WoW Fansculpt - Cho'Gall

Golden Yak

The Blizzardfest challenge inspired me to tackle a project I've wanted to for a while now - grabbing a character or creature from World of Warcraft (which being 10+ years old and all has one or two models that are a leetle dated looking) and trying to make a zbrush sculpt and a later game-worthy model. I've been neglecting my 3D artist side for some years now, so this was also very much a learning experience, bringing myself up to date on sculpting techniques.

I decided to use Cho'Gall, a unique boss character from the 3rd WoW expansion. Here's what he looks like in the game right now.

This is the result of about four days of occasionally frustrating but largely rewarding work:











Things I've learned to use on this piece after only ever hearing about them before:
*Zspheres
*The Insert Brush (this was after putting in all his teeth and spines and bits with subtools and masking and the move brush - aaaaaa~)
*Polypaint


Next - I want to do a lot more polypainting, shooting for a very WoW-ish stylized depiction. I'm really happy with what I've done so far (compared to my past efforts in painting in 3D), so I'm looking forwards to improving further.

I might do a bit more tweaking on the sculpt itself knowing what I now know, but I want to keep things moving along very sharpish, so I may bite the bullet and just keep things in mind for the next piece.

Then I'll be moving on to doing a low-poly sculpt and hammering out an effective low-poly texture baking pipeline.

Here I leave things, for now - if anyone has any feedback to give on the sculpt, advice on painting, or suggestions for a good low-poly bake method, please share it!

Golden Yak

Finished the low-poly sculpt:



and made a few tries at baking textures - here's the diffuse only, an early version and a later version.



I remain cautiously optimistic.

LRoy

Looks pretty good. You can use something like Kodde's script to make a simple top down gradient.

http://www.kostas.se/?p=343

lotet

Pretty cool, I think you went a bit heavy on the AO though, it looks more like thick line work rather then "hand painted".

You could try baking a bent normal map and use that for shading.
and also as LRoy mentioned, a gradient map would probably fit very well here.

praetus

When placing your AO onto skin, make sure to shift the color w/ a hue/saturation slider. If you leave it black it makes it look dirty and unnatural. If you shift the color to complement the skin tone it can really make it pop.

Golden Yak

Oboy, comments!

Thanks for posting, all. I'll try making some of the adjustments suggested - it's already looking a little snazzier.

Next big step will be UVing out everything else and baking out a first texture pass on the whole character.