Hello everyone, I would like to show the breakdown on my Witch Doctor Crest. The next few posts to this thread will be a walk through of how I achieved it. First, here are the final renders:
Side-by-side with the 2D art - yes this is the spray from HotS
My downside is being very type A, so I felt it necessary to put out a timeline on how I will go about proceeding with the prop. I make sure how to analyze how I will go about building the piece and what struggles I may possibly encounter. Note the very very important Week 2.5 event.
First thing's first: test out how I will go about making the feathers and fur. I decided to do a feasiblity test using tutorials made by the very talented Dantert and Pablo Munoz Gomez. So far so good but I wound up throwing out the fibermesh idea because as you'll see later, it clashes badly with the bright chunky style that is signature of Blizzard.
Here is a single card with a feather texture and alpha applied. It has been lit from in front as well as from behind to test translucency of the material
Now that that's out of the way, I block out all the hard surfaces in Maya, taking very good care to retain accuracy in size. I do not add any support edges here. That will be done in Zbrush.
The prop is brought into Zbrush and prepped for texturing and further sculpting. I have added directly to my interface three important buttons.: Group by Normals, Crease PG and Uncrease PG. By grouping the imported pieces in Zbrush I will be able to then use the Crease PG feature. This plus a little tweaking using the Zmodeler brush gives me nice crisp edges that won't be lost as I subdivide.
You can see in the picture below how I can retain the hard sharp shapes and still be able to add detail like wood rings and chipped bone.
For the flag and imported the rod into marvelous designer and made a simple hanging sheet. I wanted to make the rips and tears on an alpha card so that required that I go and utilize the Transfer Attributes option in Maya.
A quick break down on how that was done:
Marvelous Designer exports their .obj's tessimated. I wanted a nice smooth quad-based topology so I exported two things from MD: The final rendered sheet and the pattern from which the sheet was made from.
To do that: 1.) Right click on your rendered cloth -> Reset 2-D Arrangement 2.) Export obj selected with the following settings checked: Single Object, Unwelded, and Thin
In Maya: 1.) Import both your flat pattern and your rendered cloth This is the best part! When you import your flat pattern, when you open the UV editor you can see that your UVs are practically made!! 2.) You can go ahead and go one of two ways: go into zbrush and zremesh or just bust out the quad draw and trace over your flat pattern to get your toplogy right. This creates the base low poly object. In my case, I used the Add Divisions option in Maya to give me a better resolution
3.) Select your imported pattern mesh and then select your low poly object as well. Mesh -> Transfer attributes
Now your information from your MD pattern is right on your low poly mesh. However you're not done yet. We need to transfer the vertex position of our floppy sheet onto or low poly sheet. To do that, change the settings of the Transfer Attributes window again:
4.) Select your floppy sheet, and then select your low poly sheet and click Apply.
BAM!
Now I can make a sweet and glorious tattered alpha pattern and slap that baby onto my flag!
So I mentioned that I tossed out using fibermesh in this piece. This is why. I did not like how the way the material classed with the rest of the piece. Oh well. I tossed it out and sculpted the fur instead.
First pass at sculpted feathers. Again based out in Maya and then brought into Zbrush. They looked like leaves at this point and the material wasn't reading right.
And that's it! I did a side-by-side comparison and made some small tweaks in shape and silohuette. I'm not 100% satisfied with how the materials are reading but I'm really hoping that this will do better once it comes out of the texturing process.
Thank you for reading and learning with me and giving me an excuse to not retopo by making this walkthrough instead
I was very fortunate to have one of the prop artists at Blizzard spend some time doing a paint over on my mask. He instated the idea of "chonk" and exaggerate forms to emphasize silhouette. Here's a before and after I took his comments into consideration
Texturing in progress - it's the bane of my existence. I was never good at color theory but I'm giving it my 110% I am pushing for a stylized look so I'm minimizing use of roughness and maximizing AO, curvature and diffusion
@AlexJerjomin I certainly have room on a feathers card to try it ! I'm currently sticking with the concept which is pretty symmetrical for the most part but I don't see the harm in adding some details as you suggested
added some extra geometry today, starting to push in the hand painted stuff - been really struggling with trying to nail "stylistic" way of making things look and i've been doing and redoing and redoing textures. I still don't feel i'm there yet. in the mean time, i added additional geometry to balance out the headdress by adding feathers under the tusks.
Replies
Here is a single card with a feather texture and alpha applied. It has been lit from in front as well as from behind to test translucency of the material
You can see in the picture below how I can retain the hard sharp shapes and still be able to add detail like wood rings and chipped bone.
A quick break down on how that was done:
Marvelous Designer exports their .obj's tessimated. I wanted a nice smooth quad-based topology so I exported two things from MD: The final rendered sheet and the pattern from which the sheet was made from.
To do that:
1.) Right click on your rendered cloth -> Reset 2-D Arrangement
2.) Export obj selected with the following settings checked: Single Object, Unwelded, and Thin
In Maya:
1.) Import both your flat pattern and your rendered cloth
This is the best part! When you import your flat pattern, when you open the UV editor you can see that your UVs are practically made!!
2.) You can go ahead and go one of two ways: go into zbrush and zremesh or just bust out the quad draw and trace over your flat pattern to get your toplogy right. This creates the base low poly object. In my case, I used the Add Divisions option in Maya to give me a better resolution
3.) Select your imported pattern mesh and then select your low poly object as well. Mesh -> Transfer attributes
Now your information from your MD pattern is right on your low poly mesh. However you're not done yet. We need to transfer the vertex position of our floppy sheet onto or low poly sheet. To do that, change the settings of the Transfer Attributes window again:
4.) Select your floppy sheet, and then select your low poly sheet and click Apply.
BAM!
Now I can make a sweet and glorious tattered alpha pattern and slap that baby onto my flag!
Here are a couple tutorial videos on the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFAfqW0Zlqk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjbTQOfXhg
Yeah no.
And that's it! I did a side-by-side comparison and made some small tweaks in shape and silohuette. I'm not 100% satisfied with how the materials are reading but I'm really hoping that this will do better once it comes out of the texturing process.
Thank you for reading and learning with me and giving me an excuse to not retopo by making this walkthrough instead
Texturing in progress - it's the bane of my existence. I was never good at color theory but I'm giving it my 110% I am pushing for a stylized look so I'm minimizing use of roughness and maximizing AO, curvature and diffusion
I certainly have room on a feathers card to try it ! I'm currently sticking with the concept which is pretty symmetrical for the most part but I don't see the harm in adding some details as you suggested