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Natalia's Art corner

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Cersei_Lannister ngon master
Decided to edit this thread in order to showcase all the projects I start or complete in here!

As always, critique and feedback is welcome! 


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This is a project I started six months ago and had been lying around my drive since then! I finally managed to finish it, working on it for these last couple of weeks after work. As I mention on Artstation, there are lots of things I would improve if I redid it from 0, specially on the sculpt, but since that wasn't an option I just tried to improve it as much as I could. 

They're a couple of realtime models, a Zabrak jedi master and a Twi'lek (My favourite star wars specie!) padawan girl. I had a blast working on it since I love Star Wars. I think that after all, the theme is what motivated me to finish it.

Here's the artstation link (With some more images) if you're interested! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XNKga








Thanks for reading, critiques welcome! 

Cheers ;)

Nat

Replies

  • Nuclear Angel
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    Nuclear Angel polycounter
    Amazing job, the models are really good looking, and I really like the storytelling you got down with the presentation.
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks much! Originally I had this idea of posing them very similarly, as if the Master was teaching the girl a fighting stance or technique and the padawan was imitating her, but due to some lack of time to properly polish the poses I had to leave them like this. So I'm happy to hear they express something! :)
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Hey everyone! Yesterday I finished my last character, (Another Star Wars one!) Mas Amedda (The senate's blue alien from the prequels). You can see the viewer plus more images in HD here 
    https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4kvK2
    I'm really enjoying doing Star Wars characters. Originally I had another character idea in mind but then I remembered how badass this guy looked and decided to model him instead. He was played by three different actors so the looks and even the design vary between the three films; I tried to mix them all while changing his cloth's colors into something with more dark vibes (He's Palpatine's accomplice, after all). As with the jedis, I had so much fun doing this I'll probably be doing another Star Wars character in the future! :)



  • Suba
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    Suba polycounter lvl 5
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Started a Lord of the Rings orc warg rider (Super rough atm). Let's see where it goes!





  • Shyralon
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    Shyralon polycounter lvl 11
    That's a really nice thread!
    I really like how much weight and expression your characters have :)
  • Tits
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    Tits mod
    Thats some very lovely work you got there!
    Will be following to make sure not to miss your new stuff :)
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks much guys, appreciated! :)

    Worked a bit more on these guys, still rough!







  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Some more refining!




  • Ged
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    Ged interpolator
    nice anatomy work on these :)
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thank you Ged! Still a beginner to anatomy, trying to improve with every project. Hope it looks decent in the end!  :)
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Finished the warg's retopo and made a very rough first pass of the texture! 




  • Bao92
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    Bao92 polycounter lvl 9
    looks good so far! cant wait to see more :D
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thank you Bao!!

    I got stuck on the warg's texturing, so here's another project I started to refresh my mind from it






    Some kind of spider-woman based on one of my old concepts. I want her to look sexy but deadly at the same time, as if she could lure her prey with charm to then devour it horribly! 

    Still don't know how will I approach the texturing on this one. Guess I'll use Painter. 
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Some more updates on the spider lady!

    This week, I finished the human part's retopo. They were done in topogun:


    For the spider part I used zremesher for everything but the legs (Big and small) and horns, which were done on topogun as well. 

    I did a little polypainting to get a possible direction for the texturing



    Very rough, but I kind of like the dark red tones and tattoos. Also did some crown of deer horns to make her look a bit more tribal, like a witch of the wilds. 

    Once I UVd the body I projected some skin detail on Zbrush with displacement maps I had previously done in Mari



    And then I... Got stuck!

    The texturing part is always the most difficult step for me. I keep trying things but none of them actually produce a result I'm comfortable with. I tried doing a realistic face projection in Mari, but then switched to Substance Painter.

    This is the first pass of the texture 





    Not having a solid pipeline isn't cool! :(

    I'll keep trying things until I get a result I like.

    Thanks for reading! Oh, and feel free to give me any feedback or tips! Thanks :D 

    Nat

  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    I decided to experiment a bit and follow a tutorial about texturing with Zbrush's ZApplink in Photoshop (I've been using Zbrush for a few years but didn't know about this tool!). I paint-projected a realistic face and added some details in Substance Painter. I then created my specular from the diffuse, using a high pass filter over the darkened texture and hand-painting the highlights, and then used the displacement map I previously did on Mari as base for the gloss map. I think it's looking better than yesterday. ZApplink + Substance seems a good workflow so far.



    I'll keep working on it!

    Cheers!
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Worked a bit more on the shader today! Also did the low poly of half the hair. 






  • Tomtegubbe
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    Tomtegubbe triangle
    The spider woman looks very cool, amazing.
    EDIT: Noticed she is missing nipples though, odd.  :'(
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thank you! The shader is still a work in progress, so no nipples for now  :# Still don't know if I'll go for human nipples or for something more alien-like. We'll see!
  • Nuclear Angel
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    Nuclear Angel polycounter
    Nice progress so far, I think that you can add more topology on some places. Like the arms, chest/stomach and the boobs, you can see the polygons and the sharp edges they create. So add more loops to help your silhouette get nice and smooth as I think that could really improve the model. 
  • JamesMeader
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    JamesMeader polycounter lvl 9
    Really like the direction the spider woman is going in, just a suggestion but maybe adding more scarification along the arms, i think its something that adds a really cool story to character.

    alien nipples sounds interesting but i think just follow the human/spider thing you have already and also to have consistency maybe wise just to have normal every day nipples. 
  • o0_themilkybarkid_0o
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    o0_themilkybarkid_0o polycounter lvl 2
    Incredible work! I'd love to see the topology of this if you have a wireframe pass. 
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks for the feedback guys!

    @Nuclear Angel I totally agree and had already that in mind, seeing how faceted the silohuette ended looking in Marmoset. I'll definitely add some loops here and there. 

    @JamesMeader Thanks! I planned to do some tattoos on her arm (Something tribal-ish, with words and symbols). I just finished the test I'm attaching down this post, which is a first pass of the concept (Still don't know if I'll keep the design). I also added some scars, though they're smaller and at random places. May play with the scarification concept if I feel the tattoos don't work!

    @o0_themilkybarkid_0o Thank you! You can see a wireframe of the woman's body if you scroll up a bit. Regarding the spider body, it's nothing special, the abdomen and butt were zremeshed and the rest of parts, which are super simple, were done by hand



    Here's another little update:



    Added nipples (Hope it's alright to show them? :O) And tribal tattoos. Added some dirt as well, scars, general imperfections, and changed the part where it fuses with the spider body. 

    I'll keep working on it!

    -Nat

  • Elithenia
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    Elithenia polycounter
    Oh wow. Can't believe I've missed this one. Looks great!
    Can't wait to see the finished piece
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks much! Yeah there was something about her being nipless that I liked as well. Might consider removing them if I manage to make the empty space under them look natural in some way. 
  • Ouran
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    Ouran greentooth
    This thread is full of goodies ! Really like the faces of two jedis as well as the contrast in colours in your spider piece :)
  • Stinkfoot
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    Stinkfoot polycounter lvl 11
    Whoa very nice, she reminds me of something from dark souls!
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    Fantastic work! The scarring and tattoos is adds a lot I think. Can't believe I've missed out on so much from your thread.
  • Tomtegubbe
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    Tomtegubbe triangle
    I think the nipple now might look a bit too squashed, it'll probably look better if you make the tip of the nipple slightly darker than the surrounding area so it doesn't just look like a birth mark. See reference:
    http://nudes.cz/models/preview/121/6521/trailer.jpg
    Don't click the above link if you're offended by nudity.
    EDIT: Work it into the normal map if you haven't. ;)
  • Wolves
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    Wolves polycounter lvl 2
    Wow your textures are beautiful! Really good job! :D
  • Intervain
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    Intervain polycounter lvl 13
    looks great, I would agree about adding some geo in places to smooth her out. The face's looking good!
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks everyone for your comments and feedback!

    Here's another update. I added more geometry to the body and worked on the hair. 



    I finally decided to get rid of the nipples, as I don't want to tag it as mature content. I've worked a bit more on the body's textures, but have been mainly doing the hair. 



    I still need to cover some spots with alpha cards, texture the diffuse and work on the union with the head, but this is how it's looking so far. I don't know if I'll finally model her a crown, I'm liking this hairstyle as it is!

    As usual, feel free to comment if you have any feedback! Thank you!

    Nat
  • Tomtegubbe
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    Tomtegubbe triangle
    Looks very awesome, I have to say though that I never thought the nipple out of everything on a bare chested woman is what would disqualify it from a mature tag. Like is that little thing really such a big deal to people lol. This practice goes back to posh times in the uhhh a couple of centuries ago when they rediscovered nude statues from ancient times they cut the penises off the statues. I'm not saying it's right or wrong it's up to you but personally I think it's unecessary. If the thing you're drawing or making a model out of isn't provocative or posed in a distasteful way I see no issue with it. But as I said amazing work! :neutral:
  • Tits
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    Tits mod
    Hi!
    Love how the eyes and skin looks, very creepy!
    Love what you are doing with the hair also (does needs more work to connect the side braids to the scalp which you mentionned)
    I definitly agree you could add every more polygones to her overall, you can still feel the polygons on her ear especially, her chin and the bottom of her breast.
    Looking forward to see more :)

  • Snakes
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    Snakes polycounter lvl 5
    Wow love your work so much! Huge diehard starwars fan here so looking at your work has been an extra treat! Super sweet work on the spiderlady, I really really appreciate how you explain your work process too, I haven't done much organic texturing (yet!) so seeing how you get your head around it helps quite a lot. If possible would you be down to share a pic of your Spiderlady's hair and creation process? Its so wonderful, I think the textures have turned out really nice, especially where her body combines with the spider's.
    Can't wait to see more stuff from you :3 
  • Cai
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    Cai polycounter lvl 5
    Love the face, great work !
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks everyone! Nice to see another fellow Star Wars big fan around here, @Snakes :P now brace yourself, shitty explanations are coming:

    So the hair's simple breakdown would be this:



    1 - The base head, with projected hair where it fuses with the geometry hair (Still need to work on it, looks like crap atm)

    2 - A very rough base hair, done with simple geometry. Mainly done to fill gaps (Covering everything in alpha cards would be messy and heavy). As it is not an important part I mirrored the texture of the big mass of hair and the dreads (Top of the head was still too important). Then, textured entirely on Substance with a fur material, so I get the normal and everything from there. (Notice how you can see the texture's seam because of the mirroring)

    3 - The braids. Braids projected into simple geometry and then placed by hand on max using various modifiers. So basically:


    (UNRELATED. I have a lil doubt! I added some loops in max to fix the silohuette, as discussed above. But I already started the texturing. So I can't relax the loops, which, well, make the density look unbalanced, as seen on the arms. Any workarounds? If not, I'll leave the mesh as it is)

    4 - The alpha cards. Done to achieve a lil bit more realism. The process is similar to the braid's:



    You do a plane with your desired size, UV it, then bring it to Zbrush, draw hair strands into it with curve brushes, delete the plane, export the hair strands as your Highpoly mesh, and bake them into the plane. I do several variations because sometimes you need a single hair, or a bunch of little ones. Here's a gif with some of my variations: http://i.imgur.com/lpk1Jvp.gifv . Once you've baked the planes, you can add more loops to them, change their shape a bit or size if you wish, and then place them by hand on your model, as with the braids: using path deforms, FDD, bend modifiers... etc. 

    Hope that was useful, let me know if there's something I didn't explain clearly/you don't understand.

    On a side note, I just started doing a spider I planned to add as an ambient creature. Planned to add lots of them, actually. Small spiders everywhere. But he ended up having a bit too much geometry for that, so I think I'll add one or two bigger ones instead. 

    I call him Spidy.



    Cheers!







  • Tomtegubbe
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    Tomtegubbe triangle
    (UNRELATED. I have a lil doubt! I added some loops in max to fix the silohuette, as discussed above. But I already started the texturing. So I can't relax the loops, which, well, make the density look unbalanced, as seen on the arms. Any workarounds? If not, I'll leave the mesh as it is)

    You could reimport the low res mesh over your high res mesh in a program like topogun and add additional topology, when you unwrap the model the uv islands will look pretty much identical and you could just put them over your diffuse texture again. Cumbersome but probably the best way to do it.

  • tierzilla
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    tierzilla polycounter lvl 9
    this is amazing! . not a big fan about the white marks . maybe as  scarifications the prev ones would be nice . you can remove some edges on spidy and make them white'ish like babys !
    keep up the good work!
  • o0_themilkybarkid_0o
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    o0_themilkybarkid_0o polycounter lvl 2
    This thread keeps getting better and better! 
  • Snakes
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    Snakes polycounter lvl 5
    Holy moly! Thank you so much for the breakdown everything was really clear and concise - pshhh "shitty explanations" my butt! haha. But yeah, thank you thank you! I'd never expected to ever get so much info, I really like that hair workflow how you bake the zbrush sculpted hair, that never actually crossed my mind for doing hair cards haha. I guess for something like this where you only want a few high-quality looking strands baking hair strands works instead of just painting the hair cards in photoshop/substance etc. Was that your reasoning? Since it looks like the hair strands for the Star Wars characters are just painted. :O  

    Just to clarify one thing about the braids (point 3). When you projected the detail onto the low poly, how would placing them in max exactly work while maintaining the highsubdiv detail? Wouldn't you be re-exporting the braids as their lowest subdivision level as an OBJ to max to place them, so you'd lose the projected detail which would be on higher subdivs right?  The work flow I had in mind was; you place the high poly in zbrush, create the low poly (from the highpoly or manually), place them so both high and low are in the correct place, then bake. I mean this is what I'd do for everything that needs baking. Your method has me very curious! 

    I think spidy looks cute! I also think that only having a couple vs a lot of spidies might look more aesthetically pleasing so I think you made the right call! Maybe one could be like hanging from a web next to the spider ladies' head or sitting in her hand something hehe. 

    Thanks again for the long in-depth reply Natalia!
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Snakes said:
    I guess for something like this where you only want a few high-quality looking strands baking hair strands works instead of just painting the hair cards in photoshop/substance etc. Was that your reasoning? Since it looks like the hair strands for the Star Wars characters are just painted. :O  
    For me it's more convenient since I automatically get the alpha and normal map when I do the bakes (On Xnormal). The normal map has great detail as it's baked from actual geometry. I also get the crisp and nice alpha, and even an AO with the shadow information, would I want to (It's helpful when doing the diffuse). But there's no right or wrong way to do it. You can paint the hair or bake it from geometry, whatever works best for your project! 

    Regarding the braids: Once you bake the information on the low poly geometry, the only thing that is left is placing this low poly geometry in the areas you want it to be on your model. The workflow you mention is correct: You create your high poly on Zbrush, retopo it (On zbrush, topogun...), you UV it, you bake it (Both geometries are in the same place, since you retopoed directly on your high poly mesh), and then you bring this lowpoly geometry into your max scene and start placing clones on the head. You can import any of the bakes as diffuse and put it on the low poly geometry if you want to better visualize the detail. 
    I usually have Marmoset Toolbag open on my other monitor, with my model and materials configured, this way I can easily see how the scene is looking each time I do changes and save them. 

    Hope that was helpful!
  • Snakes
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    Snakes polycounter lvl 5
    @Cersei_lannister That makes perfect sense, thanks so much for clarifying that about the braids/baking & placement workflow, sounds the same as mine I think at the time of posting I was just a bit confused haha! I'll have to try it, I can see this technique would be incredibly helpful if ever doing something like platted hair etc. Can't wait to see the updates. Do you usually use an AO map for all aspects of a character? I've personally felt that AO maps often make my model look worse, I am likely just doing something wrong though haha. I've only ever used AO maps for when working with smart materials in substance painter! 
  • ErikNilsson
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    ErikNilsson polycounter
    Great work, really like the design of the hair!
  • Ouran
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    Ouran greentooth
    Thank you very much for the great down. Progress is looking great :)
  • Opilo
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    Opilo triangle
    Just great! So much life, story and feeling in these. Inspiring stuff!
  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Thanks for the comments guys, appreciated.

    @Snakes not really, like you I only work with the AO on Painter when doing organic characters, but It's useful to have the map nonetheless, just in case you need to tweak something in Photoshop (Never use Multiply, though!). It depends on the style, as well. If it's realistic most of the times I don't want shadow information on the skin's difuse, but for stylized projects it works well.

    Anyways, Mrs. Spider is pretty much finished! Today I fooled around in Marmoset and made some beauty shots in a couple of different poses and lightnings. Here are some of the screenshots I took



     
    I'll upload her into Arstation tomorrow with some more screens and maybe a turnaround, I'll keep working on the Marmoset scene during the day and see if I can make any more interesting shots. Oh, and also, she's currently being animated! Not by me, of course, but if any of the anims are ready for tomorrow I'll upload them as well.

    Thanks for reading!

    Nat

  • Cersei_Lannister
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    Cersei_Lannister ngon master
    Aand she's done! I just uploaded the project into Artstation - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qPQxD

    Here are some of the new screens (Nothing that you haven't seen!):



    Aand here's the cool part! A little walking animation done by Juanma Cervilla and rendered on Toolbag 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORoGnLSL9Q

    Hope ya like!

    -Nat
  • Tomtegubbe
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    Tomtegubbe triangle
    Looking nice, noticed you named her Arachne, at no point was the actual Arachne a half spider/half human creature, just a little spider. Still looks cool, please next do Atalanta if you plan to stay on the topic of greek female characters. :D
  • tda
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    tda polycounter lvl 16
    Glad you posted the link to this in the artstation piece or I probably would have missed this awesome thread! Lovely work in here, and awesome to see the process of the latest. Also god damn that was a fast turnaround!  Fave'd, excited to see where you go with the warg dude / next piece :)
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