WXS-07 'Depopulator'
high dynamic range
EDIT: please refer here to the clone thread link at ZbrushCentral as photobucket fucked me. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?200015-WXS-07-Depopulator
This is a personal project I've been working on - on and off - for the last couple of months. When I started it was with the aim of creating an entire hard-surface character completely in Zbrush without falling back on the 3dsMax crutch.
I found an interesting concept by Jerad Marantz, and decided to go with it. It's just a single front perspective sketch so I had to design/improvise the rest.
I'm just going to use this thread as a kind of progress report/process on how I created the project. I thought it might be of interest to any beginners or lurkers.
The original character is a 'Marauder' from the Thor universe, so as the initial challenge turned to a full-blown project the character background evolved. There are several Latin derivitives of the word marauder: preadator, and the word I chose for the character, depopulator. So this led to the background story........(which is always a good idea as it often drives your design decisions)
It is the cliched near-future. Earth's population has tripled again, and is untenable. Governments have banded together to brainstorm on a 'final solution'.........Sci-Corp win the lucrative contract....
Sci-Corp Industries has been commissioned to engineer a depopulation strategy with little allowance for liberal footnotes. A drastic measure has been devised: 7 foot tall, genetically engineered mutant-cyborgs!
Enter WXS-07(weaponised-xtreme-system) - cognomen Depopulator. Latest prototype.
I started with a pre-built basemesh and just pulled the forms around to define the silhouette. This initial 'clay' can be anything really, a sphere, a Zsphere, whatever. It's not important as I'm just looking for the initial forms/silhouette. Then it's on to Dynamesh concept sculpting.
I just use the basic brushes in the image above plus snakehook and a variation in the clay brushes.
It's mostly just carving/building out forms, sketching placeholders, and pulling things around. The process
is loose and at no time am I being too precious or needlessly noodling on specific parts, which just stunts
the process and wastes time needlessly. This is just the concept and will eventually be retopologised
for the clean, final result.
More to follow soon.....
This is a personal project I've been working on - on and off - for the last couple of months. When I started it was with the aim of creating an entire hard-surface character completely in Zbrush without falling back on the 3dsMax crutch.
I found an interesting concept by Jerad Marantz, and decided to go with it. It's just a single front perspective sketch so I had to design/improvise the rest.
I'm just going to use this thread as a kind of progress report/process on how I created the project. I thought it might be of interest to any beginners or lurkers.
The original character is a 'Marauder' from the Thor universe, so as the initial challenge turned to a full-blown project the character background evolved. There are several Latin derivitives of the word marauder: preadator, and the word I chose for the character, depopulator. So this led to the background story........(which is always a good idea as it often drives your design decisions)
It is the cliched near-future. Earth's population has tripled again, and is untenable. Governments have banded together to brainstorm on a 'final solution'.........Sci-Corp win the lucrative contract....
Sci-Corp Industries has been commissioned to engineer a depopulation strategy with little allowance for liberal footnotes. A drastic measure has been devised: 7 foot tall, genetically engineered mutant-cyborgs!
Enter WXS-07(weaponised-xtreme-system) - cognomen Depopulator. Latest prototype.
I started with a pre-built basemesh and just pulled the forms around to define the silhouette. This initial 'clay' can be anything really, a sphere, a Zsphere, whatever. It's not important as I'm just looking for the initial forms/silhouette. Then it's on to Dynamesh concept sculpting.
I just use the basic brushes in the image above plus snakehook and a variation in the clay brushes.
It's mostly just carving/building out forms, sketching placeholders, and pulling things around. The process
is loose and at no time am I being too precious or needlessly noodling on specific parts, which just stunts
the process and wastes time needlessly. This is just the concept and will eventually be retopologised
for the clean, final result.
More to follow soon.....
Replies
And I also used the slice curve/Zremesh method for some parts
Creating the arms was just a matter of drawing out the parts with the curvetubes brush and using move topological(or mask by polygroups) to tweak the layout. Then I deleted the backfacing geo for easy unwrap and added extra detail using Zmodeler.
For the interlocking armour sections I created a simple insert mesh brush and positioned them the same.
Here's another piece done using simple Zsphere topo and Zmodeler to add detail:
And the final sculpted result below. Because I used a combination of Zbrush detailing and Substance Painter normal map detailing it was
important to set up a workflow that resulted in sculptable topology that was fast to achieve for each piece(nearly 40 in all) and avoided
unnecessary complex manual retop that wouldn't have served as good sculptable topology unless a lot of time was taken to build it to
suit sculpting. Plus as the pieces were built with no backfaces/thickness this makes it much easier to unwrap(all of which was done
directly in UVMaster) Lastly I decimated with 'keep UVs' checked and the asset is ready for texture painting.
And here:
Early in the process of turning the rough concept sculpt into finished pieces I began working on the head sculpt. The head started life as a trusty sphere, and was then dynameshed.
Usually as a sculpt progresses I will work at a very low-res most of the way through, Zremeshing when I can't get the forms I want with the topology I have. I always work low like this and only go up to a higher res when refining the forms and adding tertiary details. I see a lot of beginners in Zbrush
jumping up to a ridiculous high-res when they haven't even got the basic forms in place. My rule of thumb - both for hardsurface modeling and organic sculpting - is : only add geometry when you can't get the forms with the geometry you currently have. The great thing about Zbrush is that the tools and
workflow work so non-destructively that you can change or revert this stuff any time you want, duplicating subtools and re-projecting all day long.
As the back part of the head was going to be under the helmet it didn't need the same density for sculpting, but I still wanted geometry
there for SSS shading/lighting in the final render, This is where polypaint density comes in handy.
was being compressed .
When sculpting organics I have a few matcaps that I switch between, and I will always use the Basic material as it reacts to Zbrush's interactive
light. I can't stress how important this is when sculpting as a lot of the matcaps won't give you a true representation of your sculpt. Sculpting
is essentially manipulating how light and shadow falls on your sculpt. So it is imperative the light is constantly moved around to check how the forms
react.
This is one of the best things for me about the Keyshot bridge. It allows me to instantly check my forms under true, physical 3D lighting.
As for the concept of this... I'll be honest and say without the description/back story provided, you wouldn't be able to tell this character is somewhat under human influence... mainly because I guess people would assume if a human built a freaky ass cyborg to contain over population on the planet... they probably would have built something a little more relative to human features itself... but that aside I won't knit pick on that since it's just an idea... what I would want to knit pick on is that the design itself doesn't quite support the backstory as it generally looks like it's an alien in a EXO Suit which would fit the description of a villain looking to dominate this galaxy.
My suggestion is maybe have a few more elements to the design that explain and support the purpose of this character... If it's supposed to be on the evil side of humanity (I'm assuming so please forgive me if I misunderstood your plot) then add some relative to bonds traits e.g.... In any story and almost every futuristic story.. america is the leading front for it, so maybe even some USA flag or army/government prints or elements would be of use... maybe a army dog tag print or something similar (don't quote me) it's just some random ideas to help you think of something else haha.
Other than that I wouldn't say there's much else I'd critique on atm... execution looks good so far (Y)
As the character is fully modeled/textured already and this is more of a post project writeup I will say that I've textured him in a military style, replete with insignia, so we're in sync on this one.
@Amsterdam Hilton Hotel Haha! Yes, he does look like somebody just burnt his toast alright. Thanks for the comment.
the parts were all single-sided geometry(no thickness) I didn't in this case - as each part had its own texture sheet - but
the UVs from UVmaster can easily be tweaked/scaled/normalised/combined/etc in your 3D application later on.
Then I hit a complete spell of indecision on the colour scheme I wanted to go for. I tormented myself and became obsessed to the point of abandoning the project for nearly 2 months as I was not sure what direction in which to take the colouring!! There is so much well-known sci-fi work out there with easily recognisable and iconic colour schemes that this was a much harder decision than I thought. Eventually I settled on the scheme below, having tested the good old orange/white/grey scheme.....the black/red theme.....the blue/yellow theme....and a few others.(another fantastic bonus of SP:trial and error/iteration/realtime colour scheme brainstorming;) ) The military drab olive/yellow/black(and tiny hints of orange, later) worked well for me in the end, I feel. So that 2 months lost wasn't procrastination, it was research, dammit!
As crazy/compulsive/ocd as this may seem to some, this was probably the most important point in the project for me and I just refused to continue until I was 100% on the scheme. If you're going to give many, many hours of your life to a personal project, don't rush it. You'll only do it once so make it count.
The primary reason for the choice of rendering in Vray was Substance Painter. As I had the character fully UV-ed, I thought it would be a great opportunity to run the entire lot through SP and see what comes out. Plus I wanted to see what the high-poly workflow would be like and also an excuse to play with the SP Vray export preset. Here's an early look-dev test with the first iteration of the smart material to test the export preset and set up the basic shader in Vray. This is just with a few base layers and some blocking out/masking.
And also, a major plus for the texturing/rendering in Vray Vs material render pass comping in something like Keyshot is that you're not locked to a camera view, so you can set up the shot from any perspective and have all that texture detailing for free;) whereas in the other workflow you have to recomp/repaint from scratch for every illustration.
This was a smart material that I built up from scratch in SP. The beauty of it was that I could build this template material and run all the other assets through it, ensuring consistency throughout.(as I think I mentioned earlier there are nearly 40 different armour parts) and because all the parts were still high-poly I couldn't just bring them all in to SP together. But with the smart material I wouldn't have to as I knew it would work seamlessly on all the parts. I'll post up the material tree in a later post.
Some more Substance Painter screengrabs:
And another early Vray look-dev test:
So by now I'm sure you can see the benefit of creating/using smart materials. Think of texturing an entire game like this, ensuring consistency across all assets with the same material theme. And also the ability to change the colour scheme/dirt/grime/scratches very quickly by just tweaking or enabling/disabling layers.
more SP pics, a comparison pic from SP viewport to Vray render.....and a shameless plug for a Gumroad tutorial I put together when I finished the texturing........replete with cheesy promo.
And here you can see the normal map details painted to a map directly in Substance Painter. This workflow(and using the heightmaps from ZB) eliminates the need to create floating geometry for baking details to normal maps.
This is a popular approach to painting skin/organics and comes from the traditional sculpting/silicon mask-making techniques. Layering on the skin tones using different tones for different regions. This gradual building up of many layers can give quite a natural look and is a quite enjoyable process.
I painted an epidermal(top layer) and subdermal(tissue below the surface of the skin layer) map, which were piped into the Vray skin material.
I also experimented with painting a base reflection map(mostly derived from an AO/cavity/SSS map ripped from 3dsMax's Render Surface Map tools) which I then duplicated and adjusted in PS for the glossiness map.
This way you can pretty much get instant feedback on the results. Although I have come to realise that Substance Painter is pretty much a WYSIWYG environment and towards the end I was confident that the results in the Painter viewport are practically 1:1 with Vray. This ends up saving a lot of time as the test render phase can be a long.....long step in a project.
And finally I can see how it's all coming together. I often 'printscreen' renders and paste them to PS for quick adjstments/paintovers
as this can lead to new ideas, or inspiration.
I looked into your YouTube Channel and i want to ask you if there will be a complete Hard Surface Tutorial soon, maybe on Gumroad?
I really want to learn more about zBrush and Hard Surface and im searching for dat right Tutorial with normal speed, where everything is explained and commented. The most tutorials are speeded up or without comments and this is really bad.
A step by step tutorial for a hard surface mesh/robot in zbrush would be awesome and i would pay for it
I like the Mecha Blockout Bust in your HardSurface Video :
Something like this but completely done with all details
But yes, I understand, Zbrush can seem a bit crazy to those of us used to modeling in our traditional 3d packages. I've been using ZB for organics for years but only seriously started to study the hard-surface workflow in the last year or so. It definitely took me a while to get a comfortable workflow going with my 3dsMax mindset. Now with GoZ(and as of today the bridge tool Styx) I pretty much just treat Max/ZB as a single toolset rather than thinking of them as separate packages. This allows for serious modeling options. It's amazing how quickly you can achieve some modeling tasks in ZB, and when coupled with Max's modeling tools....
Anyway, I definitely have a few more Gumroad tutorial courses in mind for the near future. A step-by-step, real-time, narrated mech bust is another I'll certainly consider adding to the list.
A complete Mech Bust from Start to Finish would be great
Yeah, i learned a lot 3DSMAX but i think some things could be done faster and easier in zBrush, for example curved hard surface with a lot of details. Thats the reason why i want to learn zBrush Hard Surface
There are some great Robots.
I like these a lot:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6Bdax
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JbxVZ
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DdewO
So once I had completed all the modeling/texturing, and had everything assembled in 3dsMax, I realised that this bloke definitely needed some sort of base, or platform. So it was back to Zbrush again for some more hard-surface action...
So I set about building one. The elements were created in Zbrush/3dsMax, and the scene assembled in 3dsMax. About 10% of the geo in the scene is kit-bashed from a Vitaly set and Zbrush IM brushes.
The great thing about building a cylindrical environment is that it's so useful to be able to 'steal' shapes from the topology. All the pipes are spline shapes extracted from the main set so they already in place, and as they are editable splines I could make use of this powerful toolset in max. Also, any object can have it's pivot aligned to the main set and be clone-rotated for perfect placement very easily.
I did a quick unwrap on the main set element and created a texture that would be enough to do its job in the final illustration.
And bearing in mind that this is a background prop, this is good enough. Spend time where you need it.
The character was saved out as a Vray Proxy for the final stages of rendering
Call it impatience....:) but it's great to be able to get ahead of yourself and try out different ideas just like sketching. No matter how crap it looks, as nobody will ever see it......oh!....wait!.....too late....
EDIT: anyone know how to post full res images? PC is rescaling.
edit: okay just checked your artstation for the other renders, That texture work is something else, and i get it that you want to showcase every bit of detail, but a render with a more dramatic atmosphere would work really well in my opinion, a some smoke and dust and a darker lighting.
Thanks for the inspiration, and looking forward for more