Sketchbook : EnterOleyxis
Hello everyone!
Thank you for taking the time to look at my sketchbook, this will be filled with work i've created for my college course and final products free for critique and feedback.
I am still quite new to digital works so my digital art isn't very strong, but i hope to be improving that over the next 6 months
Any advice you can give on my work will be much appreciated, as i'd like to develop the skills i currently have and make them industry standard.
This in particular will be following the progression of a Strong cultural character i've had to create for college, with all information about her and sketches including a final work that is currently being re-created in Super Sculpey and also as a highly detailed 3D model, both of which are currently in the works!
I hope you like my work, and i look forward to hearing from you! My next post will begin with My concept character, but for now enjoy a piece of work from another project while i work on updating the rest!
Thank you for taking the time to look at my sketchbook, this will be filled with work i've created for my college course and final products free for critique and feedback.
I am still quite new to digital works so my digital art isn't very strong, but i hope to be improving that over the next 6 months
Any advice you can give on my work will be much appreciated, as i'd like to develop the skills i currently have and make them industry standard.
This in particular will be following the progression of a Strong cultural character i've had to create for college, with all information about her and sketches including a final work that is currently being re-created in Super Sculpey and also as a highly detailed 3D model, both of which are currently in the works!
I hope you like my work, and i look forward to hearing from you! My next post will begin with My concept character, but for now enjoy a piece of work from another project while i work on updating the rest!
Replies
For our character creation project at college we were asked to create a character with a strong cultural backgound, so i decided to go for a Witch doctor!
These characters are to be based on ourselves in its own respect, so keeping our genders and one of our features.
I got abit ahead of myself and started some drawings before properly researching into the character though.
These i've designed in a scetchbook, but for further research these designs i decided to not use, as they don't really sit too well with what i wanted the final to look like.. they're almost too neat?
I know i wanted a large, unusual headdress so that was something i wanted to focus on quite alot.
I went with 4 of these designs to work further into, and posed them more to see which one could flow better, and honestly just whichever one i preferred the look of.
I tried to go in abit more detail on her face aswell, to see what sort of age i could make her.
Then working alittle more into the designs i chose :
Decided to give her a dog (: Babatunde!
Playing with the idea of giving her some body paint, as it's quite a cultural thing for african tribes. Decided against it however, as i want quite a dramatic headdress and the addition of lots of body paint would just over complicate her too much.
Playing with some colours etc.
Lets me play with some interesting looking eyes.
Some colour tests :
Nice moments aha
For this character we have to create them as both 3D models and as a sculpture, aswell as creating a concept art for them in a pose that is to be recreated in the 3D model and sculpt, so naturally i had to create some different examples of poses i could use.
Planning the character, we needed to create a 3rd point perspective image of our characters, so a front view, side view and back view of the characters design.
Originally i wanted to create 2 different designs, one that she would begin with and the other that she would become, but i decided the design for the final was better then the original.
You can see that design here :
Here you can also read about the information i came up with for her, background story included.
I wanted to create a simple but meaningful pose, but with her blindness i felt a solitary image would work better, so i decided to go with the concept of her sitting along in a dead tree, to represent that hollow loneliness that would come with the loss of sight.
This was the original concept version i created :
I was then given some feedback from a concept artist to add in a more dramatic feel, so to dd a bigger background and much more dramatic lighting.
Lighting and backgrounds are something i quite badly struggle with however, so i'm not overly proud of the outcome.
Feedback on these issues is appreciated.
As a 3D model using a base model in 3DSMax, importing it into Mudbox to create in depth details and working more into the characters design and creating normal maps from this Mudbox edition, to then be transferred back into 3DSMax in a lower poly form.
This has been an incredibly long process with many issues mainly revolving around simple modelling areas, all of which i will run through with you lot and hopefully you can give me some feedback for my next 3D model project!
Asha the Witch doctor, as you can see from her reference in the post above, as well as other workings of her throughout the WIP posts posted previously, is a rather in depth character in terms of design, and has taught me plenty about modelling and painting.
Beginning with the base of the character through the body! Creating the body in 3DSMax went surprisingly smoothly, Keeping into the account that as this model has to be moved into mudbox i cannot have any tris, so this is entirely covered with topology.
Working on the feet.
Happily working into the face then THIS HAPPENED.
I still don't know what had actually happened here, as there was only a minor lag in the program and it sent the verts flying off in all directions, fortunately this only affected the jawline of the actual face working so was not much of a big deal, just unfortunately took awhile to fix what had been destroyed.
Creating the face was challenging, as expected. Originally we were asked to use a stencil for topology we had drawn on photos of ourselves as a base but i decided against this as my character is of completely different ethnicity and my features would not suit this so i began sculpting this from scratch. The original face, though you cannot tell here was worked on for the better part of 5 hours, with tedious editing to move cheeks forward, mouths up, noses out, making her look less like benedict cumberbatch which seems to be all i can this when looking at this!
I began sculpting her hair using individual faces for the leaves to go on, but after much deliberation this was scrapped as issues would arise when unwrapping and there were continuous errors with the faces flipping themselves when i extruded them out.
After working into making the face more natural, moving polys around in mass sections to help out the smoother feel of the face, i had to re-create the 'hair' using a single plain and wrapping and shaping it around her face, head and clothing so that it had a vaguely natural feel as if sitting on/around the areas. You can see the polys are all shaped around improving the 'falling' motion that naturally comes with hair, as it would still have some of that feel with a leafy headdress. I've also connected the head to the body using topology and have worked in more of the characters detail.
Unfortunately i totally forgot to take more progress shots as i was working through this so it will leap into further workings without much opportunity to show the full process of the modelling.
Added in more planes on the end of the twigs, have also added in more features included on her outfit.
First progress of the face after having unwrapped the final 3DSMax model and transfered it into mudbox. After originally transferring the original model from 3DSMax to mudbox there were several issues around the skirt so that area had to be recreated more simply and with a flat plain rather then pulled out plains for the fur around the side of her skirt.
Here after subdividing the face, it's become apparent how bad the proportions of the face are, much work needing to be done!
I originally did a first version of the face, but accidentally made an unfortunate mistake of trying to symmetry half of the face, which upped the polys to ridiculous levels and removed the UV map, making it unusable. This however being its own little blessing in disguise as the first attempt was not good whereas after much working on the second time, the face came out much better then the original.
Closeup of the final face, sculpted and painted almost ready to go back into 3DSmax as a lower poly version. As mentioned previously, unfortunately i completely forgot to take progress shots of the workings in Mudbox so there is only screens of the final look. I had to remove the hair from this version as i decided i wanted to aplha map the hair in 3DSMax to make it look like there were gaps in the leaves rather then just a slab of polys made to look like something flowing like leaves. Subdividing to levels as high as 8 to create the entirety of the detail in the clothing and the face, using my own textures for the feathers off her head and skirt (As seen below) to stencil into the seperate objects, and using the gloss paint layer to give them a nice shine as feathers do naturally.
(Hand sketched texture ready to be stenciled onto the feathers! Unfortunately it did not fit very well and looking back they would've looked better as Aplha mapped polys aswell, but they look nice anyway! Always feedback and thoughts for the next model.
A slightly earlier view, but gives a better feel of how the face has been sculpted in mudbox, much happier with this version then the original so as mentioned before, sometimes mess ups are abit of a blessing in disguise!
You also get a nice feel for the shine and stencil used on the feathers from this view, looking nice and glossy but not too over the top that it sits weirdly on the model.
Working into the material bandages on her legs, have worked fully into one side of her body but not into her right side yet, still need to complete the sculpt of the hand, the sock on her foot and finish the details on her leg. This is an almost finished version, where you can still see where the hair and fur aspects would be, before being hidden and thrown back into 3DSMax as the lower leveled version.
Silly little feature but being a not-so-confident 3D modeller i'm absolutely over the moon with how the skull on her belt has come out, used a lovely preset stencil to give a bitty feel so it feels abit more natural then a dry brush paint to give the worn and bloody look to it.
Screenshot of the final mudbox sculpt! Normal maps were an absolute nightmare for this as mudbox has a feature that applies the normal maps as a grouped object for when you import the model back into 3DSMax, but for reasons unknown this feature would not work on my model so i had to do each object from the model separately and combine all the normal maps from those on a photoshop file.
Final diffuse map, the fur an leaves were done as a seperate drawing (One type of fur, 5 leaves and 3 vines duplicated to create an intricate but not too tedious look for the fur and leaf hair.) then merged into the diffuse map that sits on the model itself.
Alpha map created for the hair and leaf headdress section, unfortunately again i discovered later that actually mudbox does not take alpha maps so i had to make some changes for the final high poly version we needed to submit.
Normal map, after having slotted everything together.
View of the model completed before the diffuse and alphas of the hair and leaves have been put on, the eyes have been added in and coloured (she's blind and i found that actualy having her eyes completely white over looked haunting enough to represent an almost hallucinogenic state that a witch doctor would frequently be in.) Once the maps for the hair and fur were thrown on it was immediately posed to create a 3 point turn around render of the character in 3DSMax. Which you can see below!
(Originally this was meant to be done in Marmoset, however the character model had seams that i was unable to fix and actually it looks much nicer as the 3DSMax version anyway. Kept it as consistent colours as i didn't want to go for a hyper realistic feel for this character, and the consistent colours looked pretty fun on the model!)
Completed render images from Marmoset, 3 point views of the final model for both a shaded and one featuring the wireframe of the character. Thankfully the alpha maps worked nicely in marmoset as well which i was rather worried about referring back to the issue that alphas do not work in Mudbox.
As you can see these renders have come out rather nicely, i decided to take the diffuse map off for the wireframe renders as the colour of the wireframe would not really sit very well on the characters colours. It did also mean i could put a different background on it to make it look a little different in both versions.