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
I posted on the Allegorithmic forums yesterday, and today they contacted me and asked me to do an artist interview and feature the Substance Painter workflow, so I'm chuffed.
Not surprised at all, this thread would make a great marketing campaign for Substance Painter, i already started looking at tutorials and just might begin to try it out.
Also, just got a message from Paul Gaboury from Pixologic, who was watching this project at ZBC, asking me if I'd like to compete in the hard-surface sculpt-off at this year's Zsummit! Crazy. Almost makes all the hard work worth it...:)
My only thing I would have to say though is that the face really doesn't do it justice, All I keep seeing is a mix of bulldog and blobfish.
Not in a bad way that is, its just to me it seems it sticks out a bit and it feels like it's an area that has less sculptural information and texture information as it has a flat look.
Other than that, I really do think you have really pushed that render in a nice direction, although I do agree about the lighting.
Forgot to post this one(being doing this on 3 different sites simultaneously
I think the material values in your texture are too similar, which makes your grouping composition difficult to read. I would darken your black plating, set the green plating as your mid-range value, and brighten the white skin to help set each material grouping further apart - without going full black or white.
Nice work.
- Did the Decimation of the model give problems in Substance Painter when generating maps, like curvature?
- Did you use the decimated model in Vray? Since It's Mainy Hard surface I guess displacement was not a good option.
- And could you tell me some more about the pro's and cons of Substance vs MARI. I am really interested in MARI as an extra option in my workflow.
No, the deci meshes were fine. This used to be an issue in SP but I believe it's been resolved of late.
Yes, I used the deci meshes in Vray. Once I had all the shaders/look dev set up on each piece I grouped them all a a Vray proxy object.
Here's a good Mari discussion thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/169814/mari-non-commercial-free-3d-texture-painting-software/p1
F**king photobucket! My account is still active but I stopped using it as its become so slow and unusable due to ads. And now they must want to charge for offside hosting.
@gfelton cheers mate. I've officially severed ties with Photobucket.