Lenny's Workshop
polycounter lvl 15
[html][/html]Welcome to my Workshop Thread here on Polycount.
I'm Looking forward to filling this space out with Dota 2 items, and when i find the time, asset/workflow breakdowns.
My Steam Workshop
If you like my work be sure to throw me on follow to receive updates on new items
Item Collections
I'm Looking forward to filling this space out with Dota 2 items, and when i find the time, asset/workflow breakdowns.
My Steam Workshop
If you like my work be sure to throw me on follow to receive updates on new items
Item Collections
Single Items
Guides
Replies
I remember a long time ago you posted a set of screenshots showing what different combinations of masks looked like on that tide weapon... would you maybe still have that?
It would be pretty awesome to be able to see more detailed variations of what the masks are capable of than are shown in the valve mask guide; I know I'd use that reference. Also you could update your already great guide with it
mrpresident, i do have that screenshot and you know it was pretty interesting look back through some of thos older files. I grabbed a few more comparisons from my wip folder that are a pretty good example of what a rebake, updated color and reworked masks can do.
For anyone new to this, when i first submitted this wep to the workshop i received some solid crits from Bronto and Tvidotto, where they suggested i bump the quality in a few areas. They were absolutely right so i went back and updated the Cannon based on that and spent a fair amount of time fucking around with the mask files in the process.
Here i have the original color map and preview image. I still kind of like the flat color map, but the lack of contrast and painted in lighting ended up looking pretty nasty in game.
So i adjusted the highpoly, rebaked the normals, remade the color and both mask files. When you compare the images you can see this is the same lowpoly model with identical UV's, with the only difference being the four shaders.
I also made a proof sheet in photoshop while previewing, i find this incredibly helpful when trying to decided which combination works best. Although i think my original photoshop file may have had many more minor variations.
Keep up the good work.
ps. I am really impressed with your tutorials. I would sticky it everywhere, and for sure will point people to it if I would have opportunity, because it covers everything step by step! Perfect
And yeah, the before and after textures really show how important high-contrast between segments is in dota's engine/visual style.
Apart from this weapon being more detailed and somewhat organic, the first section is very similar to the process used to create the pudge offhand weapon, create two splines, extrude, bridge, move verts around, etc. Sure the shapes are harder to bridge and it is difficult to keep a reasonable polygon distribution but I just took my time and adjusted the splines or moved the vertexes where needed.
At this point you can see where I align many of the connecting edges between objects, I also chamfer the edges that will be bladed. On the handle in particular I made sure the edge flow follows the detail in the concept, I know I'm going to be sculpting in some large detail and I don't want to be fighting my mesh to do that.
I also go on to use a FFD box to change the overall thickness of the dagger and taper it towards the tip. In retrospect I slimmed the dagger far too much and ended up having to reverse the process with the high poly and low poly before bake, which was messy and less than ideal.
I now have the base mesh completed and have reduced the size of the handle and increased the size of the blade to closer match the proportions of the original weapon. I have also attached all the parts together to from one mesh, setup some smoothing groups added 3 levels of subdivision and feel it's ready for sculpting.
I ran into another problem at this point, I started sculpting which was taking far too long to add needed detail. Not only was it taking too much time but it looked lumpy, it took great effort to create a separation between the sections and was just looking horrible as you can see on the left in the below image.
So i went back to the base mesh in 3dsmax, separated the dagger into its original three parts, capped any holes, adjusted the smoothing groups and sent the three new meshes back to Mudbox.
Progression is now pretty quick with the new mesh breakup, I work at a low subdivision level with the sculpt, flatten, scrape and wax tools. I also Auto retopo my mesh when needed, which is a new feature in Mudbox 2014 and even though it's pretty good it's still buggy, so make sure to save your scene before you give it a try as you will often end up with holes in your mesh.
Now I'm going to want to start lining some sculpted detail up with the concept. To do this I start by taking a screen grab of my base mesh from 3dsmax and overlayed the concept sketch on a new layer in photoshop with 50% opacity, I then used the warp tool to align the concept as best I could with the base mesh and save this color image for later, where it will be used for the color map.
I then desaturate the image, and crank the levels until I have something like this
Which I then add to Mudbox as a stencil, I then align the stencil with my model and sculpt using the stencil and sculpt tool until I have all the rough shapes I want. Pretty messy, but I like to think of it as a rough sketch which I can now refine.
From here I refined the handle using grab, sculpt, flatten and scrape tools.
And I start refining the main blade section in a similar way as above. Take note of the large jagged parts, these were pulled out with the grab tool, cleaned up as best I could with the geo being stretched and then auto retopologized. I used the stencil again to see where and how far the jagged sections needed to be extended out too.
And finally I do one last detail pass where I clean up some forms and add any subtle high level detail.
Back to max for the low poly, UV's, Cage and baking in Xnormal.
In Photoshop I open my bakes from Xnormal and add them as layers into a single image. I then past in the previously created warped version of the concept and match it to the bakes/UV's with scale, rotate and warp. I then roughly clone around the edges to make sure everything is covered and use the liquify tool to move some things around, which is what you can see in the centre image.
From here I colour pick from the concept and paint using a brush until I'm happy with the texture, I also adjust the blending of any bakes I have and test in max and Dota2 throughout the painting process.
And there you have it, colour map matching normal map detail and your concept image.
ALso if you haven't already be sure to take a look at DoubleLeafs thread, the creator of the original concept image.
First up i have the skeleton king sword Shattered Destroyer, concepted by DoubleLeaf and created for one of the monthly unofficial dota 2 challenges here on polycount.
Edit - just found these two wip shots in the old contest thread
And the associated Youtube tutorial video
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What makes this one a little interesting is i then received some feedback from Valve.
"Could you bring the blade of the weapon more in line with the cool colors of the original blade? The wrap is ok in that warm red, but it would be nice if the rest better matched the blade/his bones color."
"Also, could you scale it down a bit? The length is ok, but the depth and width should come down."
Fair call if you ask me especially about the scale. So i went back and made some adjustments, i found changing the scale a little problematic as it very quickly robbed the blade of the originals character but i feel i was able to bring most of it across, while hopefully making enough of a change.
After the SK sword i moved onto a weapon for Chaos Knight, Shadow Brand. Concepted by DoubleLeaf and again for the unofficially monthly Dota 2 challenge.
As you can see in the WIP images we ended up shifting the colors to better match Chaos Knights pallet, this came about after seeing him running around with it in game and was one of thos pre release moments where you just haveto backtrack and make the change, inspite of wanting to release right away.
Another great change came early on from Doubleleaf, i sent him over this screenshot of the base mesh, he replied with an immediate paint over and explained he was envisioning two prongs, which would give the weapon more heft. Which was a damm good call and produced the final design.
I also made a quick video tutorial on basic skinning in 3dsmax using this item.
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Additionally this was added to the Polycount chest which not only had me doing a happy dance, but brought with it some great new particle effects added by Valve.
Although it looks like the Normals may have been changed on the upper blade sections, creating some pretty heavy blue rimlighting that wasnt on the original submitted to the workshop. Would anyone know how i go about bringing an inconsistency like this up with Valve? just post about it on the dev forums?
Dev forums could also work too.
Iv been chipping away at several things over the last while, learning some Zbrush on the side and hope to get back to regular workshop submissions in the very near future.
All concepts by the ever patient DoubleLeaf
Razor Helm, which is pretty much finished - final mask's, touchups and marketing images and he should be good to go. Will have a time-lapse video of the creation.
Slardar Wep - needed a few scale changes to match the original wep and to fit in his hands, although looking at it now ill likly go back and do some in game scale tests before moving onto the sculpt.
QOP Wings - needed to move them around a bit to better match the bones.
And the Nyxx set, would love feedback on the "wing/blades" i was concerned with them clipping but after some in game testing they dont clip with the arms too much, mostly on mana burn. Plan is to add a different style without them just incase it pushes things to far.
And however much i love the lower jaw horns they clip way to much and had to go.
Arcing Supremacy a Razor headpiece, concepted by Doubleleaf.
I worked on this item over a pretty long timeframe as I traveled throughout the holiday period and managed to screencapture my process as i went along.
I ended up crunching the video down to what turned out to be a pretty disappointing and jangly time-lapse, but for completions sake here it is, with a few notes on processes and things I'll be doing differently nextime around.
Part One and Two - 3dsmax base mesh.
I have a tendency to do allot of work in Max pre sculpt, this works well but all the vert pushing involved takes up a bunch of time. This is something im currently working to change and feel I will likly skip over much of these steps once im more competent with Zbrush, or at least the majority of the 2nd video which will hopefully lead to a more refined and a quicker workflow.
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Part Three and Four
Due to the level of detail modeled into the base mesh the sculpt ends up being mostly small details and a few fixes.
I go onto paint the color map directly onto the highpoly with mixed results.
On the one hand having a highpoly with color that can be baked out to a variety of different lod levels or used for other resources could be incredibly handy in the right pipeline.
But the inability of Mudbox to bake these maps out with the control of a cage, and Dota2's relatively low polycount lead's to some very inconsistent results at bake time, leading to much repainting, which you can see in the next few videos.
For future projects ill skip this step, go straight to baking, layout my bakes and overlays in photoshop and paint the remainder directly onto the lowpoly.
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Part 5 and 6
Pretty standard Lod1, UV's and Bakes in these two videos. I take a little time doing test bakes and making adjustments for a cleaner bake about halfway through. I also setup a quick Hemi bake and do a small exploded bake but all in all pretty standard stuff.
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Part 7 Color map and Masks
I spend the majority of this video reworking the color map by linking my .psd in mudbox to photoshop which allows you to switch back between the two pieces of software and maintains your photoshop layers.
The Masks went pretty smoothly on this guy.
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At the end of the day i found recording my own workflow incredibly helpful all on its own and highly recommend giving it a go, even if you don't show it to anyone just seeing where you can improve your workflow is pretty awesome.
He just needs a fabulous peacock-like dance emote and his world will be complete :poly121:
Thanks Spudnik, i think it could really work as a set too.
Glad your liking them, will see about making it a semi regular thing seeing as thought i cant really stream due to a slow internet connection.
Lately iv been progressing a few singles, which have been on hold with the lack of chests, I had planned to just role them into future sets but after reading Anuxi's great post and Valve reply am moving them forward again.
The QOP wings are a mesh smoothed pre sculpt test, I did this as I wasn't sure if I would be able to hit the lod1 polycount and wanted to make sure I didn't waste sculpt time if I couldn't. The picture is lod0 and I think I can squeeze in the lod1 with some reasonable design changes.
I ended up making some pretty drastic changes to this OD staff, mostly I couldn't have the floating rocks without supporting animation. I also wanted to see if I could do a quick sculpt as I have a tendency to wast time over detailing at the sculpting stage. So far im not convinced, and have ended up using the same if not more time dicking around with texture painting, which i need to re do anyway (looked rubbish in game).
Concept by DoubleLeaf
And i have been agonizing over this Slardar Mace and its textures, mostly im finding the change in huge/saturation between the larger character select screen, the ingame daytime and nighttime can be pretty dramatic.
Its still not 100% finished as you can see by the incomplete shell pattern and a few other areas, but i would particularly appreciate any feedback at this stage, would definitely be a big help towards bouncing me out of this tunnel vision.
And the ever helpful Doubleaf suggested I dust off and finish up my old warlock set. This thing has been rattling around on my harddrive for over a year now, so im looking forward to wrapping it up, and moving on.
Most of the parts are already sculpted and have lowpoly versions with 90% finished shaders ... although having transitioned the sculpt over to Zbrush im going to give them all a quick update.
His belt is baked out separately so i can tile the weave, and the offhand and satchel arnt in the scene yet. Will be remaking his weapon.
Old image of the lowpoly in my max viewport
Sculpt currently in Zbrush
Vayne - cheers man, i was going to make it a slow transition from Mudbox but i used Zbrush once and havent sculpted in Mud since. Still use some Mud for texture work here and there though.
The projects im currently working on have shifted a bit, but im still chipping away at the Warlock set and The Nyx items casually while i work on something else.
For the Warlock i sculpted some of his offhand weapon, still need to clean a few areas up and sculpt the gemstone in the center.
And i cleaned up his bracers a little and sculpted the gemstone
I also did some texts on the Nyx set, much like some of my other items from my last post i was worried about having trouble hitting the polycount on a few slots. So i baked out a pre sculpt base mesh and had mostly ok results, my main concern being the claws, which i was able to squeeze into the lod0 but changes will be needed for lod1. Similarly the back slots ok, but i still need to add the parts to each of the six legs, and im tempted to fiddle with the way the shell layers towards the back
Anyway if you do have any feedback i really do value it both positive and negative
The bracers for the warlock (gem) seems a little too complicated. Try just a basic 4 face or 5 face gem.