[FINISHED] Dishonored 2 bust
greentooth
Hey polycounters !
I'm opening this wip thread to share my progress on a character bust. The concept I will be following is an artwork by Cédric Peyraverney for Dishonored 2. Anyone wishing to comment or critique my progress is most welcome
For this project I have three major objectives:
I also chose it for it's "simplicity", meaning there aren't 72 elements to model here. Therefore, I'll be able to take my time and give it the required polish while exploring new software. I'm not giving myself any deadline here since the goal is to learn and have fun.
Overall, I'm looking at all the Dishonored artwork to study how they treat anatomy and form. I'm also looking at the result in game to see how they translate it to 3D in both games. Clearly their process evolved from Dish1 to Dish2. It looks a lot less handpainted now. I'm also looking forward to discovering the character from the concept in game since I haven't seen her yet in the trailers.
One other thing I noticed is how much she looks like Tilda Swinton. I'm guessing she was the inspiration for this design. I'm also very excited for the Dishonored 2 to come out so I can take a closer look at the characters in game.
Here's my current progress after a few sessions. I've started from zbro's head basemesh to which I added a mouth cavity. I decided to quickly break symmetry because of how defining of a caracteristic it is to this character.
For the hair, I quickly blocked in a few strands which I matched to the concept view angle. Obviously, they don't work from the other angles so I'm going to have to tackle this soon. Hair is usually my pet peave so I want to make sure I resolve it asap instead of staying in my confort zone and polishing the face for too long.
Thanks for reading this and feel free to engage. If you have questions on my process, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have remarks and comments, don't be shy and help me grow
Cheers !
I'm opening this wip thread to share my progress on a character bust. The concept I will be following is an artwork by Cédric Peyraverney for Dishonored 2. Anyone wishing to comment or critique my progress is most welcome
For this project I have three major objectives:
- Uping my game in terms of technique. This will be my first PBR piece and it will be a great opportunity to tackle a number of subjects which are still alien to me (mainly, PBR workflow/software and hair cards).
- Finding the pleasure again. For too long I've been doing work because I felt I had to rather than because it was what I really enjoyed. Time for a change !
- Engaging with the community more. I have a tendancy of working on my stuff in an ascetic way and it's something I want to change. FB is great but clearly the people here are a lot more involved and this is something I'd like to be a part of.
I also chose it for it's "simplicity", meaning there aren't 72 elements to model here. Therefore, I'll be able to take my time and give it the required polish while exploring new software. I'm not giving myself any deadline here since the goal is to learn and have fun.
Reference
Overall, I'm looking at all the Dishonored artwork to study how they treat anatomy and form. I'm also looking at the result in game to see how they translate it to 3D in both games. Clearly their process evolved from Dish1 to Dish2. It looks a lot less handpainted now. I'm also looking forward to discovering the character from the concept in game since I haven't seen her yet in the trailers.
One other thing I noticed is how much she looks like Tilda Swinton. I'm guessing she was the inspiration for this design. I'm also very excited for the Dishonored 2 to come out so I can take a closer look at the characters in game.
Progress
Here's my current progress after a few sessions. I've started from zbro's head basemesh to which I added a mouth cavity. I decided to quickly break symmetry because of how defining of a caracteristic it is to this character.
For the hair, I quickly blocked in a few strands which I matched to the concept view angle. Obviously, they don't work from the other angles so I'm going to have to tackle this soon. Hair is usually my pet peave so I want to make sure I resolve it asap instead of staying in my confort zone and polishing the face for too long.
Thanks for reading this and feel free to engage. If you have questions on my process, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have remarks and comments, don't be shy and help me grow
Cheers !
Replies
What software you want to use for the texture ?
Only crit about the model so far is I noticed that they use a somewhat hard surface/ marble sculpt approach to their characters. Your model currently is really close and a few flattened planes along the underside of the cheeks would help to push that look.
@Asura: Thanks ! Yeah you're right. The face is still in early stage I'd say and I intend to do just as you said ^^
Also rebuilt the jacket quickly in topogun to get some clean topology to work with and continue refining the face. Not sure how far I should go there before jumping into detailing. Any crit is very welcome on that aspect !
Sunday update with some more work on the hair. I reshaped the upper volume and then spent litterally hours placing smalls strands on the sides. It's a super tedious process and I'm not even sure I'll be able to use these in any way to create my final game hair but hopefully they should allow for some nice clay renders.
There's still quite a long way to go to cover the back of the skull but it should be faster than the temples.
@Mateus Thanks
Also couldn't resist throwing her into keyshot to play with lights. Please feel free to comment and critique
I'm really excited to see the texture work!
@ajd Thanks ! The face definitely needs a bit more hammering in some areas (ears/neck ?) to keep the consistency with the cheekbones ^^
@o0_themilkybarkid_0o Cheers
@Leb Actually I placed the small strands at the back 5 by 5 and the ones of the side one by one. I made a little custom brush for it which I'll release once I ask Dylan Ekren's permission (since it's based on strands created with his brush).
Concerning the neck, I've found some ref of really thin women with something close to that and decided to go for it, knowing that it'll be softened by the SSS. I'll go with it for now but if it becomes a problem I'll go back to it and tone it down a little
You mentioned that you aren't sure if you will be able to use some of the hair for your final in game piece. Have you decided on how you are going to approach that?
I am having a similar issue with some assets I'm making for work. I have a cast of characters I'm making for a VR project so I am wanting to limit alpha draw... I decided to dynamesh my hair into the head entirely, then I did a projection to get the details from the hair onto that single mesh. It's helpful for selling the transition from the scalp to the hair. It also leaves me needing to do the eyebrows sculpted as well.
Anyways. Great sculpt, and your hair work is rad. Looking forward to seeing how you move toward your in-game asset.
To be honest, this is something I think about more and more and I believe it's going to take me some trial and error to figure out a proper way to make this hair.
The first thing that came to mind is, like you said, to get all the short hairs into the bake of my head texture. Maybe that will suffice but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have cards on top anyways. Testing will tell.
For the big major strands, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to redo them from scratch as haircards. That's ok for me because I'm in love with clay renders which I consider as a piece of their own. Also I'm giving myself no time limit on this piece.
Now regardings the eyebrows, I believe I'll be able to break them in groups of strands and bake them to separate cards. To that I will add more cards and that should do the trick, in theory. Let's see how it pans out when I get there !
for your game hair, I have a suggestion . it all happen into maya, but it's rather easy to pull off. take your long strand of hair into maya, palace 3 curves on each strand and use GMH plugin. it will help you generating hair and a geometry to project them on . like that you'll have your fantastically shaped hair and the render of maya hair all projected on your polys.
Usually it give out great results
@nikkiPito Thank you ! It's definitely one of the few AAA games out there with a very strong artistic authorship. Make sure you play it slow and enjoy the world
@volaille Cheers ! I am not a Maya user. Therefore, it's ahrd for me to visualize the technique you are refering to. If there's an article or a tutorial about it somewhere, I'd gladly give it a look !
@Antone_m Thanks Antone ! Can't wait to start texturing as well. It's always a great moment when I can call a sculpt done. By the way, your GoG fan art is one of my favorites ^^
hop it can be useful to you. if you are interested, I'll try to gather more precise info on the workflow
Damn, that really works? I'll have to give it a try too.
Quick update here. A couple of ZBrush screengrab to show the first pass of alpha work on the skin. Up next I'll be going in manually to rework some of these details. Also did quite a few fixes on the face but I'm pretty sure they're too subtle to notice.
And Dishonored 2 is out and I'm having a fantastic time with it. Still haven't found this character in game but I hope I will ! If anyone spots her before me, let me know
However, I may be completely wrong and I hope to check some of the game model files soon in order to look at their textures myself. If needed, I'll just redo the detailing entirely
Alright 2nd pass on this. Did a bit on the jacket as well and finally added that left earing.
Your collars fabric is a bit thick as well.
Also those examples from the game look damn cool! That they successfully kept the dishonored feel on the characters yet the new rendering techniques is amazeballs.
But good luck with your model. It is coming along super nicely!
Regarding the skin, I think I'll just go with what I have and see how it ends up looking in engine. I'll make decisions from then on. I have all the detailing on a layer so it'll be easy to push it or remove it at will. Hopefully the game models will show up on the net sometime soon and I can study their work furthermore.
So.... I've found 2 characters in game that ressemble the concept I'm going for. They're not one to one with the concept but close enough to give me a good idea of what to shoot for. Clearly they have pretty realistic detailing which conforts me in the idea of at least trying what I have right now in engine.
So here's my first pass at covering the subdermal mess I posted before. First screengrab is with zbro viewport skin and 2nd one is using the flat shader. Most of the work so far has been on the center part of the face. I feel the forehead is a tad too orangy compared to the rest or maybe it's the other way around ? At this point I'm slightly unsure what is the recommended workflow. Should I put this in engine, see how it reacts and work from here or keep on painting in ZBrush ?
I continued working on the skin to a point where I'm fairly happy with it. Now, I'm going to wait before it's in engine before making further changes.
Also did a bit of work on the coat because I thought it was a little simple/boring. Straps, buckle, button, seamlines, leather panel on the back...they should all contribue to making this item more interesting. I also folded one side of the collar in order to break the symmetry.
@leopenaranda Cheers
@NNKD Thank you very much
Hello there, time for a new update !
I've done the low poly mesh for the face by dropping the high poly to subdivision 2 and then modifying it. The neck and chest had to be rebuilt entirely since they were very stretched. The polycount for this mesh is 8.9k triangles. I also did the UV's where I gave the back of the head a smaller pixel ratio than the rest. Not sure how that will turn out, especially if I end up having the short hair be textured on the head itself.
Then proceeded to baking a couple of maps. I was getting errors around the lips so I went back and opened the mouth slightly on both high & low poly. I still have minor projection errors but nothing I can't fix in Photoshop. I'm not sure what went on with the baked Height map. This is a part of the process where I'm not super comfortable yet so I'd be very welcome to have some feedback on this
@leopenaranda Cheers ! Can't wait to see it with proper materials as well. I'm not really sure what technique I'm going to use for the hair but hair cards are definitely first on the list of what I'll try.
Times are busy with freelance work taking me hostage again but I'm happy to share both my Short Strands brush as well as a couple of renders from my finished high poly. The brush is free and I'd like to thank Dylan Ekren who was kind enough to give me permission to share it
VM_IMM_ShortStrands: https://gumroad.com/l/jFfB#
High poly keyshot renders:
Any feedback is most welcome
Here's a first pass atthe skin and eye in Toolbag. It's really fun to mess around with all the cool new sliders. I'm probably going to add a few more skin color break ups in painter. Also, I want to try to achieve a metallic/almost perly effect on the eyelids. If someone has a tip for this I'd be happy to give it a shot.
Could you, by the way, elaborate on where did you do the skin in the end? I understand that you wanted to up your PBR game with this project, which makes Substance Painter a natural fit, but according to your updates you used ZBrush. Or did I misunderstand you?
At any rate, really enjoyed watching your progress on this and hope to git as gud!