Sketchbook: Chris Fraser
polycounter lvl 5
Hey everyone!
Just found Polycount a few weeks ago. I have really enjoyed reading and seeing everyones work on here. So, figured I would do my best to contribute as well. What better way than to start a sketchbook thread!
I plan to post whatever I happen to be working on at any given time. Critiques would be very much appreciated as I want to learn as much as possible.
A little about me, I live in Vancouver, Canada. Went to school for 3D art at BCIT just over 10 years ago. Although I did well in school, after graduation, life took me in a different direction for the last decade. For reasons I can't explain, a few weeks ago I made a decision to redirect my focus back into 3D art and design and ultimately plan to make a push into the game industry once my skills are up to snuff.
Ever since its like I've been possessed with a passion I forgot I had for doing this stuff. For the last few years I've been really into 2D art and drawing, which is luckily something I never gave up. With 3D though, its crazy, I'm just obsessed with learning as much as I can. Its all coming back like a flood. I've already re-learned and learned so much in just a couple weeks. I know I have an insane amount to learn still but I've never been more amped to learn and progress.
I've been writing a lot about the experience on my art blog, which is http://www.lefthandart.com if anyone wants to check that out.
As for stuff I've been working on, I started small with modelling and texturing a pretty simple flashlight. Modeled in 3DS Max and textured in Substance Painter.
I also modeled and just finished unwrapping this low poly spaceship I plan to texture tonight.
Anyways, thats all for now I think. Like I said, crits more than welcome! Thanks!
Just found Polycount a few weeks ago. I have really enjoyed reading and seeing everyones work on here. So, figured I would do my best to contribute as well. What better way than to start a sketchbook thread!
I plan to post whatever I happen to be working on at any given time. Critiques would be very much appreciated as I want to learn as much as possible.
A little about me, I live in Vancouver, Canada. Went to school for 3D art at BCIT just over 10 years ago. Although I did well in school, after graduation, life took me in a different direction for the last decade. For reasons I can't explain, a few weeks ago I made a decision to redirect my focus back into 3D art and design and ultimately plan to make a push into the game industry once my skills are up to snuff.
Ever since its like I've been possessed with a passion I forgot I had for doing this stuff. For the last few years I've been really into 2D art and drawing, which is luckily something I never gave up. With 3D though, its crazy, I'm just obsessed with learning as much as I can. Its all coming back like a flood. I've already re-learned and learned so much in just a couple weeks. I know I have an insane amount to learn still but I've never been more amped to learn and progress.
I've been writing a lot about the experience on my art blog, which is http://www.lefthandart.com if anyone wants to check that out.
As for stuff I've been working on, I started small with modelling and texturing a pretty simple flashlight. Modeled in 3DS Max and textured in Substance Painter.
I also modeled and just finished unwrapping this low poly spaceship I plan to texture tonight.
Anyways, thats all for now I think. Like I said, crits more than welcome! Thanks!
Replies
I started this sculpt on the day I got it just to mess around and try to figure out how the program worked. I come back to it every now and then if I'm bored. Its so cool that you can sculpt stuff like this in Zbrush without really even knowing how to use the program at all. Honestly I don't know shit in the program and am just winging it pushing/pulling/smoothing until something shows up. I've pretty much used the move brush for 98% of this and a little bit of clay build up. Still lots to do but I figured I would post it here for progress sake.
- Learn to properly use Zbrush to sculpt a high poly realistic human head
- Learn to retopo head in 3ds max
- Unwrap head in 3ds max
- Texture in Substance Painter
- Learn to use Substance Designer for any material I needed
- Learn to use Marmoset toolbag to display everything in the end
For the sculpt, I had only really played around in Zbrush on a few projects without really knowing what the hell I was doing. So, I went to the Arrimus3D youtube channel and watched some of his sculpting videos. His videos have been immensely helpful in learning. Just the way he presents information is so much easier to follow than most "learn Zbrush" tutorials. I found he just gets right to the point where others spend too much time browsing the interface before beginning. I spent a lot of time just learning the brushes and when to use what brush, etc...
Here's a link to his channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSLLdTBwLMfTKWS56tOiQpw
I started with a sphere in Zbrush. I used my imagination and bit of reference of heads from Google just slowly working my way from a very low poly version to about 3.5million polys at the end. I don't have a ton of time to spend on 3d stuff during the week so it took me a few weeks at about 4-5 hours a week to get to the following the following. I feel it would be a lot faster now since I was learning all the brushes and how things worked for the first while.
Next, I looked up some vids on using retopo tools in 3ds max since I had never done it before. I found a few good tutorials and set to work for a few hours retopologizing the head into max. I had a rough idea on what I was supposed to be doing from having looked at 3d head meshes over the years but really didn't have much of a plan at all.
It was sort of coming along but I had a gut feeling that I wasn't doing it correctly and I had probably gone too into adding more poly's than I should be adding. So, I stopped and looked up some vids on retopologizing a human head and found the following vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L8eZAwmG2E
It was extremely helpful to watch and so I started over again. In no time I had the head fully retopologized and had learned a lot about theory of retopologizing a head. I ran a turbosmooth on the retopo'd head to get a bit more geometry and this was the result.
I then did a really basic unwrap in Max using the peel tool. I admit I spent like 5 minutes on this part, which may not have been wise but I was keen to get it into painter to see if I could even get a bake going.
I also ended up making a cage for the head so the bake would go better.
Once into Painter I baked all the maps, using the high poly sculpt on the low poly retopo'd mesh. I threw on a quick skin material just to see how it looked and this is what I got.
Sort of looks like Patrick Stewart here
There was a lot of back and forth at this point. I think I actually started with my really low poly head but realized that the shadows were showing quite blocky due to how low poly it was. So, thats when I did the turbosmooth and brought it all back for another bake, which worked much better.
I spent a while in painter working with different materials to get the skin looking natural. I figured I wanted to make this guy some sort of ancient barbarian horde style warrior so I added some dirt and some war paint to one side of his face. Ended up with something like this.
I figured it was good enough, but he still needed some eyes and I had no idea how I was going to make those. I screwed around on my own for a while trying to manually paint an eye texture and looked at a few videos but was not happy with the result. I realized I could have just found some texture online and copied it or something but I really wanted to make something myself to put in there. I mean its eyeballs, how hard could it be, how long could it really take?
In the end, I remembered I had a substance designer education license but had never installed it. I remembered seeing a video listed on youtube about making an eyeball material in subsctance designer so I installed the program and found the video. This is the video I followed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glHAfulS19k
Its an older 5 part series on creating the eyeball substance, step by step by Vincent Gault. He's using a much older version of Designer throughout the video and he has a pretty thick accent so I had to go really slow and make compromises when he did things that seem different in the newest version of Designer. Ultimately, this was a good thing though cause it meant I was making the material more my own than just copying him, which I liked.
In the end, I spent a good 5-10 hours just working on the eye material because I was learning Designer while doing it and its easy to get caught up playing around with settings for hours on end in there. This was the result I landed on.
The real funny thing I was to find out later is that you can barely see the eyes of my character in the final renders. Oh well, it was still a blast getting caught up in learning a new program. Haha.
Anyways, I published the material and brought it into Painter, applied it to my eyeball mesh and exported all the textures.
I had never used Marmoset toolbag before but saw I could get a 30 day trial so I installed that and gave it a go since it seems to be a common tool for showing off completed projects on here.
It was simple enough to find my way around and get the scene going. I quickly realized that the dirt generator I had used in Painter was way too intense of a result, especially in the creases in my guys face, so I went back to Painter and toned it down as well as fiddled with some other tweaks.
I brought it all back into Marmoset, imported the head, the eyes, etc... toyed around with the settings, set some lights in a scene I liked and this was the final result.
Pretty happy with the result. I realize he doesn't have any eyebrows or eyelashes. I figure I'll sort that out on the next one. Kind of just want to move to the next model and use what I learned from this one to make it good instead of continuing to fiddle with this one endlessly.
Any comments or critiques are welcome. Thanks!