@jewski-bot Loving the progress! Getting a pretty good sense of the material this thing is made of based on the hand-painted detail. One thing I'd encourage is painting in the damaged bits as a lighter color, to show the unpainted material underneath. That's what I'm seeing in the concept art.
Progress on the screens! I had a blast modeling and texturing these guys, made up a whole system of robotic arms and attachment points to fasten them onto the rails on the wall.
@jewski-bot I think your seams are from having hard edges. I don't think you should have any hard edges on this model.
This high poly is intense. Everything green has had the proper bevels put into place. I'm spending extra time making sure the topology is a-ok and doesn't provide any artifacts when smoothing, as it would be a great folio piece. My low poly model poly count is just under 50k right now, which is around what I want to keep it at after all the retopo.
@Gustavo_Elliott looking good.I'm looking forward to seeing you develop it. @alytlebird Nice texturing.The tiles might be a bit large. @Ashervisalis I like all your custom details,it's looking good.Be sure to check your low poly for faceting in engine with baked lighting if you plan to use it as baked shadows go off geometry not normals and cylinders can be tricky.
I did another detail pass and some base materials.
Obligatory "proportions took more time to figure out than I thought" post. Took a decent amount of going back and forth but I think I got something that's close to the concept and looks good. Something I wanted was to have water able to flow out of the mouth into the bucket, but it seemed easy to have the mouth stick out too far when trying to match the concept.
I've only just started sculpting. I haven't used ZBrush in too long, so there was some remembering hotkeys involved. Also apparently dynamic subdivision just...makes it impossible to sculpt? My brushes were skipping all over the place. I'd never used it or run into that problem before. Anyway, turned that off and started creating cracks.
@alytlebird - Your scene is looking great, the lighting especially. Are you thinking of doing any sort of prompt / text / display on the screens? I know the concept is vague but just those bright white screens seems weird to me, they stand out so much, I guess? Anyway love the shader and rail system.
@jewski-bot - He's coming together! It's hard to tell, but the bake doesn't look too bad from the pictures you posted, although you probably do want to bake at a higher res. If you just have small errors it may be easier to just paint them out in Photoshop. Right now I think having some hue variation in your main color sections would help the look a ton. The different sections have different shades of blues, browns and golds. Some of that is due to the light, but some of it definitely isn't. He's looking good!
@Urzaz Thanks! Yeah actually, that's something I'm gonna aim for a bit later in the project. I agree that the blank screens stick out too much, it also doesn't add much character to the guy living here, beyond showing that he does, in fact, use lots of screens (like most of us!). My idea right now is to use decals in Unreal to create those screen details. It'll be fairly easy to crank out 8-10 different windows as textures, then layer them onto the screens individually. If that doesn't work or doesn't look right, I'll probably go for a vector painting option and make some alternate window textures to blend in.
I've actually already used a decal in another area of the scene, just to experiment and see how they work and how to properly blend them onto textures.
Unity render. There are some things that need to looked at and possibly redone. I'm not a fan of the weathering of the blue painted parts and for the life of me can't figure out why I'm getting seams in a model that doesn't have hard edges.
In any event, I'm tired and need to get for work in about 6-7 hours. When I get back home tomorrow, I'll be sure to give some feedback on some of the updates that have been posted. Some really impressive work is coming out and I look forward to seeing everyone's finished products!
As promised, I wanted to give some feedback to some of the newer updates and also extend a welcome to @redfoxie! I think that you're off to a good start though you may want to check your proportions a little bit. It could just be perspective distortion, but I think that you need to adjust the height of your arms and the pool. I think that your base is correctly proportioned, though you might want to add more to the height as well. Not too much, but just enough to match the concept art. With the wings, the left and right sides of the inner wing should be flush with the outer wing's. Outside of that they look good. Do consider breaking the beak and making a separate piece. This is kind of tricky when looking at the concept art because it you don't want to over-extend. Additionally, make sure that the nose slope is clearly defined early on in the block out model. I goofed on mine and had to spend a bit of time fixing it in ZBrush. The eyebrows could use some more thickness, but be careful not to over-exaggerate. That was another good on mine due to improperly interpreting the concept art. Lastly, the square cut-out for the ear is good. I would take the beak and the rest of the head and add more to the height, but the placement of the square ear cut-out is good.
I apologize if it seems like I overburdened you with too much advice. As I said, I think that you're off to a good start. You just need to get those proportions accurate before going into the high poly model.
@Urzaz, you're next my friend! The model is looking sharp. Asides from a few small things, the totem itself is coming along. You're proportions and forms are are reasonably spot on and your sculpt details from what I can tell seem to be working a bit better than mine were. The few crits I do have are that there seems to be some pinching with the around the eyes / cheek region. I'm not sure if that's due to not having enough polygons to support the edgeloops in that area or what. You may be able to fix in ZBrush by converting to Dynamesh and smoothing it out, or even use Sculptris Pro. Another Idea that might work is Move Topological or Move Elastic as I found those to be great alternatives to the standard Move brush. Either way, you're going strong and I can't wait to see you get to the texture phase!
As far as my baking goes, I'm going to go take a look at some Substance tutorials. I may not have the correct FBX export settings from Maya. Additionally, I may need to re-pack which will set me back slightly, but thankfully I can just convert everything to smart materials in Substance Painter and plop them back on. Besides, I think I screwed up the workflow anyhow, LOL.
@alytlebird, that's incredibly badass so far, especially with some of the solutions to attach the monitors to the rails. Texturing looks pretty good as well. I can't think of much in the way of critiques as full blown environments are beyond me. I'm not sure if adding a bit more color the environment would over-saturate it or help it. It may a lighting solution yet to be implemented. I think you're in that place where it's tweaking subtle details that will help to further enhance your piece.
@Ashervisalis, You're model is a beast! I think that you've done a good job of filling in the blanks of the design not seen from the concept art and I'm a bit interested in how you approached the base attachment of the satellite dish to the mount. Stuff like that is usually stuff I tend to agonize over even though in the end it's usually a pretty simple solution!
@TangDao, Looking good so far. Your colors are nice and clear and it looks like you have a clean bake. Since it's early in the texturing phase, I don't really have any major feedback to give. Look forward to seeing the weathering!
I'll hopefully be finished this weekend depending on how much progress I make. It's been fun!
@jewski-bot Thanks man. What part specifically are you talking about? The cylinder with all the details, or the spherical part which attaches to the arm?
@jewski-bot Thanks man. What part specifically are you talking about? The cylinder with all the details, or the spherical part which attaches to the arm?
The diamond pattern you have going on the mount for the dish itself.
Added the clothes pile and pants/socks! Just gotta do the pillows then I'll be done with the fabric assets.
Currently thinking over how I want to do the bonsai tree for the zen guy's side. While it's tempting to use a premade tree and save myself the pain of drinking the SpeedTree koolaid (along with dropping $$ for a one-month subscription), I do need to learn foliage generation, and I feel like modeling it from scratch would take way too long.
@Toafaloaf You have right about the proportion of the square ... I think I had overthinking about the external shape. the rest of the details like smalls curve added for the shape I did intentional .
So, here I fix the square and finished the bake part at 2k maps. Today I will start with texturing and hope I will get done quick this part. I had less time in the past few days that I was expeted.
@jewski-bot Try to add an fill layer and select just the color. then drop the curvature and set the layer on the overlay. you can put another level fillter on the layer just to fix the intensity of the black and white. In this way you will have some light edges. In my opinion this is one dettail that you are missing and the difference of the colors betwin parts. for example: the base with the tail you can put in the same layer for color but almost all body parts have different colors. You have the sculpture done right you need just an little work on this things.
I was curious how some of you guys were doing your unwrapping for the satellite? were you going to be UVing it symmetrically to save texture space? or were you just going to lay the whole thing out flat? @Ashervisalis @TangDao Both of your guy's models are looking awesome by the way! I do like the details you've added to the mount that connects the arm to the dish, Asher. Tangdao, those base materials are looking good! Your gonna have yourself a real pretty prop when you're done.
Model pretty much sculpted. Just need to add some cracks and details to the wings. Spent a couple minutes rendering in Zbrush, not sure it was worth it for seeing details, so I added some matcap shots. A lot of this process was masking different areas and using Deformation > Inflate to give some cracked sections an offset look. Masking by each area was pretty time consuming, I can't help but feel it's not the best way to go.
Added vines w/ curve tubes, not sure how I should get lowpoly geo, even the lowest subdiv is still pretty high. I could also try just retopoing them to be part of the body, or lowering the Zbrush geo in Maya somehow. Anyone have experience with this sort of thing?
@alytlebird - That clothes pile texture looks GOOD. Is that Marvelous Designer for the clothes and pants? I will say that pile is pretty tall, though. It looks kinda "formed", I think natural pile would probably spread out flatter. The good thing is real-world reference is pretty easy to find.
@cician08 - The bake looks good! I think I'm seeing some small
distortions in the texture around the hands and feet? If those become a
problem you can try adding some edge loops, usually extra geometry fixes
that, and if you just add loops you shouldn't have to mess with the UVs much.
@Urzaz Yup! Marvelous for everything actually. :P I took the pants and socks, grabbed some prefab shirts and boxers, then layered the clothes up to create the pile. I exported and made a low poly shell in Maya, applied unique material IDs to all the individual pieces of clothing, then did a high-detail bake in Substance. After that, I just used the ID map to pick out each piece of clothing and texture them as normal.
I'll mess with making the pile more flat like you said, I see what you're saying. Theoretically I could just scale it in Unreal and it shouldn't look too bad...
@jewski-bot Oh that part! I'm pretty fond of that part. I kind of wanted to put something into the model which was a bit more organic, and I've been looking at some of Paul Pepera's work (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zXyPm) and wanted to imitate that. First I made what I wanted the pillow to look like basically in Maya. It turned out looking like the diamond pillow when smoothed, which was perfect. I then created a base mesh, which is just the basic shape of what you see there; a cube, with the ends deleted, and then added some extra geo to stretch it around. In ZBrush, I imported the pillow shape, and converted it to an alpha. Then I went to town sculpting on the base mesh and inserting the pillow shapes. I downloaded a bunch of cloth sculpting brushes for the details. Mine doesn't look as great as Pepera's, partially because I don't have access to Marvelous Designer (and don't have the time to learn it), but also because Pepera was basically a god of 3D. I really wish I could have scrapped it and restarted, grabbing 4 diamond instead of just one for the alpha (would have made the process a lot quicker), but I'm on a time constraint! It looks just fine the way it is. Retopo is not going to be super fun, but oh well.
@Gustavo_Elliott Hey dude, the model will be split into several different UV maps. The smaller parts will have their own texture, but since the model is actually gigantic, the larger parts will all have tiling textures added, so as you don't see the pixels up close.
@Ashervisalis Thanks, man. I was thinking I like to keep my props in my UV map normally, but this prop is going to be so dang big there's no way I wouldn't see pixels, thanks for confirming some of my speculations. Ya know, I did not even see that pillow-shroud thing you got going on, that is so cool! Retopo wont be that bad! actually, with step-build and the rest of freeform it should be uhhh not fun but uhhh not terrible?... ya know especially with the whole shift-drag an entire loop, It will no doubt be worth it.
Here is my first test with the texture. I did a quick render from Substance painter... I will move to marmoset because I have more control for the light, but I like even this version from the Iray, probably is for the HDR map . I've change some proportion , a bigger mouth and less space between eyes in order to have more that angry look.
@Urzaz yeah ... there is small distortions in the texture but event with that the detail is a 100% fit with the rest of the cracks You did a really clean model, smooth and you have that angry look from the concept and I like that you go with 2 tails you have to add some more volume to the "jaw".. in the concept the right part/ shape it seem that it go out from the box... in and out somewhere in the middle .
@jewski-bot Thanks for the feedback I appreciate it.There was a thread in Technical Talk not too long ago about Maya messing up normals on edges but I couldn't find it again,might be worth looking for.If the seams are in the normal map low poly normals and UVs would be good places to look.It wouldn't take too long to just remodel the faces on the sides of the seams if nothing else works.Sometimes baking in Designer works better for me if you have it.Something looks a little bit off about the shading.It almost has a metallic look,maybe check the metal spec and rough. Thanks @Gustavo_Elliott , I used bevels and face weighted normals on my low poly to get smooth edges and a trim and detail normal sheet as well as tiling textures for details so most of my UVs are just cube mapped.To bake from high to low I'd start with at least 3 2k maps but I still don't know if that would be enough.You could also bake a normal map just for edge smoothing that wouldn't need as much resolution and bake you details separately and apply using a second UV set than your tiling textures or apply as decals. Another approach would be to treat it as an asset for a RTS game for example that the camera never get close to there's no rule that says it has to be first person resolution.
@cician08 Looks good I really like the illusion of depth you got on the water.
Update time! I thought I would've been finished with this, but some things, namely building a grass material for the pedestal, still remain. Asides from that, I wanted to thank everyone for their feedback and advice. After close scrutiny and checking things in other programs (namely going into MODO and seeing if I had similar problems). So there were a variety of problems. First, I didn't have good edge padding in Maya and the UV shells were too tight. That meant re-packing. It sucked, but thankfully Substance Painter is awesome and I didn't lose much work. However, I STILL kept getting seams in other areas like the beak and ONLY the beak. After checking normals various bakes, etc. in both Maya and MODO, I realized that the problem was I goofed on a the Beak name and had it like "Mouth_Low" and "MOuth_High". After adjusting the case to read "Mouth_High", I was able to get rid of all of the seams! Hooray!
Rendered in Unity using a custom skybox with an Intensity Multiplier of 2.
@cician08, I forgot all about using the Curvature Map to help get quick stylized edges. Thanks for the tip as that really helped a bunch! It seems like you're doing well on starting off with your first past. Since it seems like you're doing a more realistic style, I'm not sure if you need the Curvature Map trick, but I did add in something similar where I used the AO mesh input map as a fill layer, then set to Color Burn and put the opacity to about 50%. This may help with emphasize definition in recessed areas.
@Ashervisalis, thanks for sharing your workflow and the link to Pepera's art station. I'll be sure to check it out. As it stands, I'm probably not going to be able to tackle the satellite with the time constraints and also crazy hours at work.
@Urzaz, Your sculpting details are very nice and clean. The definition is nice and sharp. Should translate well to normal map bake when you get there.
@jewski-bot No problem. Regarding your vines, stuff like that, I would just add vines as geo. It might up the poly count, but that's not a huge deal for something like that. It'll look way better than if it was just baked detail.
Hello everyone! Its been a while, but I am back with an update . I have been working on hand painting the texture and adding some normals for the indentations in the stone. I have no clue why his chest isn't showing up in Substance painter, so I'm just going to texture it separately with the vines and water. Let me know what you guys think so far. It's so wonderful seeing so many new people trying the challenges out!
@momomoonscar Nice to see an update! I think it is coming along well. I like your transition of colors in the eyebrows and mouth.
@cician08 It is looking really good! It has a unique style about it and I especially like that bucket texture.
@Urzaz That is a beautiful sculpt. I look forward to seeing it textured.
For my update. Working on texturing. I have not done many hand painted textures so it has been taking me a while. Lots of trial and error. This is just a quick in substance painter render using Iray. Still in progress.
@Tadpole The main critique I have on your model is proportion. It's meant to be something like 40 feet tall, but your hand rails make it seem like it's around 10 feet tall.
Slowly clawing my way towards the finish line... Finished the pillows yesterday, did the dishes and jars today. Planning on tackling the zen guy's props soon (tree, candles, incense, etc.), as well as some decals for the "conspiracy wall", and decals to show half-eaten food on the dishes.
Finally finished the high poly... maybe. I'm thinking of bringing a part or two into ZBrush to add some claw marks or something cool. After that, I'll be readjusting the low poly to fit the smoothed version, UV mapping, material creation, and texturing. 100% not going to be finished by end of month, but I want this to be perfect, and portfolio worthy.
@alytlebird Looks good! I'd bend and rotate some of those photos differently so they look more unique.
Continuing to get closer to completing the hard surface environment. Finished the beads (complete with another position-based color variation system), along with the zen props (using a placeholder tree and rocks for right now, got them from an Unreal Marketplace pack), and also added in a post-process volume to really fine-tune the lights and shadows.
Here's all the zen props compiled:
Last stop will be fine details like the keyboard, some pens, ID cards, actual Polaroids (been using stand-ins so far!), etc., as well as the dirty food decals and the "conspiracy wall" I've mentioned before. Also still thinking over how I want to handle the city skyline. Might wind up using a blurry backdrop and blowing out the window with bloom so you can't see much detail.
I'd like to call mine finished. It's been another learning experience, particularly getting the UV's laid out nicely, and baking in Toolbag. I made up a background for the scene to add more interest over the standard grey/black, but I'm struggling giving it a sense of scale and avoid it looking like a toy. I guess a couple of other buildings around it would help. I tried producing a short animation from Toolbag, but Youtube 's compression has degraded it a bit. (Facebook's compression completely destroyed it, despite using the advised settings. 720p. 30fps... just Mpeg rather than MP4.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKF-t-SOA7k Now looking forward to next months challenge. @Gustavo_Elliott I modelled mirrored but flattened out the UV's using a few materials for the parts. I'm not expecting to use this 'in-game', just a few pre-rendered shots, so I wasn't worried about performance and texture sizes. I'm also still relatively new to this, and haven't done it the other way yet Something for next time maybe. @cician08 I like the Iray render. The background works really well with your statue.
Hello all! My first challenge here I start modeling this 5-6 days ago (Blender). Currently on stage fixing issues and prepearing for unwraping. Even now I see I need to join upper pipes Furthermore I gonna texture it with some tiled bitmaps. Probably photos. Don't want to create unique texture because it is preety big object and in addition my hardware could not stand texturing in 4k in painter. The hardest part for me was this area when a reference human stand and first day when I tried to match camera to concept. As you can see I don;t add still many small details but in other hand I add some details from me. I want to texture it now and if time allowed it I will add some details later.
@AndySC Great animation! Please add some sounds like turret tank rotation or hydraulics SFX.
alytlebird Enviro interior looks cool but you can add some more variation, randomness to photos on left side.
@TangDao I like your style. I think that this first render with materials on 3rd page looks much cooler than that with dirt pass. Maybe add some paint splash?
I'm back after a long silence. Looks like I won't be able to finish the prop before August ends, but this is the current state of the Totem. The area with some plant-life growth looks messy, but I'm planning on adding some grass cards that blend with it during the texture painting process.
@alytlebird your environment is looking awesome! Something that I see in the concept is that most of the lighting in the environment is warm (especially the bounce light). This is really cool because it makes the blue in the monitors pop out more, integrate all the red props (The carpets, hammock blankets, and the pillows), and also even though it's a hard surface sci-fi future, gives us that feeling of a cozy room .
@jewski-bot Great work! Every update you post the totem looks better and better. The addition of the lighter edges is great for stylized props. My advice is that after you have applied a mask using the curvature map, it is good to go back to it and erase or paint some of the areas where it was applied. I personally like thinking about "the story" of the prop and figure out where some of the areas have degraded more than others to apply more or less edge wear.
Here we go for perhaps the final update. I'm kind of meh to be honest. I think that most of the work is okay, but my first foray into Substance Designer kind of left something to be desired with the grass. It just doesn't look like it fits to be honest.
In any event, I'm thinking that I'll probably go back to doing hard surface work for the next challenge.
Great looking entries all!
@fsanin, that looks great! Your sculpt looks very clean and the details have clear definition. In regard to painting out some of the excessive edge wear on the curvature map, I had done that earlier, but I suppose that it's still a bit much in some areas. In all honesty, despite my insane 2K map, I saw this guy more for mobile games. I'll see what kind of result I get from scaling down the res to around 512.
@Ashervisalis, sorry for the late response. I had debated adding in the vines, and I think it would work for a higher res model (granted I could probably stand to optimize the polycount on this guy still), whereas for a mobile game background prop it might be too much, (though the only mobile game I've been playing is Bleach Brave Souls on my Samsung phone, so I might be wrong).
In any event, I'm looking forward to September's challenge!
Got a little too noodly with retopology, but I'm happy with how it looks once baked. For some reason I could bake separate parts with match by mesh name in Substance Painter for normals, but not AO (it would always hang or crash when I tried). Even though all the pieces are baked together, the AO map looks good except around the vines.
I've roughed out the color values in Painter, but I really don't understand the software well yet. I'm worried I have my file / texture set set up the wrong way, but we'll see how it goes.
@cician08 - I think I see what you're saying, the bottom/darker part of the mouth is too thin and doesn't stick out? I'm going to try and thicken it up once things are done and maybe make it stick out a bit more, it does stick out some but isn't that noticeable. Thanks!
@momomoonscar - I like your handpainting a *lot*. The general art / painting tip that's always thrown around is to not focus too much on the details of any one area but rather work in levels across the whole thing before drilling down on details. I suspect that the chest isn't showing makes that look worse, and I'm definitely not a great painter, so grain of salt and all that. I'd be very interested in seeing how you have your layers set up or if you're just painting all on one.
@black_nine Thanks for the comment and feedback.I do like the clean look as well but want to go with the dirt and wear for a couple of reasons.I feel it fits the style of the game a lot better and I wanted to work on implementing the detailing inUE4 with vertex painting.You've got a lot of great details going hope to see it finished.Maybe add a bevel or two on the base or some more detail.
I did tone down the dirt and wear and also added a distance fade in the shader to reduce the noise.Added wear and dirt to the normal map details.Thanks go to @Obscura for outlining how to make the UE4 normal edge detection.Added a couple large dirt decals to try to help unify everything and baked the lightmaps.
I'm done if nobody sees anything that needs fixed.More on my Artstation.
Great work everyone really impressive talent and creativity.
Result so far. I couldn't find good workflow for creation tileable materials along with support mesh maps. Here are 5 unique materials 2k res. each in S.painter but I want redone it in S.designer and use only tiled texture + mask in game engine. What a shame that layering workflow in substance painter don't give us possibility to change a color of materials. In designer in other hand when you scale your global output you end with scaled mesh maps too so you should have 2 mesh. 1 mesh with UV in 0-1 range and second mesh with bigger UV for preview reson.
Nice result @TangDao. You stick with concept to the end and even do vertex painting in UE4. I need to learn it soon or later but now thankfully I have Unity which I know probably 100 times better
@Black_nine It looks like you've made the material metallic. I believe the metal would be painted over, so the metallic would be at zero. Could be wrong.
Semester just started, so progress has slowed a tiny bit, but I'm very close to finishing this thing. Aiming to have most of it done by tomorrow so I can submit it for a showcase at my university. Did the food decals, conspiracy board, proper poloroids, and added a bit more clutter to the messy side of the room. Also took @fsanin 's advice and made the lighting a tad bit warmer. I still want some of the blue glow from the computer screens so I'll keep tweaking things, but I do see the appeal of having it be brighter.
Ok I think I am done. Could push it further but I need rest a week or two. Renders from unity. I used only 4 materials with texture - concrete, floor, rust and metal (only base color and normal). And in addition 7 RGB mask so it could be more optimized. I was pretty lazy with UV because when you use a little bevel on low poly and then some mesh cut, the UV is gonna be so messy that any circular island converting to straight bar will be real pain. (I set all hard edge and seams but after unwraped I don't spend much time to optimize).
At the end I use material texture in 1k res. and RGB mask in 4k. res. Tris count is a little under 50k.
@Ashervisalis Big thanks! I have wrong material order when I working with UV space 0-1 shader but when I change to layered workflow I fix it. Look forward for you future update.
Good job all! Good luck with this and next challenge.
...and I think I am done. I may wind up doing some tweaks based on feedback I get, then implement those tweaks before I make an Artstation post, but I'm guessing they'll be very minor things.
@alytlebird I don't really have any critique, well done Maybe lower the opacity of your signature on the image, so it doesn't attract so much attention from the picture itself?
@Toafaloaf Could I suggest a different background colour? Maybe a colour which more compliments the mesh. Good job on the piece!
Hey all! Cool seeing the finished results (and even if they're not finished I still want to see them). I'm really happy with how my guy turned out, it was a pretty good way to learn Substance Painter, although there's still a ton I don't know.
I'd still like to add some water effects and maybe some other details to really show him off, but I'm calling the model itself done. If you have crits/advice/questions I'd love to hear them.
@alytlebird - Your scene looks good! I don't have much to add, the only thing I see that looks kinda weird to me are all those metal jars/urns in the corner by the hammock. They all look kinda uniform in a "3D metal material" way. You could tint a couple of them slightly in Unreal, maybe? I think leaning one over and maybe scattering them a bit would make it feel messier like the rest of the room. I love the white windows you added to the screens. It's a simple fix, but it's just enough to make it feel realistic and not weird.
Replies
Progress on the screens! I had a blast modeling and texturing these guys, made up a whole system of robotic arms and attachment points to fasten them onto the rails on the wall.
And here's an example of the slight flickering I added to the material, for added variation: https://i.gyazo.com/10fad57a0c6a1471cf3e65890bba0e89.mp4
Aaaaaand as an added bonus, here's what happened when stuff went wrong with the material variation and I wound up with a disco rave: https://i.gyazo.com/fc8bc96eb3c52fe93484d4d083f132f5.mp4
This high poly is intense. Everything green has had the proper bevels put into place. I'm spending extra time making sure the topology is a-ok and doesn't provide any artifacts when smoothing, as it would be a great folio piece. My low poly model poly count is just under 50k right now, which is around what I want to keep it at after all the retopo.
@alytlebird Nice texturing.The tiles might be a bit large.
@Ashervisalis I like all your custom details,it's looking good.Be sure to check your low poly for faceting in engine with baked lighting if you plan to use it as baked shadows go off geometry not normals and cylinders can be tricky.
I did another detail pass and some base materials.
I've only just started sculpting. I haven't used ZBrush in too long, so there was some remembering hotkeys involved. Also apparently dynamic subdivision just...makes it impossible to sculpt? My brushes were skipping all over the place. I'd never used it or run into that problem before. Anyway, turned that off and started creating cracks.
@alytlebird - Your scene is looking great, the lighting especially. Are you thinking of doing any sort of prompt / text / display on the screens? I know the concept is vague but just those bright white screens seems weird to me, they stand out so much, I guess? Anyway love the shader and rail system.
@jewski-bot - He's coming together! It's hard to tell, but the bake doesn't look too bad from the pictures you posted, although you probably do want to bake at a higher res. If you just have small errors it may be easier to just paint them out in Photoshop. Right now I think having some hue variation in your main color sections would help the look a ton. The different sections have different shades of blues, browns and golds. Some of that is due to the light, but some of it definitely isn't. He's looking good!
I've actually already used a decal in another area of the scene, just to experiment and see how they work and how to properly blend them onto textures.
Unity render. There are some things that need to looked at and possibly redone. I'm not a fan of the weathering of the blue painted parts and for the life of me can't figure out why I'm getting seams in a model that doesn't have hard edges.
In any event, I'm tired and need to get for work in about 6-7 hours. When I get back home tomorrow, I'll be sure to give some feedback on some of the updates that have been posted. Some really impressive work is coming out and I look forward to seeing everyone's finished products!
I apologize if it seems like I overburdened you with too much advice. As I said, I think that you're off to a good start. You just need to get those proportions accurate before going into the high poly model.
@Urzaz, you're next my friend! The model is looking sharp. Asides from a few small things, the totem itself is coming along. You're proportions and forms are are reasonably spot on and your sculpt details from what I can tell seem to be working a bit better than mine were. The few crits I do have are that there seems to be some pinching with the around the eyes / cheek region. I'm not sure if that's due to not having enough polygons to support the edgeloops in that area or what. You may be able to fix in ZBrush by converting to Dynamesh and smoothing it out, or even use Sculptris Pro. Another Idea that might work is Move Topological or Move Elastic as I found those to be great alternatives to the standard Move brush. Either way, you're going strong and I can't wait to see you get to the texture phase!
As far as my baking goes, I'm going to go take a look at some Substance tutorials. I may not have the correct FBX export settings from Maya. Additionally, I may need to re-pack which will set me back slightly, but thankfully I can just convert everything to smart materials in Substance Painter and plop them back on. Besides, I think I screwed up the workflow anyhow, LOL.
@alytlebird, that's incredibly badass so far, especially with some of the solutions to attach the monitors to the rails. Texturing looks pretty good as well. I can't think of much in the way of critiques as full blown environments are beyond me. I'm not sure if adding a bit more color the environment would over-saturate it or help it. It may a lighting solution yet to be implemented. I think you're in that place where it's tweaking subtle details that will help to further enhance your piece.
@Ashervisalis, You're model is a beast! I think that you've done a good job of filling in the blanks of the design not seen from the concept art and I'm a bit interested in how you approached the base attachment of the satellite dish to the mount. Stuff like that is usually stuff I tend to agonize over even though in the end it's usually a pretty simple solution!
@TangDao, Looking good so far. Your colors are nice and clear and it looks like you have a clean bake. Since it's early in the texturing phase, I don't really have any major feedback to give. Look forward to seeing the weathering!
I'll hopefully be finished this weekend depending on how much progress I make. It's been fun!
Currently thinking over how I want to do the bonsai tree for the zen guy's side. While it's tempting to use a premade tree and save myself the pain of drinking the SpeedTree koolaid (along with dropping $$ for a one-month subscription), I do need to learn foliage generation, and I feel like modeling it from scratch would take way too long.
So, here I fix the square and finished the bake part at 2k maps. Today I will start with texturing and hope I will get done quick this part. I had less time in the past few days that I was expeted.
@jewski-bot
Try to add an fill layer and select just the color. then drop the curvature and set the layer on the overlay. you can put another level fillter on the layer just to fix the intensity of the black and white. In this way you will have some light edges. In my opinion this is one dettail that you are missing and the difference of the colors betwin parts. for example: the base with the tail you can put in the same layer for color but almost all body parts have different colors. You have the sculpture done right you need just an little work on this things.
@Ashervisalis
@TangDao
Both of your guy's models are looking awesome by the way! I do like the details you've added to the mount that connects the arm to the dish, Asher. Tangdao, those base materials are looking good! Your gonna have yourself a real pretty prop when you're done.
Added vines w/ curve tubes, not sure how I should get lowpoly geo, even the lowest subdiv is still pretty high. I could also try just retopoing them to be part of the body, or lowering the Zbrush geo in Maya somehow. Anyone have experience with this sort of thing?
@alytlebird - That clothes pile texture looks GOOD. Is that Marvelous Designer for the clothes and pants? I will say that pile is pretty tall, though. It looks kinda "formed", I think natural pile would probably spread out flatter. The good thing is real-world reference is pretty easy to find.
@cician08 - The bake looks good! I think I'm seeing some small distortions in the texture around the hands and feet? If those become a problem you can try adding some edge loops, usually extra geometry fixes that, and if you just add loops you shouldn't have to mess with the UVs much.
I'll mess with making the pile more flat like you said, I see what you're saying. Theoretically I could just scale it in Unreal and it shouldn't look too bad...
@Gustavo_Elliott Hey dude, the model will be split into several different UV maps. The smaller parts will have their own texture, but since the model is actually gigantic, the larger parts will all have tiling textures added, so as you don't see the pixels up close.
Thanks, man. I was thinking I like to keep my props in my UV map normally, but this prop is going to be so dang big there's no way I wouldn't see pixels, thanks for confirming some of my speculations. Ya know, I did not even see that pillow-shroud thing you got going on, that is so cool! Retopo wont be that bad! actually, with step-build and the rest of freeform it should be uhhh not fun but uhhh not terrible?... ya know especially with the whole shift-drag an entire loop, It will no doubt be worth it.
@Urzaz
yeah ... there is small distortions in the texture but event with that the detail is a 100% fit with the rest of the cracks
You did a really clean model, smooth and you have that angry look from the concept and I like that you go with 2 tails
Thanks @Gustavo_Elliott , I used bevels and face weighted normals on my low poly to get smooth edges and a trim and detail normal sheet as well as tiling textures for details so most of my UVs are just cube mapped.To bake from high to low I'd start with at least 3 2k maps but I still don't know if that would be enough.You could also bake a normal map just for edge smoothing that wouldn't need as much resolution and bake you details separately and apply using a second UV set than your tiling textures or apply as decals.
Another approach would be to treat it as an asset for a RTS game for example that the camera never get close to there's no rule that says it has to be first person resolution.
@cician08 Looks good I really like the illusion of depth you got on the water.
Rendered in Unity using a custom skybox with an Intensity Multiplier of 2.
@cician08, I forgot all about using the Curvature Map to help get quick stylized edges. Thanks for the tip as that really helped a bunch!
It seems like you're doing well on starting off with your first past. Since it seems like you're doing a more realistic style, I'm not sure if you need the Curvature Map trick, but I did add in something similar where I used the AO mesh input map as a fill layer, then set to Color Burn and put the opacity to about 50%. This may help with emphasize definition in recessed areas.
@Ashervisalis, thanks for sharing your workflow and the link to Pepera's art station. I'll be sure to check it out. As it stands, I'm probably not going to be able to tackle the satellite with the time constraints and also crazy hours at work.
@Urzaz, Your sculpting details are very nice and clean. The definition is nice and sharp. Should translate well to normal map bake when you get there.
I have been working on hand painting the texture and adding some normals for the indentations in the stone. I have no clue why his chest isn't showing up in Substance painter, so I'm just going to texture it separately with the vines and water. Let me know what you guys think so far. It's so wonderful seeing so many new people trying the challenges out!
@cician08 It is looking really good! It has a unique style about it and I especially like that bucket texture.
@Urzaz That is a beautiful sculpt. I look forward to seeing it textured.
For my update. Working on texturing. I have not done many hand painted textures so it has been taking me a while. Lots of trial and error. This is just a quick in substance painter render using Iray. Still in progress.
By my spreadsheet, I've got 12 assets left!
@alytlebird Looks good! I'd bend and rotate some of those photos differently so they look more unique.
I'm working on wear and dirt using UE4 vertex paint.
Here's all the zen props compiled:
Last stop will be fine details like the keyboard, some pens, ID cards, actual Polaroids (been using stand-ins so far!), etc., as well as the dirty food decals and the "conspiracy wall" I've mentioned before. Also still thinking over how I want to handle the city skyline. Might wind up using a blurry backdrop and blowing out the window with bloom so you can't see much detail.
I made up a background for the scene to add more interest over the standard grey/black, but I'm struggling giving it a sense of scale and avoid it looking like a toy. I guess a couple of other buildings around it would help.
I tried producing a short animation from Toolbag, but Youtube 's compression has degraded it a bit. (Facebook's compression completely destroyed it, despite using the advised settings. 720p. 30fps... just Mpeg rather than MP4.)
Now looking forward to next months challenge.
@Gustavo_Elliott I modelled mirrored but flattened out the UV's using a few materials for the parts. I'm not expecting to use this 'in-game', just a few pre-rendered shots, so I wasn't worried about performance and texture sizes. I'm also still relatively new to this, and haven't done it the other way yet
@cician08 I like the Iray render. The background works really well with your statue.
The area with some plant-life growth looks messy, but I'm planning on adding some grass cards that blend with it during the texture painting process.
@alytlebird your environment is looking awesome! Something that I see in the concept is that most of the lighting in the environment is warm (especially the bounce light). This is really cool because it makes the blue in the monitors pop out more, integrate all the red props (The carpets, hammock blankets, and the pillows), and also even though it's a hard surface sci-fi future, gives us that feeling of a cozy room
@jewski-bot Great work! Every update you post the totem looks better and better. The addition of the lighter edges is great for stylized props. My advice is that after you have applied a mask using the curvature map, it is good to go back to it and erase or paint some of the areas where it was applied. I personally like thinking about "the story" of the prop and figure out where some of the areas have degraded more than others to apply more or less edge wear.
Here we go for perhaps the final update. I'm kind of meh to be honest. I think that most of the work is okay, but my first foray into Substance Designer kind of left something to be desired with the grass. It just doesn't look like it fits to be honest.
In any event, I'm thinking that I'll probably go back to doing hard surface work for the next challenge.
Great looking entries all!
@fsanin, that looks great! Your sculpt looks very clean and the details have clear definition. In regard to painting out some of the excessive edge wear on the curvature map, I had done that earlier, but I suppose that it's still a bit much in some areas. In all honesty, despite my insane 2K map, I saw this guy more for mobile games. I'll see what kind of result I get from scaling down the res to around 512.
@Ashervisalis, sorry for the late response. I had debated adding in the vines, and I think it would work for a higher res model (granted I could probably stand to optimize the polycount on this guy still), whereas for a mobile game background prop it might be too much, (though the only mobile game I've been playing is Bleach Brave Souls on my Samsung phone, so I might be wrong).
In any event, I'm looking forward to September's challenge!
I've roughed out the color values in Painter, but I really don't understand the software well yet. I'm worried I have my file / texture set set up the wrong way, but we'll see how it goes.
@cician08 - I think I see what you're saying, the bottom/darker part of the mouth is too thin and doesn't stick out? I'm going to try and thicken it up once things are done and maybe make it stick out a bit more, it does stick out some but isn't that noticeable. Thanks!
@momomoonscar - I like your handpainting a *lot*. The general art / painting tip that's always thrown around is to not focus too much on the details of any one area but rather work in levels across the whole thing before drilling down on details. I suspect that the chest isn't showing makes that look worse, and I'm definitely not a great painter, so grain of salt and all that. I'd be very interested in seeing how you have your layers set up or if you're just painting all on one.
Did the food decals, conspiracy board, proper poloroids, and added a bit more clutter to the messy side of the room.
Also took @fsanin 's advice and made the lighting a tad bit warmer. I still want some of the blue glow from the computer screens so I'll keep tweaking things, but I do see the appeal of having it be brighter.
Here's a progression gif:
And here's the final scene!
<a href="https://sketchfab.com/models/7c2febeca8cb46d3929d1fee2e97d43f?utm_medium=embed&utm_source=website&utm_campaign=share-popup" target="_blank" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1CAAD9;">Tiki Fountain</a>
by <a href="https://sketchfab.com/Toafaloaf?utm_medium=embed&utm_source=website&utm_campaign=share-popup" target="_blank" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1CAAD9;">Toafaloaf</a>
on <a href="https://sketchfab.com?utm_medium=embed&utm_source=website&utm_campaign=share-popup" target="_blank" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1CAAD9;">Sketchfab</a>
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@Toafaloaf Could I suggest a different background colour? Maybe a colour which more compliments the mesh. Good job on the piece!
@alytlebird - Your scene looks good! I don't have much to add, the only thing I see that looks kinda weird to me are all those metal jars/urns in the corner by the hammock. They all look kinda uniform in a "3D metal material" way. You could tint a couple of them slightly in Unreal, maybe? I think leaning one over and maybe scattering them a bit would make it feel messier like the rest of the room.
I love the white windows you added to the screens. It's a simple fix, but it's just enough to make it feel realistic and not weird.