Sketchbook: Zott

Zott

Hi there, I'm a 3D artist currently building a portfolio for game art. 

I've decided to start putting my work online because I'd really like to improve as best as I can, so please feel free to provide feedback/critique on anything I post here if you'd like to.

Thank you for taking the time to check out my thread!

Zott

Here is my most recent "finished" project. I learned a lot making her and I think there are things worth improving but I've decided to put her up for display for the time being and I'll probably pour some more work into her again after taking a step back for at least a week or so. The character is from Anzka Nguyen's wonderful character busts https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w8A0V6 I liked the character and wanted to create a PBR, 3D version of her.





There's also a turn table on the art station page for her if you'd like to see that: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/e0lE66

Here is the original concept by Anzka Nguyen:

Zott

I've been working on a fishmonger character who I'm also building a scene for. His name is "Gar". My plan with this guy was to work on my anatomy and to try out making clothes in Marvelous Designer and then feed them through the MD>Maya>Zbrush WF to add some sculpted details. I'm also planning on retrying hair cards for him. I tested hair cards for my last project but it didn't look right vs the concept. The boots/belt/beltloops are box modeled.


A problem I'm having with him is that he's a character I doodled a while ago as a sort of side character to a canned idea and so I think his design is a little bland right now. I'm starting to feel like Gar is maybe more of a "tech demo" of a project than a super interesting guy.

Here's the low poly I have so far:


 I had to create nice quadded low poly before I could sculpt in the finer details in zbrush. The MD8 remeshing works quite well, except for the tris it creates at pattern edges, so I just used the mesh>transfer attributes method with Maya. The pants are a little too high res, but it's perfect for sculpting for now so I'll think about making a better version of those once I'm done sculpting the seams, etc.

Zott

I had an idea over the weekend and decided to take a bit of a break from Gar and play around with MD for a bit.




I've been wanting to make use of MD's Trace UV to pattern utility and I decided this could be a cool experiment. I created a spherical, non-constant spring shape as the frame and then fit a low poly sphere over it and gave it some quick UVs in Zbrush via polygroups. Getting the simulation right in MD took a couple tries but retrying different approaches was fast since both the spring and the "fabric" were already in place. Once I was done with MD, I made a low poly frame and power cable and textured in substance painter.

I created a subsuface influence map for the lamp paper by combining info from the curvature and roughness maps to make it look like the frame is still inside and to help sell the rice paper look and to keep the light from scattering as much in the painted areas. Full prop ended up being 938 tris. All maps are 1024x1024. I also learned how to make gifs in PS today 

Zott

I've finished Gar's high and low poly and I'll be moving on to UVs soon:

I decided to redo his shirt entirely as I realized the previous version was really ill-fitted. I ended up borrowing a book on pattern making and realized there were some important measurements that I wasn't making before creating the shirt pattern and that helped a lot. I also decided to give him an apron.

I think I'll leave the hair cards out for now since I've been really wanting to get into the materials for some time and I can put those on their own texture set later once I get there. I also kinda like the chrome dome look

Zott

UV's done!

I've been using Houdini for UVs lately because I like the parametric packing workflow. It's got all the normal UV utility I typically use in max and UV groups work better (imo). 

I tried a test bake and ran into some triangulation errors so I'll have to handle that after work during this week. Here's what the first bake gave me, mistakes and all:

Zott

Long time no posts! My day job has been stupid busy so I've had precious little time to post about Gar's progress, let alone time to work on him but he's still going! I redid the UVs and split him into two texture sets as it got me the pixel density I was looking for. I also made the "Gar's" logo with a sculpted sea gar in the shape of a G in Zbrush.

 I feel like he's at about 80% now, I need to add more roughness info and more story and small fixes to the materials and move some parts of the mesh about a little.

Also, sorry, the lighting in marmoset for that gif is really bad. I'll post some more better lit images next time.

Zott

I'm considering Gar done now. All in, he took about two months of after work and weekend time. He's 27,190 tris and he has two texture sets, displayed at 2k. I'd like to keep working on him but I've learned a lot from the project and I'm ready to start new things.


A couple detail shots from marmoset:



Here's a gif:

As always, I'm happy to receive any critique/suggestions/etc. Now to figure out what's next.

allmighty_thunder

That gif is a bit choppy for me what is the framerate on it?

Zott

I'll have to double check once I'm back home but I think I recorded at 30FPS. I saved it as an image sequence and made a gif of it in photoshop; I could have accidentally set the time between frames a little too high in PS. I'll try to fix that later tonight, it does look choppy. Thanks for the input!

Zott

So I re-did the gif without a delay between frames and it still does look kinda choppy, so it's probably the 30FPS that's causing that. I rendered at 30FPS to keep the end gif file size down, since I don't want the art station page to take forever to load. Hopefully it doesn't detract from the image too much

I also tried changing the background color to a green, I think the contrast works a little better?

Zott

I wanted to take a break from my other project, just for a day. I felt like doing something more organic. I found this awesome piece by Brian Wynia:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rR1VJL

I really love it and decided to dedicate a few hours to do a study of it. I didn't match all the details perfectly and the polypaint is really sloppy but I was trying to learn from the bigger shapes and I didn't want to throw more than a few hours at it since I was copying someone else's work:

Zott

The beginning of a leaf blower for the DiNusty discord monthly challenge that I've started:

Zott

Some progress from yesterday with a sub-d modifier applied:

Zott