found this online , might help
@mateus Glad I could answer your Q dude!
@tierzilla No probs man and thanks for the pic, I've been looking for a nice high res of the game version! I am planning to retop and do a game rez version yes, after I pose up and do some renders of the sculpt.
@TheWinterLord Thanks dude, appreciated!
Not had a lot of time to work on this lately, seems to be a reoccurring theme. Finished detailing out the cloth elements over the past night or two. I've been playing around with marvelous to simulate the loincloth and cape, it looks real nice and is way closer to matching the concept but the idea of trying to rig something as one off as this for the lowpoly is stupid. The loincloth I can get away with but not the cape. I'll stick with what I have now for the game rez cape so it can be rigged, but I think I will detail out the marvelous version for highpoly presentation shots. Other than that I've been doing lots of proportion and scale tweaks as well as some more accessories. Getting very close, here's some current shots!
Next up is a detail and finish pass for the weapons which I'm pretty excited to get started on
Some updates from the past few days. Been playing with the BPR and lighting a little for these too, trying to find something I like
Anyway, have some ridiculously big BPR's
Before I head into the lowpoly I want to pose him with transpose master for some highpoly beaut renders but right now he's sitting at 124Mil spread over 219 subtools
but I also think its time to move on to the next stage. I think its unnecessary to ad a bunch of extra detail just for the sake of it. I love how accurate this is to the original design and I think you should keep it that way.
How many do you average per subtool?
@Poinball Thanks dude!!
@lotet I agree dude, 100%. I've called it done. I may add more things (aka, more tools, im thinking skulls on the pelt) but i'm not touching what I have any more.
@amirabd2130 Thanks
@Ootrick Total including the weapons is like 150mil, probably 250-270 total subtools? Most of em are spread across 4-5 ZTL's, but i combined them up for those last renders. Zbrush wasn't happy lol
So, posing this guy with transpose master proved WAY harder than I thought. I ran out of ram in like 10 seconds flat, hiding and unhiding polygroups just eats it up. I think if i had 64Gb or something I could pose him up for some tasty renders but I'm learning a hard lesson here that if you want a posed highpoly, you should pose it early. I may go in and attempt to lower the base level polygon counts of all the subtools and try again (200+ subtools
Some quick and dirty bake tests, because the post isn't complete without pics.
It might just be me, but as a whole it gives me detail overload. My eye feels like there's nowhere to rest. Too much detail and information for me to take in. Maybe that will be remedied while texturing, but as it is now, all one solid color, it's not super aesthetically pleasing. But then, I don't care for Warhammer's aesthetic in general, so maybe it's just not for me?
I'm curious about how other people feel, with regards to all the detail.
as for posing the highpoly, it really is a mess when you get to many subtools.
What I could recommend, if you still want to pose the highpoly, is decimated it, run UV master. then pose the lowpoly version, bake out a hightmap and then reproject the detail.
but its a lot of extra work that could e spent on a proper lowpoly.
@Docm30 I hope so man!
@lotet Nice idea dude, could be worth a try! I think a decimated mesh might be even more of a bitch to pose than what i currently have though. The problem i'm running into is ram. Too many subtools, too many polygons. Even after manually ZRemeshing every tool so it's base level is never more than 5k or so, it still brutalises my RAM when i hit the transpose master and start hiding and unhiding polygroups. My options are limited, but i can push the lowest level of the subtools even lower (there's room for that) and only pose little bits at a time. I think it's totally possible and i want to do it, but it might be a thing i do at the end now as opposed to before the lowpoly.
Speaking of which, i have some lowpoly progress! Intricate = time consuming, who would have guessed. I'm doing a lot of this stuff on stream now to reduce the monotony and it definitely keeps it more interesting, but fuck if my voice isn't used to so much yappin'!
you can probably dynamesh a lot of stuff together though, like spikes n stuff dosnt have to be its own mesh. but I dunno, honestly its probably better to just finish the lowpoly. you can always bake a highmap for the real lowpoly too.
Here's a quick snap of the retopo as it stands after a week or so of evenings, I've been UVing everything as i go too so there' not too much left to do now. Finally on the home stretch, looking forward to getting into the texturing!
Can't wait for the finish.
also, you should post some wires too, so we can actually see all your topology work.
@Bolovorix Yeah it's been a struggle man, no lies there, but rewarding to see it all come together at the end for sure! Bakes should be real soon, working on UV's atm
@gfelton,@SveinY thanks bros!
@lotet yeah thanks for the input dude! I did have to do a bunch of cleanup work on the decitopo meshes (as i've affectionately named them) it made lots of really dirty thin tris that ruined the shading even when normalmapped, but i'd say it probably took a little less time and effort than manually retopoing so, success? Also yeah for sure here's a pic with wireframe, totally forgot to show it! When everything is properly symmetried he's sitting at around 82k tris, with the cape, pelt and some more accessory stuff still to go. It could be way, way lower in places but i really want the details hold up to some extreme closeup/highrez action.
80K tris isnt that much really. I do think your gonna get a lot of nice detail in there though, it can most likely hold up pretty well even for closeups.
@almighty_gir Yeah man that's what I'm thinking, like, budgets these days? What are those? I could definitely pull a few thousand from non silhouette bearing areas but even if i did that's what, around 5% total reduction? Plus this guy would be a super hero char, literally twice the size of a normal human, so I feel it's kinda warranted. If i'm honest I'm more bothered that I had to use 5 texture sets to get the resolution clarity i wanted with 2k maps, but that means 4k will be....
I don't wanna post without updates so here's a snap of the UVs for anyone interested. I've made the cloth slightly lower texel density than the rest because it's just so large, it would take 2 maps alone at the same rez as the body. To save space and scale everything up a bit I thought about doubling up the uv's for the main chunk of the inside of the pelt (because it's almost impossible to see) and hiding the seam to the bear paws with alpha cards... But the way i have it now has left me with loads of space in the cloth map for hair cards which is needed, so that neatly puts all alpha on the same map.
anyways, Looking good as always
will you be streaming tonight?
didnt know marmoset 3 had a baker now, crazy!
@lotet, get on it dude!! its pretty slick
Makin progress. Bakes are.... i'd say 95% done. I'll post some closeups tomorrow, it's 2am here. Gotta try and get *some* sleep.
are you planning on trying out the material baker?
personally I found that almost more interesting then the classic normal map baker.
@lotet I didn't try out the material baker. I'm hitting up substance so there's no need really if i'm thinking what you're thinking. I pre-prepped vertex colours in zbrush with a swatch (so my substance experience is as smooth as possible) and used the albedo baker to capture those colours, just made sure to throw a material with the albedo set to vert colours on all the highpoly pieces. Job done!
I'm having way too much fun with marmo3 haha! Model's all set up for substance now but i'm too busy playing
Quick update, been on holiday for a while for my birthday. Spent the last few days texturing (and playing DS3 DLC!) Far from done but making progress!
Happy Birthday!
This looks awesome man.
but i assume this is more of a first pass then final textures