The Maltese Falcon Sculpt WIP [Zbrush]

9Solid

I've dabbled in many sculpting programs. Mudbox first, and a little later, sculptris. But I've always struggled picking up Zbrush. The ui wasn't intuitive like mudbox, and most of the time I had to try and learn it, I was on a deadline where spending time figuring it out wasn't really an option. Finally I set time aside to really delve into it, and I honestly love the program. My first sculpture is the Maltese Falcon, from one of my favorite movies. 

The point of this thread is to get some critiques on the sculpture, as well as detail my process as I retopologize and texturing the model. Further on I could possibly create an environment to put it in, but I'm just going to focus on the bird for now.

First a few references. There are a lot of different versions of the Maltese Falcon out there. From cheap replicas, to fan made projects and Fred Sexton's sculpture from the original film. I wasn't dedicated to making the original falcon, instead I pulled design elements from various sources to create mine.


This falcon was great for being able to use front and side & back references to block out the basic shape of the bird.


Loved the eyes and beak of this one. Really wanted the beak to have the chiseled hard edge.


Not really a fan of the look fof this falcon. The separate beak, small eyes, soft-edged holes. But the talons, the talons are pretty dope. 


This bird helped immensly with the detail of the wings, back and back of the head.

Finally, my sculpt.



Overall I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. I may make some changes, like the upper back of the wings could use more definition and the feathers behind the feet could be improved. 



I have been using zspheres for retopologizing it and am learning as I go, really. I may go back and make those changes I mentioned before I get too far though.

Kaine123

I might reduce the size of the cheeks a bit. even if it's less accurate, the big cheeks seem a bit goofy 

9Solid

Noted. Haha, I actually like the poofiness of the cheeks. Like a squirel with nuts in its mouth. But I toned them down a little.

9Solid

Updates!



I finished the lowpoly retopology using zspheres and exported the mesh into maya. As you can see there are a couple of holes from missed connections in the face and between the front talons, but I decided to fix that in maya instead. 





Once in maya I proceeded clean up the geometry and work on the smoothing groups. Hardening the bottoms of feathers, around the nails and the eyes and beak to add definition. I also UV'd him. Next up, baking the normal map and tossing it into substance painter.

gfelton

The big cheeks really remind of the movie Chicken Run I used to watch when I was little. Really gives him a cartoony look that I don't think you were going for. 

9Solid

So I baked the normal map in xnormal but quickly found out while messing about in substance painter that I was going to need to re UV my model. It didn't seem too noticable at first, but in painting the falcon, the neck seams really stuck out. After reuving it, putting the seam down the back of the head, I was able to hide it a little better.



There's a little bit of noise at the top of the head from the render, which I did right in Substance Painter, but overall I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It wasn't a very complex material to make. Being an almost black diffuse color, I also used different procedural images, basically gray and black noise, in the roughness map to show a little tarnish and a more interesting surface. Finally I added cuts, chips and dings to the normal map to really make it look like something that's been dropped, carried and fought over.

snoop

Try flipping the Y/Green channel of your normal map before re-uving, or rather, in substance painter, switch it from DirectX to OpenGL or vice versa. Often it'll have flipped green channels, and that typically makes seams appear... but honestly looking at the whole thing, the green channel looks flipped.

9Solid

Flipping the green channel wasn't the issue, but switching from DirextX to OpenGL totally fixed my seam issue! This was after I reuved it, of course.
I messed around a little more with IRay to try and get some nice shots of the bird. I rendered it with shadows, but the ground is all done with a photoshop gradient. It has an old movie vibe that I'm pretty happy with, and I let them render for a little more to get rid of the noise.