Artstation Game Character Art Challenge - The Red Witch
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Current Progress:
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Hello hello!
I finally decided to fully commit to my very first full art competition and jump into the melee over on Artstation's newest challenge: Ancient Civilizations. I'm joining the 3D Game Character portion and I am so excited to see everyone working alongside one another on all their respective projects.
My thread here is largely a duplication of my submission thread located on the Artstation challenge itself, but I figured there are plenty of artists that prefer the Polycount nexus instead. So, I'd like to share my work here too and would certainly welcome all feedback or critique on either platform!
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I'll be doing the Witch from Tatiana Vetrova's fantastic character submission. When searching through some of the 2D Design portion of the challenge, witchy here caught my eye immediately and I couldn't pass up such a striking figure.
Replies
As I stated on my Artstation thread, generally when I start a character, I have to begin with some manner of head sculpt. I need "chat" with them a bit and figure out how to proceed and for that they need a face. It's tough to really get excited about a bunch of grey blobs otherwise.
A lot of this is just block-in stuff, but I think she's off to an interesting start. The color is is just placeholder to get an immediate emotional read. No firm plans yet, but I'm pretty sure it's going down the painted face route instead of a mask.
It's at this point I realize I need to actually cover a bit more planning before committing to some of the large costume pieces.
I also spent far too long staring at shibari reference photos. That sounds kinda pervy, but that crap is complex as hell! It did pay off though - figured out one continuous rope binding (one piece of rope in a full loop). I did have to slightly modify the rope work of the concept as I don't know if it was based off of any particular pattern, but I got really close.
As always, let me know if you guys see anything large that needs fixing.
small crit would be the arm looking a bit stiff from side view.
@lotet Hmmmm, that's actually an interesting point, although I'm a little unsure how to fix that. Are you referring to perhaps the weird perspective angle from ZBrush's wonky FOV in the viewport? Or...actually...if you're pointing to the anatomy, I think you may be right. I need to make a note to hit up that lower arm again and give it a little more love. The hand too.
Im talking about the actual anatomy, the rest of the sculpt has a really nice stylized curvy flow through the body. From the side view the arm looks very straight and stiff and feels out of place.
actually so does the lower leg now when Im looking at it.
Smaller update for now. I've been chipping away at some of the boring foundational work and preparing some of the lower poly block-in stuff to ship over to ZBrush which is a little hard to show, but progress is rolling.
I am reasonably happy with her head sculpt at this point - I widened her features a bit and pushed some things around to match the concept a little closer. If you check out the previous progress on her face, you'll notice more of an elongated look, which was fine, but diverged enough from Tatiana's concept that I felt like it was missing something. Outside of building out her mouth and some later detailing/scarring, I like where she's at.
I also put a little more work into her anatomy based on a few suggestions (thank you @lotet
). Polished up her calves, tightened up the structure of her forearms and elongated her neck a bit to give her somewhat disconcerting proportions. Her hands and feet are still pretty rough so I'll need to tie those down shortly, but outside of a quick remesh and clean up she's got a rockin' bod to take to the finish line.
I'm starting to tackle some of the corrupted body of the Witch. The concept does a great job of describing an almost hollowed out core, so I'm really looking to communicate that internal negative space. I experimented with a few different ways of tackling it, but settled on subtraction shapes. I just threw together a mass of rough blocks/shards, clumped them together, and used that as a negative shape to 'scoop' out the internals of the thigh and chest cavity. The black crystals here are just placeholder for the moment. I can already tell that there's some serious potential here to get some neat effects by placing light sources in those cavities for the final scene. Should be interesting.
These kinds of massive asymmetrical changes always make me a bit nervous because it naturally shuts off your ability to make further symmetrical edits to a some degree. Onward and upward.
As always, C&C is always welcome either here or on the Artstation thread.
Ended up with some a wacky schedule issues this last week and now running a bit behind, so I'll have to play catch up. Fortunately, an early part of figuring out the Witch's corrupted bits resulted in tackling almost all of her body re-topo work, so that's a large chunk of work I don't have to worry about later. Small victories, I suppose.
I've got a number of different things in-progress at the moment, but I went ahead and took a break to round out the hair a little more. Hair sculpts (especially women's styles) are actually one of my favorite parts of a model to dig into as the construction for each style can be so wildly different from the next. All those flowing curves, subtle details, and complex transitions really carry a lot of the personality of a character. There is still plenty of work to do on the individual strands, but I'm pretty happy with the overall style it so far.
I'm also procrastinating carving up her face. That will definitely be a point-of-no-return moment.
Looking forward to seeing how it will turn out in the end!
Good luck on the challenge!
Looks amazing though regardless. I really can't wait to see what you do with the materials later. Good luck!
Oh WOW! I'm just amazed how incredible this is!! Cheers man!! I love the way it looks, keep on keepin' on!
@peloncr @Elithenia
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!
@mfrederick
That's actually a very valid point! She is definitely carrying a lot of horizontal 'striation' in her face. If I'm perfectly honest...I kinda like it that way, but that's likely just a stylistic preference. I'll experiment around with some of her features to see if I can come up with something a bit more subdued all the same. Gotta explore as many avenues as possible. Some of the horizontal lines may actually be balanced out a tiny bit with her face pain and throwing in some scarring detail too, so that may help as well.
@Justin Meisse
Thanks man! I've always really dug the chiseled line look on the human form, so it tends to sneak into my work in some way. And the 3D Character challenge I think had the encouragement to use the 2D challenge concepts buried in the brief somewhere, but I do remember that being one of the key reasons for splitting the challenge into two sections this time around. It's been really neat seeing how everyone tackles the same concepts en masse. Kinda like the bi-monthly character challenge here on PC, but on a much larger scope.
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Starting to get to the point where I can really see where she's heading which is really exciting.
There's still a lot of her that's still pretty rough, but I think it's finally time to actually dig into the detail work. First up is finishing her body corruption so I can push & pull her clothing around those sections. I threw a bit of polypaint on her to explore a few ideas. I'm actually really digging the color transition on the hair, so I will likely incorporate that element into the final. There's also a few pieces not shown here that I'm working on outside of ZBrush, but they should be coming online shortly.
The hardest piece of the puzzle for me at the moment is definitely her face. I honestly cannot decide between about a dozen different variations of tattoos, paint, and scarring - It's all just so much fun! I am a fan of the less-is-more design philosophy however, so I may do something kinda subdued and just let her red face paint carry her scary looks.
(Quick matte render to show the difference in completed hair sculpt)
Looking at her now, I think I may have to bump up the size on a few of those shards to exaggerate the effect a bit. She matches the concept pretty closely as is, but sizing them up might make for a better impact on the read. The weird grey color on shards in these screengrabs also isn't really helping with clarity either, so that's my bad.
I think following the concept is good, but then you will have to make artistic decisions in the end to make it pop even more for the 3d presentation.
I think this where I'm going to call it on the corrupted skin. I could go crazy detailed across the entire section, but the style of the rest of the figure wouldn't really support it, so I'm just leaving it to pockets of detail. The polypaint mock-up here is just testing out an interesting idea to visualize the spreading corruptions and strays a bit from the concept, but I think I'm going to drop it in favor of some selective red body paint. That's likely to have a stronger read anyhow.
Was also considering bringing that tattoo scarring from her face into the rest of her body, but I think I'm going to leave that out as well - there's a danger of getting too noisy otherwise.
Now on to all the fun clothing bits and details.
maybe the hole in the hand could be a bit more stylized but other then that I think its looking really good.
I think I have to agree with lotet's comment above about the hole in the hand, it feels like it's missing a little extra something. I know it's not in the original concept, but it might be kinda cool to incorporate the corrupted shard elements into it somehow. Anyway, awesome work, can't wait to see more.
I've been burning so hard on this I forgot to post an update!
The highpoly was wrapped up not long ago and I'm digging through the lowpoly and UV's as fast as I can. Her texturing phase is gonna be a bit crunched, but I'm still really hoping to have her done in time.
@lotet @mfrederick
@CaiteradeThanks so much, guys! I do plan to add a little flair to the puncture hole in her final piece. I think the idea behind the witch is that she grows more powerful as more of her body converts to crystal...but it does require her to sustain damage. Judging by the concept, the hole in her hand is fresh and self-inflicted so it's only just starting to convert to the shards.
The longer neck is a bit of stylistic thing as a number of my female sculpts tend to veer in that direction. In this instance though it was a conscious decision and further exaggerated to give her a slightly unnatural look as well as emphasizing the tall neck of her collar/cowl. There's an early version of her sculpt that is even more elongated than this across her entire body that pushed her toward an almost hag-like and bestial appearance, but it was departing too heavily from the concept. He neck and unusual facial features are pretty much the only thing that remain of that early exploration.
duuuuuuuude. You're killing it!
Sometimes those kind of model can become very busy and hard to read but i believe that you did a really good job keeping the design easy to read, nice and clean. Really nice sculpting job
Can't wait to see how it turns out!
@Tits
Thank you Marie, I'm really happy to hear that! I'm definitely a fan of a "large-read" philosophy that encourages a cohesive design rather than just over-detailing the crap out of everything. It's really easy to lose sight of your overall goal when you can just keep adding neat little bits n' bobs all over the place. That's one of the reasons I tend to veer away from anything too realistic, although I'll need to explore that side of character work eventually.
@theStoff
That's actually an excellent question. In the short term, if it's looking like I can finish her by the 8th, Her mouth will remain shut just so it's one less thing to do to get her done. But if I'm not going to make it I'll slow down and go back to open up her mouth and stick some teethy bits in there. I've done zero facial rigging or expression work up till now and she'd be a fun one to try some things out on.
BUT FEAR NOT, FELLOW CITIZENS! Progress will continue onward and she will emerge from the ashes soon enough. I'm going to slow down a bit, fix a few things, and do some additional work to really make her shine. She's already well into the lowpoly phase, but I'd like tweak a few things in her sculpt before baking. I will continue working and updates here and I hope you will join me in seeing her all wrapped up soon. I am a little burnt out from a bit of overtime for work here and there, so I might take a short break for a couple days and then be right back at it.
@jimsvanberg @LilyNion
Wow, thank you so much! That means a lot to hear that. I hope this project and future work can live up to those compliments.
@Ouran
Thanks, mate! And I have to say, I'm really loving your results on the Dishonored sculpt. That's definitely not an easy style to figure out, but you nailed it!
cant wait to see her finished, whenever thats now or later