Sketchbook: Fstain
polycounter lvl 7
Hello everyone. 
I used to be here early '10s but left for artschool and now I'm back slightly smarter. I used to post mostly 2d digital but since I've moved on to basically just drawing analogue with fineliners and stuff. I might just post some of that later on but anyway. I'm here on a 3d quest for now.
Critique and other such things are totally appreciated, let's have a discussion about the stuff I make!
OK so here's my latest little project, a sort of realtime 3d sketch:
For now just a straight up dump outta the viewport in Unreal. I'm still not sure what kind of post-processing I'll apply on it. this image has a cheeky bit of color balance and sharpness cuz I wanna see how the water gleam comes across.
It's sort of a timed project. I'm limiting it to 20 hours. I generally work on it 2-3 hours at a time since free time and all that.
I'm into about 16 hours so far. It's taken far too much time just polishing and twiddling stuf and even modeling some stuff that won't make the cut likely.
I have several of these ideas in the works so I'll keep making them and getting faster likely. That's the plan
More to come, of course.
I used to be here early '10s but left for artschool and now I'm back slightly smarter. I used to post mostly 2d digital but since I've moved on to basically just drawing analogue with fineliners and stuff. I might just post some of that later on but anyway. I'm here on a 3d quest for now.
Critique and other such things are totally appreciated, let's have a discussion about the stuff I make!
OK so here's my latest little project, a sort of realtime 3d sketch:
For now just a straight up dump outta the viewport in Unreal. I'm still not sure what kind of post-processing I'll apply on it. this image has a cheeky bit of color balance and sharpness cuz I wanna see how the water gleam comes across.
It's sort of a timed project. I'm limiting it to 20 hours. I generally work on it 2-3 hours at a time since free time and all that.
I'm into about 16 hours so far. It's taken far too much time just polishing and twiddling stuf and even modeling some stuff that won't make the cut likely.
I have several of these ideas in the works so I'll keep making them and getting faster likely. That's the plan
More to come, of course.
Replies
Is there a hole in that wall underwater? It seems it loses a bit of information details there, it seems a bit too blurry for me (although I know this is not crystal pure water), at first I thought it was an unfinished area, maybe my eyes are bad haha.
But this is really to be picky, to me it looks amazing and finished already!
There's indeed two holes, this additional sketch should reveal what the point was:
my very first idea was having a gnarly-looking moray eel poking its fat body out of the top hole. But it didn't turn out good. All the cool details on a eel would go lost at this distance, if I rendered it like 4k then maybye :P that's a bit overkill for this project.
I decided to ditch the tentacles too, though. since it's, i dunno. a little too much "cheap tattoo" look for me, even though I like squids n stuff.
Oh! and one more thing: most hightlights are faked (and the light caustics of course, they are Decals or vertex paint):
It's just a dot product against a worldspace axis that writes to basecolor, emissive and opacity. (also check out that creamy resolution on the rocks mmmm-mmmm)
And finally, Yedp: Your eyes are totally fine, the rocks are blurry. I considered baking more highresolution maps and make higher resolution photo-sourced textures but then, I decided "hey, it looks a little more blurry under water" and Unreal doesn't have a super simple way of blurring just the water without heavy amounts of shader mastery. So I opted to just put some finer details to hide the low-res, just like any good 3d artist would LOL (just kidding).
OK. Stopping here... maybe. At about 19 hours total. I wasted two hours at least on just random stuff that I decided to not save.
But that's part of this project idea, I need to work on making decisions "quickly" and I've failed at least half a dozen such decisions in this project alone, the moray eel, the tentacles etc etc.
SO! I'll start sketching on my next piece, actual on paper tho. Might include those depending on how quickly I get into the 3d work.
Laters
I have a good chance of actually getting this somewhat finished, too so I will start dumping individual models and stuff as I feel confident that they are locked down.
also a breakdown of ur diorama would be much appreciated
Sup, gametime!
And yeah, totally. I'm already dropping some minor videos about this game but I have one major enemy to make, a bunch of the level (at least to get it designed to what works with the gameplay in mind) and some UI stuff.
And so, like I said in the previous post, I have some things to drop off here. It's some renders of two models that I made for this project so far.
So similarly, the weapon and vehicle designs are not mine, I made the models and all of the things that that entails, naturally. Just felt I need to shout out to him.
Open bolt SMG, the one you can see in the screenshot.
That's it for right now. I'm going to start creating the enemy model pretty soon and I will make sure to actually document the progress on that here, so that you can share insight or feedback during.
Feedback on these two models or anything else are more than welcome!
Until next time
Low poly only then substance painter for texturing. And since I'm going through the process of scraping together renders anyway there's a character I haven't rendered out yet who's the standard "foot soldier" enemy in the game so I might do that.
Buh-bye.
This is the enemy-guy, it's not THE enemy I was talking about before, as that's a much bigger mecha/powersuit type of character which I will get started on eventually, you'll see if on here when it starts at least.
Pew pew!
Cya!
Lots of stuff happened, and I lost the email (like literally can't even remember what it was called...) so in true daftness I'm back with a different account, in the same sketchbook. And to prove I'm not a fraud, watch how "Fstain" won't come here to kick my ass.
Sajeet, Thanks m8, not sure you're here to see this 5 years later but. Thanks.
Anyway, lately I've been doing really "fast" modeling stuff, focusing honestly on keeping toolchain simple, for example keeping most of the stuff in Blender only, using vertex colors, texture painting and really generic textures re-used everywhere. Some material work etc of course.
So here's some pieces as of late!
I like doing these kinds of modeling projects now because it focuses mostly on "off the cuff" stuff, what can I make in a pretty short timespan, most of these sail around the 15 hour mark, give or take a few, so well finished within a solid day, but segmented out because of work and attentionspan
more to come, and I'll make sure I won't lose this account. And if some mod or something wants to bounce me across the floor because of this account switcharoo, then I apologize, and please do.
See you around.
Here's another one of these speed modeling projects. A guy sitting down having a coffee. Woohoo. This one took about 15 hours again, I spend 75% of it on his head, though, because I also tried to blend face texture and an ear and free-painted texture paint in Blender, matching all the values/hues together to make it look cohesive.
Though! The important bit, or the different bit is that this is the first time I made "groom" like eyelashes. It doesn't show up a lot in the render obviously, but it's there and it's kind of a point to be able to add this kind of thing in a "tasteful" manner, if that makes sense. The hair density is at 10% in the close up pic, so during render he'd have a lot thicker facial stubble and head-hair, eyebrows and eyelashes are the same.
Also tried to mask-paint different normalmaps for nose, cheeks and forehead skin, something I haven't done before in this way, I've done it plenty in substance painter. So it's been more fun than the result is haha! guy sitting down doing nothing.
Nose hairs next?