Band of Brothers, explorative portfolio piece - wip
polycounter lvl 7
Hey Polycount 
This is a new piece I'm working on at the moment, inspired by Band of Brothers. Feel free to just look at the pictures (and post comments)
Project intentions; I know there are a lot of military characters in a lot of portfolios and it's not particularly original or inspired to do a military bust. However, I really enjoyed the series and this project aims to work on my current weakness and explore things I'm still learning about.
It's been about a year since I left uni and in that time I've had limited access to a desk and even less access to the internet, so there's a gaping hole in my portfolio and in my knowledge of recent developments. (In the past year I have done some pieces just for fun and massively improved my knowledge of anatomy - so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)
Based on looking at my previous work and the weak areas, this project aims to look at rendering realistic materials (leather that looks like leather), give me more experience sculpting faces and improve my understanding of BPR and SSS.
I also want to use this to look into tessellation and the creation of complex or detailed assets.
The character I'm working on is one of the protagonists, Lt. Richard D. Winters, as there's obviously loads of good quality ref of Damian Lewis.
It's still early days but here's a preview of the sculpt in progress.
This is a new piece I'm working on at the moment, inspired by Band of Brothers. Feel free to just look at the pictures (and post comments)Project intentions; I know there are a lot of military characters in a lot of portfolios and it's not particularly original or inspired to do a military bust. However, I really enjoyed the series and this project aims to work on my current weakness and explore things I'm still learning about.
It's been about a year since I left uni and in that time I've had limited access to a desk and even less access to the internet, so there's a gaping hole in my portfolio and in my knowledge of recent developments. (In the past year I have done some pieces just for fun and massively improved my knowledge of anatomy - so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)
Based on looking at my previous work and the weak areas, this project aims to look at rendering realistic materials (leather that looks like leather), give me more experience sculpting faces and improve my understanding of BPR and SSS.
I also want to use this to look into tessellation and the creation of complex or detailed assets.
The character I'm working on is one of the protagonists, Lt. Richard D. Winters, as there's obviously loads of good quality ref of Damian Lewis.
It's still early days but here's a preview of the sculpt in progress.
Replies
To learn how to do complex and cool hard surface shapes, visit Polycount's The Weekly Hard Surface Challenge. You will improve in no time.
If you want realistic textures/materials, you can take a look at new and fancy PBR texturing/rendering for next-gen. You can find about it using search on this forum, I'm afraid I don't have any links for you.
Some tessellation tests in Marmoset. The normal and height maps came out well after some alteration to the cage and making sure the open sections were capped. I made the cage in Max and exported to Xnormals for the best results. The first test renders showed some erroring in the tessellation where I needed more padding on the height map.
Height and Normal map with plain coloured diffuse.
Errors due to lack of padding.
Padding increased (Still needs adjustment).
Here's the same thing again but with an opacity map to remove the helmet. I could include the tessellation information in the same maps and model as the helmet itself to reduce draw calls. Having the rope and helmet as two separate elements is useful where the helmet has asymmetry, the rope appears to be loose around the helmet or the details are used like kit pieces to make a range of different helmets.
Without Tessellation, Normal map alone gives very flat and unsatisfactory results.
Tesellation looks really cool!
The face looks relly nice aswell. No crits so far
I shifted my concentration to the helmet, worked on creating his Major badge for the front of the helmet with a combination of shadowbox, polish and alpha from texture.
Also experimenting with textures & polypaint for the two layers of the helmet.
The upper layer needs some more attention and markings before I call the helmet complete.
Have you thought of adding some scratches/detail to the helmet, then polypainting over them while using a cavity mask? I do this constantly with my hardsurface stuff, and it yields really interesting results.