Grommash Hellscream WIP - Zbrush/Hand-painted
interpolator
Most recent progress:
Original post:
Hey guys!It's been entirely too long since I've made a personal piece. I spent a lot of my free time taking courses over the past couple of years, so I figured it's time to put that new knowledge into practice by making a character!
I'll be trying out the Zbrush sculpt to hand-painted diffuse workflow for this, which I haven't done before. My usual workflow is to go straight to lowpoly and hand-paint that. I've had the opportunity to sculpt a few characters at work though, so this will be a fun project to really push those skills to the next level.
Anyway, I'm totally jumping on the orc bandwagon like a little fangirl, and started working on a Grommash Hellscream.
I'll mainly be going off of this concept from Warlords of Draenor: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2167961/Grommash_Hellscream.jpg
The goal will be to make the final character look as closely to a painted concept as possible. I will not be holding back in terms of polycount or texture budgets. I really want to see how far I can push a hand-painted character with this.
So without much further ado, here's the base body so far. Progress is very early, right now I'm just establishing the proportions and main muscle forms. Any comments are very welcome! I intend to learn a lot on this project, so do not hesitate to tell me if I derped.
Replies
How did you separate the head from the body in level of detail?
As for the level of detail on the body and head, it's simply a continuous base mesh. However, as the edges of the torso and shoulders converge into the neck, it gets relatively denser.
This is what it looks like at the lowest division. I like to keep my base meshes as low as possible. I actually just started this from a generic male base mesh, and I'm surprised it held up fairly well, considering how far I had to stretch out the mouth and ears.
Succes landgenoot ; )
and a great start overall, the head looks really weird from the side view though.
@lotet :What about the head do you think looks weird from the side view? Is it the overall anatomy, or is it how the tusk appears to graze the face? If it's the latter, unfortunately I don't think that can be helped. If I move the tusks in or out a little, they will simple graze the face again at a slightly different angle.
This is where the face is currently at.
its not really anatomy or anything like that, I just feel its not really look as orcy as the front view, its really hard to explain, I hope this paintover illustrates what I mean
Here's a close-up shot of the face that I've been using as my main reference: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2167961/1280x720-TPi.jpg
The concept is from the front, ofcourse, so the side view is up for some interpretation. However, you can still readily see he does have a high forehead and dome, not small and sloped like your version. You can also see that the angle of the jaw appears to be very small in comparison to the chin.
I had matched the jawline and other features to the concept as best as I could (save for some asymmetry which I haven't added yet). Here's a GIF anim showing that:
For the side view, I took some cues from the Blizzcon statue sculpted by Steve Wang and his team: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2167961/1556227_836575399720990_2307815161829160210_o.jpg
I didn't go out of my way to match the Blizzcon statue exactly, since I mainly want it to look like the concept. However, you can see on that version that the nose isn't hooked, his brow is not that deep and the angle of the jaw is indeed very small, perhaps surprisingly so.
I do really appreciate the feedback, but in this case it's not what I had in mind for the character. Sorry about that!
@SveinY : Thanks! I plan on adding asymmetry when I get to the next division level. As for the neck, I tried to match it to the concept, as you can see in the above image, but I might fiddle around with it and see how it looks.
@tomenjerry : Dank je wel! I think he will look more angry when I get the brow detail in with some asymmetry. I do want to keep it semi-neutral, though, since this is basically the "default" expression.
@MadGunslinger : Thank you! Hopefully I can live up to your expectations. XD
@tda : Thanks! I'm a dudette, btw. ^_^
@wrigglybear : Thank you!
@Pixelatedkiwi : I'm glad you like it so far! It was actually your War character that filled me with the overwhelming urge to put on hold the art course I was taking, and start on my own character instead. :proud:
@lotet : I made some adjustments, probably not enough for your liking, but I definitely wanted to make sure the front view lines up with the concept still. The various versions of him are different in execution and don't necessarily match up. The main version I want to capture is the concept art, and the rest I just use as general inspiration.
I got more work in on the anatomy. It's not at final detail yet, but getting closer. I decided to detail the entire body, even if much of it is going to be covered by clothing. It's a good opportunity to get some anatomy practice in, which you can never do enough of! Especially legs and feet... can't skip leg day!
i had some pointers about the legs and started on a paintover before i read your latest post... so i guess you're already aware of my critique i have for you lol!
since i already made it, i though it wouldn't hurt to post it anyway
(i'm by no means an anatomy expert so don't rely on my feedback completely!!)
my concerns are:
the quads looks "melty" - like it's running down the knee.
also, the tibia muscle looks bent witch makes the bone also look bent, i think...
(i hope this was somewhat helpful)
anyway, it will be really interesting to hear your opinion on this texture painting workflow because i have never tried it either!!!
As for the "melty" vastus medialis, I did get that from my anatomy reference. It's probably a unique variation, because it only shows up on the left leg, but I thought it looked pretty cool.
Reference from: http://www.3dscanstore.com/
I highly recommend it for any character artist!
just to be clear; i did not think it looked "incorrect", just unusual.
if it's an artistic choice, you should go for it!!
Where is your 3D portfolio, if you don't mind me asking? I saw you pixelart, which is great, but I'd like to see more of your 3D as well.
@Mateus : I'm looking to rebuild a 3D portfolio starting with this character. There's some recent stuff I did at work I would show, but it's still under NDA. Any work older than that I don't care to show, as it's no longer representative of my current skills.
These are not final expressions. For one, I didn't touch the eyes and brow at all. They are just rough tests to make sure the mouth construction makes enough anatomical sense for it to support proper facial animation. I also didn't add any extra detail or asymmetry yet, as I wanted to make sure this worked before pouring a lot of detail into the face.
I have been working on the teeth and gums. I did my best to get close-fitting functional bite, despite the natural underbite. In humans, if there is even 3mm of spacing between the upper and lower teeth, you start speaking with a lisp and have trouble eating. I wouldn't want Grom to be drooling all over himself, so to have a semblance of normal function, I opted to make the entire upper row of teeth the smaller row. The teeth interlock normally otherwise, just in reverse, basically. It was pretty tricky to make sure that the pointy upper canines don't pierce the gums of the lower jaw on the inside, and also to get the tusks to fit without overly huge gaps. I had to drop some molars to make space for those big tusks.
I may have been overthinking this, but that's what makes it fun, right? XD
And here's what it looks like with the head. I didn't have time to do the detail pass on the face yet, so feel free to ignore that part! It does show the changes I made to the side profile, so hopefully that looks better. I also added the piercings, because I wanted to get those in before starting on the face details.
Anyway, I'll be going on a holiday shortly, so I won't have access to my digital art tools for a couple of weeks. I'll probably do some sketches instead, so I can figure out some parts that aren't clear from the concept.
Do you get this feeling with the Blizzard Orc facial anatomy, it's generally a human head and muscles that are adjusting for the huge teeth and jaw, so there's no "new" invented muscles? Like on just forceing the nasiolabial fold to be stretched instead of inventing a new form to deal with the teeth?
I generally really like the direction that Blizzard has taken recently with their orcs, specifically in the Warlords of Dreanor cinematic and the Warcraft movie as well, ofcourse. I think they look a lot more realistic being based off of human anatomy, and it makes sense, because when you look at comparative anatomy, the musculature is surprisingly similar in all mammals.
I also think basing it off of human anatomy helps a lot with making orcs that look genuinely expressive in animation, since we are so in tune with how a human face emotes. I love how they did this for the cinematic orcs. It makes them very relatable and not just some dumb beast.
Thinking about how skin would behave, I imagine you'd definitely get a large nasolabial fold stretched around the teeth. It seems to make bio-mechanical sense to me. I didn't really stretch muscles around when working on this. Instead, I thought about the muscle's origins and insertions, as well as their angles of pull, and what directions you'd want the lips and the corners of the mouth to be able to move. I also thought about how the skin would pucker as a result of those muscles pulling. A lot of that is described in Scott Eaton's facial anatomy course, which I took last year.
There are many renditions of orcs that have very boxy or otherwise unrealistic heads, with incorrect facial planes and no apparent anatomy. And to me, that looks invented, rather than a real creature.
Please note though that I didn't fully finalize the face yet. It still needs more detail and asymmetry. Also, I didn't touch the eye and nose area when making the open mouth pose, since it was just a test to see if the mouth would open properly. To make it look like a proper roar, I would need to furrow the brow, add wrinkling around the eyes, and add the nose wrinkles that you'd get in a snarling expression.
So far, I blocked out the hair. I also added some additional anatomical features. I figured that if I'm going to turn this into a full anatomy study, I might as well go all the way. I suppose it was a good thing too, as I ended up revising a much wider area around it to make things fit properly.
That said, I'm not sure if I should consider showing the full base body. I could definitely use some community input on that.
At least in terms of scene scale, he's not short. I set the eyeball to be human-sized (25mm in diameter with a 12mm iris). As shown earlier in the thread, I matched facial proportions to the concept by overlaying them, and then I matched the body proportions in the same way.
Using the eyeball as a size reference like that, the character comes in at 220cm, or 7'3". That's 20 cm (8 inches) taller than the player orcs in WoW, according to this neat little chart: http://i.imgur.com/kGTo4Fj.jpg
Here's how I measured when I was establishing the proportions of the base mesh:
On a random side note, with the scene set to real-world units, it's pretty funny to take measurements to find out how big the character really is. For instance, his hand is twice as long and three times as wide as a normal human one. His shoulder width is more than a meter, he'd have to go through the door sideways!
And here's what it looks like with the hair blockout. I wanted to get the rough volumes around the head in place before detailing the face, to get a better idea of how the likeness is coming along.
Edit: Something I have noticed is that his nose on the concept and the cinematic (WoD) is less defined on the bone part (nasal bone). On the concept It seems thicker/meaty. Might be nitpicking though.
@Mateus : Way more than I'd like to admit! Around 16 hours. I'm more used to working with mobile budgets and the only characters I've sculpted were a lot simpler and more stylized. I'm really pushing myself to sculpt this to a detail level I haven't done before, but as a result, it's taking a lot of time. I'd like to think of it as study time more than production time, really.
You're correct about the nose. It was an artistic decision on my part to define the bone more. I also made some changes to the brow compared to the concept.
Orcs will always be cool : )
looks like him in that last render too
Will follow this
@Brian : Thank you, although I suggest you get the info from the source! I very much recommend these courses for your anatomy studying purposes: http://www.scott-eaton.com/
On a side note, I'm still not sure whether it's okay to post the uncensored version of the base body. My main concern is that Blizzard might take issue with such a revealing rendition of their character, especially when posted on a major game art forum.
Ofcourse, I could take out the character's name from the image, as well as the most obvious identifying markers, such as the piercings and tattoos. I could even crop out the head from the image entirely. But it would still be easily identifiable simply from the comparison with the other pictures I posted.
Any community input on this would be great, especially from those at Blizzard!
A close-up of the hands. All this effort and he's gonna wear gloves.
I made an effort not to get lazy with the feet. Scott Eaton pointed out on his anatomy course that feet are an often understudied subject, so I had to make sure I didn't make that mistake.