Sketchbook: Armand von Benecke

nnode

Thought I'd start a sketchbook here as a place to dump some progress images of my personal projects.

I'll be trying to keep this mostly visual - the paragraphs of enquiry and discovery can go on the blog. Also, critique is most welcome.

nnode

Right, first dump:

Bubblegum Crisis fan art! I've actually been working on this project on and off during university for the past 2 or so years in order top teach myself some 3D skills. I'm planning on doing all four of the Knight Saber suits, but I've mostly been focusing on Sylia as a starting point. Practically done with her now...

Firstly, the old stuff (blush blush):

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And now the new stuff:

New workflow - do some rough sculpting of the suits in ZBrush:



Then manual retopo in Maya and adding all the missing bits:

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~discovers Substance Painter~

100% generated (aka no manual painting):


Some manual painting over that (hehehe, might have gone a bit ape here):

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Aha, now that Sketchfab integration is fixed here's the posed Sylia model:

model

nnode

Some progress on Priss from my Bubblegum Crisis fan art series:





Just need to get some UVs on her now and then it's texturing time~...

nnode

Some more progress on Priss... basic procedural texturing in Substance Painter:



Just needs some texture refinement and a pose, so next Priss post will probably be the finished model...

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Here's the finished Priss model:

model

I noticed that I somehow managed to cut the polycount in half with this one while achieving the same result as with Sylia. Priss weighs in at 9.5k; Sylia was around 18k.

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Here are some renders of Priss done with RenderMan:







The HDR used for the renders is from the NoEmotion HDRs collection.

I noticed there are some black artifacts around her knee and thigh strips in the front view and around her torso in the back view... anyone know what's causing it? The normal map?

chaselt

This is super cool. I'm a sucker for Meganman (specifically Meagan Zero) like characters/design. The pose is rad but I think could be pushed a bit more. 

A quick mock up to ball park what I mean.

I think just rotation the lower torso/hips more towards the direction she is pointing the gun gives it a more "darting" and energetic feel. Also prosing the hands (maybe even into a fist) would add more life to the character.

As for the black spots, that could definitely be a normal map issue or even just a normals issue. I doubt there are weird flipped normals there or something (there would probably be see-thru and not black if that were the case). I'd put my money on the the colors of the normal map in those areas are wrong (valued to be facing a different direction or just completely muddied). Maybe throw your normal map up?

Cool stuff!

nnode

Thanks for the feedback chaselt! Yeah I was trying to hit a nice action pose while retaining a bit of feminine elegance, but heeey in retrospect I could've definitely pushed it way more like your mock-up there shows.

Anyhow, I'm going to play around with the normals/normal map and see if I can figure out a way to kind of control those black areas... might be a nice way to create a type of 3D lineweight without using the backface culling technique... hmmmmm...

j_swan

I don't have any critiques, just want to say it looks great and it's pure eye candy. yum.

nnode

Haha, thanks j_swan!

I'm basically done modelling the next hardsuit in the Bubblegum Crisis series, Nene's:






Will UV her up, pop her into ZBrush for a highres and get her textured before too long... gogo!

nnode

Reviving this sketchbook after a fairly long hiatus. The unitZero8 era is at an end and now we're in the age of polydesu. Over the last 2 years I started shifting more towards real-time environments, but I might dust off my unfinished Bubblegum Crisis series for a third time, haha. Anyhow I started with a new environment a weekend or two ago and thought it might be good to document the progress here. General concept is an ice planet on which some mineral is getting extracted as part of some terraforming operation. For now the focus is just on the planet while I get used to World Machine and landscapes in UE4.

This is my first time attempting to make my own terrain with World Machine, so apart from the built-in samples and a quick tutorial I have no idea what I'm doing (any help/tips/advice will be really appreciated). Here's the height output with a basic texture overlay:

And here's the height output as viewed in UE4:

And then I went back to figure out how to actually get some sort of material setup working in UE4:

I'm still pretty much a pleb when it comes to UE4, so I'm going to spend some time figuring out how to set up a proper landscape material for at least some height blending between rock and snow. The textures are also just quick temp textures I got from Substance Source. Will replace with my own at some point. That's it for now I guess...

nnode

So I got a few things figured out to enhance the landscape material in UE4. I've got it set up as a 4 layer blend (blends material functions for rock, snow, melting snow and a mineral layer that's currently hidden under the frozen water plane in the hole, haha). Each material function includes a distance based tiling blend and a base colour macro to further break up repetition. It's starting to lean a bit on the heavy side of things though, so I'll probably simplify it. Anyhow, here's the current landscape:

The blending is being annoying at the moment, especially the blobby appearance on the slopes. I'm guessing it's either that my weight maps from World Machine are bad, or my height maps aren't good enough to get a decent transition (especially from snow to rock).

Guess I'll just have to experiment some more...

Eric Chadwick

You might want to make the rock height map use a lower-frequency pattern. That will make the blending show chunkier details. You can also mix low- and high-freq details in the same height map. Worth a few tests!

nnode

Thanks a bunch @Eric Chadwick ! So as I was trying to apply your advice I noticed that my height maps are actually being disregarded completely, haha. The landscape layers are set to no weight-blend and the layers in the landscape layer blend node are set to LB Height Blend, so I'm guessing i messed up something in the material functions for each surface... That little bit of high-frequency blending detail between the layers somehow came from the macro map.

Think I'm going to create a simpler basic 2 blend material for rock and snow to troubleshoot what's going on...