Natalia's Art corner
ngon master
Decided to edit this thread in order to showcase all the projects I start or complete in here!
As always, critique and feedback is welcome!
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This is a project I started six months ago and had been lying around my drive since then! I finally managed to finish it, working on it for these last couple of weeks after work. As I mention on Artstation, there are lots of things I would improve if I redid it from 0, specially on the sculpt, but since that wasn't an option I just tried to improve it as much as I could.
They're a couple of realtime models, a Zabrak jedi master and a Twi'lek (My favourite star wars specie!) padawan girl. I had a blast working on it since I love Star Wars. I think that after all, the theme is what motivated me to finish it.
Here's the artstation link (With some more images) if you're interested! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XNKga
Thanks for reading, critiques welcome!
Cheers
Nat
As always, critique and feedback is welcome!
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This is a project I started six months ago and had been lying around my drive since then! I finally managed to finish it, working on it for these last couple of weeks after work. As I mention on Artstation, there are lots of things I would improve if I redid it from 0, specially on the sculpt, but since that wasn't an option I just tried to improve it as much as I could.
They're a couple of realtime models, a Zabrak jedi master and a Twi'lek (My favourite star wars specie!) padawan girl. I had a blast working on it since I love Star Wars. I think that after all, the theme is what motivated me to finish it.
Here's the artstation link (With some more images) if you're interested! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XNKga
Thanks for reading, critiques welcome!
Cheers
Nat
Replies
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4kvK2
I'm really enjoying doing Star Wars characters. Originally I had another character idea in mind but then I remembered how badass this guy looked and decided to model him instead. He was played by three different actors so the looks and even the design vary between the three films; I tried to mix them all while changing his cloth's colors into something with more dark vibes (He's Palpatine's accomplice, after all). As with the jedis, I had so much fun doing this I'll probably be doing another Star Wars character in the future!
I really like how much weight and expression your characters have
Will be following to make sure not to miss your new stuff
Worked a bit more on these guys, still rough!
I got stuck on the warg's texturing, so here's another project I started to refresh my mind from it
Some kind of spider-woman based on one of my old concepts. I want her to look sexy but deadly at the same time, as if she could lure her prey with charm to then devour it horribly!
Still don't know how will I approach the texturing on this one. Guess I'll use Painter.
This week, I finished the human part's retopo. They were done in topogun:
For the spider part I used zremesher for everything but the legs (Big and small) and horns, which were done on topogun as well.
I did a little polypainting to get a possible direction for the texturing
Very rough, but I kind of like the dark red tones and tattoos. Also did some crown of deer horns to make her look a bit more tribal, like a witch of the wilds.
Once I UVd the body I projected some skin detail on Zbrush with displacement maps I had previously done in Mari
And then I... Got stuck!
The texturing part is always the most difficult step for me. I keep trying things but none of them actually produce a result I'm comfortable with. I tried doing a realistic face projection in Mari, but then switched to Substance Painter.
This is the first pass of the texture
Not having a solid pipeline isn't cool!
I'll keep trying things until I get a result I like.
Thanks for reading! Oh, and feel free to give me any feedback or tips! Thanks
Nat
I'll keep working on it!
Cheers!
EDIT: Noticed she is missing nipples though, odd.
alien nipples sounds interesting but i think just follow the human/spider thing you have already and also to have consistency maybe wise just to have normal every day nipples.
@Nuclear Angel I totally agree and had already that in mind, seeing how faceted the silohuette ended looking in Marmoset. I'll definitely add some loops here and there.
@JamesMeader Thanks! I planned to do some tattoos on her arm (Something tribal-ish, with words and symbols). I just finished the test I'm attaching down this post, which is a first pass of the concept (Still don't know if I'll keep the design). I also added some scars, though they're smaller and at random places. May play with the scarification concept if I feel the tattoos don't work!
@o0_themilkybarkid_0o Thank you! You can see a wireframe of the woman's body if you scroll up a bit. Regarding the spider body, it's nothing special, the abdomen and butt were zremeshed and the rest of parts, which are super simple, were done by hand
Here's another little update:
Added nipples (Hope it's alright to show them? :O) And tribal tattoos. Added some dirt as well, scars, general imperfections, and changed the part where it fuses with the spider body.
I'll keep working on it!
-Nat
Can't wait to see the finished piece
http://nudes.cz/models/preview/121/6521/trailer.jpg
Don't click the above link if you're offended by nudity.
EDIT: Work it into the normal map if you haven't.
Here's another update. I added more geometry to the body and worked on the hair.
I finally decided to get rid of the nipples, as I don't want to tag it as mature content. I've worked a bit more on the body's textures, but have been mainly doing the hair.
I still need to cover some spots with alpha cards, texture the diffuse and work on the union with the head, but this is how it's looking so far. I don't know if I'll finally model her a crown, I'm liking this hairstyle as it is!
As usual, feel free to comment if you have any feedback! Thank you!
Nat
Love how the eyes and skin looks, very creepy!
Love what you are doing with the hair also (does needs more work to connect the side braids to the scalp which you mentionned)
I definitly agree you could add every more polygones to her overall, you can still feel the polygons on her ear especially, her chin and the bottom of her breast.
Looking forward to see more
Can't wait to see more stuff from you
So the hair's simple breakdown would be this:
1 - The base head, with projected hair where it fuses with the geometry hair (Still need to work on it, looks like crap atm)
2 - A very rough base hair, done with simple geometry. Mainly done to fill gaps (Covering everything in alpha cards would be messy and heavy). As it is not an important part I mirrored the texture of the big mass of hair and the dreads (Top of the head was still too important). Then, textured entirely on Substance with a fur material, so I get the normal and everything from there. (Notice how you can see the texture's seam because of the mirroring)
3 - The braids. Braids projected into simple geometry and then placed by hand on max using various modifiers. So basically:
(UNRELATED. I have a lil doubt! I added some loops in max to fix the silohuette, as discussed above. But I already started the texturing. So I can't relax the loops, which, well, make the density look unbalanced, as seen on the arms. Any workarounds? If not, I'll leave the mesh as it is)
4 - The alpha cards. Done to achieve a lil bit more realism. The process is similar to the braid's:
You do a plane with your desired size, UV it, then bring it to Zbrush, draw hair strands into it with curve brushes, delete the plane, export the hair strands as your Highpoly mesh, and bake them into the plane. I do several variations because sometimes you need a single hair, or a bunch of little ones. Here's a gif with some of my variations: http://i.imgur.com/lpk1Jvp.gifv . Once you've baked the planes, you can add more loops to them, change their shape a bit or size if you wish, and then place them by hand on your model, as with the braids: using path deforms, FDD, bend modifiers... etc.
Hope that was useful, let me know if there's something I didn't explain clearly/you don't understand.
On a side note, I just started doing a spider I planned to add as an ambient creature. Planned to add lots of them, actually. Small spiders everywhere. But he ended up having a bit too much geometry for that, so I think I'll add one or two bigger ones instead.
I call him Spidy.
Cheers!
You could reimport the low res mesh over your high res mesh in a program like topogun and add additional topology, when you unwrap the model the uv islands will look pretty much identical and you could just put them over your diffuse texture again. Cumbersome but probably the best way to do it.
keep up the good work!
Just to clarify one thing about the braids (point 3). When you projected the detail onto the low poly, how would placing them in max exactly work while maintaining the highsubdiv detail? Wouldn't you be re-exporting the braids as their lowest subdivision level as an OBJ to max to place them, so you'd lose the projected detail which would be on higher subdivs right? The work flow I had in mind was; you place the high poly in zbrush, create the low poly (from the highpoly or manually), place them so both high and low are in the correct place, then bake. I mean this is what I'd do for everything that needs baking. Your method has me very curious!
I think spidy looks cute! I also think that only having a couple vs a lot of spidies might look more aesthetically pleasing so I think you made the right call! Maybe one could be like hanging from a web next to the spider ladies' head or sitting in her hand something hehe.
Thanks again for the long in-depth reply Natalia!
Regarding the braids: Once you bake the information on the low poly geometry, the only thing that is left is placing this low poly geometry in the areas you want it to be on your model. The workflow you mention is correct: You create your high poly on Zbrush, retopo it (On zbrush, topogun...), you UV it, you bake it (Both geometries are in the same place, since you retopoed directly on your high poly mesh), and then you bring this lowpoly geometry into your max scene and start placing clones on the head. You can import any of the bakes as diffuse and put it on the low poly geometry if you want to better visualize the detail.
I usually have Marmoset Toolbag open on my other monitor, with my model and materials configured, this way I can easily see how the scene is looking each time I do changes and save them.
Hope that was helpful!
@Snakes not really, like you I only work with the AO on Painter when doing organic characters, but It's useful to have the map nonetheless, just in case you need to tweak something in Photoshop (Never use Multiply, though!). It depends on the style, as well. If it's realistic most of the times I don't want shadow information on the skin's difuse, but for stylized projects it works well.
Anyways, Mrs. Spider is pretty much finished! Today I fooled around in Marmoset and made some beauty shots in a couple of different poses and lightnings. Here are some of the screenshots I took
I'll upload her into Arstation tomorrow with some more screens and maybe a turnaround, I'll keep working on the Marmoset scene during the day and see if I can make any more interesting shots. Oh, and also, she's currently being animated! Not by me, of course, but if any of the anims are ready for tomorrow I'll upload them as well.
Thanks for reading!
Nat
Here are some of the new screens (Nothing that you haven't seen!):
Aand here's the cool part! A little walking animation done by Juanma Cervilla and rendered on Toolbag 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORoGnLSL9Q
Hope ya like!
-Nat