Narcissism Priest Female Version (Realtime Model Portfolio Piece) FINISHED

Nuclear Angel

Latest Progress: 



I am over these coming months in my spare time work on a beautiful concept by Hayun Lee, but as a girl instead of a guy. My goal for the project is for the character to be at a quality for a AAA game. Any feedback would be welcome as I really want to push myself as far as I can on this project. 





Currently I have as of now blocked in all the major elements, and for the face I have got the base up. 

Body Screenshot

Face Closeup


Moving forward my focus will be on the face, hair and the hat. But I will try to work a bit on as many of the elements as possible to keep the quality going up relatively consistent.

Nuclear Angel

I have started to polishing some of the cloth elements, so the hat and the Shoulder pieces got some love. 

Nuclear Angel

I got some more work on the coat this morning. I still got the bottom part left of the coat, and then to polish up the other parts. 

Feedback more than welcome.

Nuclear Angel

I worked some more on the coat. I will keep on trucking with the arms now. 

Nuclear Angel

I have now refined all the element except for the belts and some minor details like smaller crosses and spikes on the shoes. So next up is to take another pass on the highpoly to get in that next level of detailing. So that means I will try to finish up the face under the coming week. 

Pav3d

Hey shes looking really good! Youve matched the concept pretty well. Id say take another look at those folds above the belt line. Also possibly make the crease between the legs on the back a bit less obvious, less trouser-like and more long skirt. The straps coming off the belt are a bit too thin compared to the concept.

Looking forward to see how that weapon turns out, looks like a fun one to model

Nuclear Angel

@Pav3d I am a huge fan of your work, so thank you for taking the time to give me this feedback =O! You are spot on with your observations, just a clarification on the crease between the legs.
Are you thinking of either the seam line in red, the folds going down in blue or are you thinking of the entire distance between the fabric between the legs making it look like strousers? 
 

And yea I am looking forward to be making the book as well, a lot of tiny cool details to both make and then texture! Thanks again man

Pav3d

Hey no problem

Sorry ignore me, I misinterpreted the concept, didnt realise this one that shows her wearing trousers,

i thought it was more of a trench coat

Nuclear Angel

Ahh I see what you mean =P Yea that one picture really helped me out when trying to figure out what she is wearing. 

Nuclear Angel

I have now blocked in all the elements of the body, all the small crosses, spikes and such. So I have now started to work on the face where I am aiming to finish the first piece of the highpoly. I will address the feedback from Pav3D when I get to polish up the coat. So those folds will be taken care of. 

Body


Head


Detail close-ups

Nuclear Angel

I have over this weekend made a lot of minor tweaks from various sources of feedback. I went over all the folds on the waist line, softened up the fabric and made some more detial work plus changes to the face. So now I feel that the face is done, and the coat is pretty much done as well.
What I got left to polish up now:
Shoulders
Arms
Gloves
Socks
Belts 
Shoes

bkost

Hey Nuclear, sweet progress! The clothing design details on the shirt look awesome. For the design on the center back did you mask and extract?

I love the character design and the character sheet layout illustrating all the details. 
Right now the spiky belt loops look too thin/small and feel underwhelming

Great work nonetheless, I look forward to seeing the model all textured!

Nuclear Angel

Damn you are entirely correct on that the belt loops are a bit to slim. Great catch thank you. 

And regarding the details on the back you are entirely correct. I mask details on the semi finalized coat and from that extract with 0 thickness. Then I work on the flat plane and retopo it the fastest way possible, usually zremesher is enough, but I clean some of the spikes up in Maya to get as clean as possibly I can. Then I give it thickness with panel-loops and detail them. 



I hope that explains it properly  

Nuclear Angel

I have got the arms polished up as well as the gloves. Next step is to have all the straps, socks and shoes to polish up. 

artofmars

Thats a tough concept to work with, right now you are killing it. keep it up!

kanga

Looks great. Love the layers.

Nuclear Angel

@kanga @artofmars Thanks a lot you two! 

I have finished up the highpoly of the body now so I have the two books left. 

Complete body


Details

bkost

Bloody awesome details on the clothing! Now onto hear giant book haha, I'm interested to see how that turns out.

The character design page illustrating the use of her book is hilarious. I wonder what's filled in those pages that makes her want to beat up the book over the ground. 

AndresZambrano

Very unique concept and really good execution from your part, looking really good so far. I don't know if you are going for full realism or more of a semi-realistic style but I think some parts could use more memory folds to make the fabric look more believable. Although it you are going for a cleaner somewhat stylized look then probably better just how it is.

Nuclear Angel

@AndresZambrano Thanks for your kind words, and you are entirely correct on the lack of memory folds. I am currently working on the retopology of the character and I will test bake as it is now. But if it feels bad on the bakes I will spend some time getting in a bit more of those details. Great spotting! 

For now I have finished the book and I am currently retopologizing the character. 

AndresZambrano

Looking great man!

Nuclear Angel

I have retopoed the body, baked the base textures and started to texture her. I still got some stuff left on the face, but I will tomorrow start on her hair as that and retopoing and baking the book are the large parts left to do! Then it is to texture her body and the book which will be great fun! 

The body is on 2 textures sets of 4K each, divided in to cloth and the other one being leather and details. The face is right now on a 4K texture map. 
The body with face is currently at 76K tri


Face Closeup

Nuclear Angel

Currently working on the hair, still got transitional haircards and more flyaway to do, but any thoughts would be lovely on the progress so far. 

bkost

Nice start @Nuclear Angel in addition to the transitional and flyaways. I believe you could use a layer or two of break up.

It is time consuming but well worth it. What are your references? How many different texture strips do you have?  Right now your base is good, but there needs to be a variety length and width in the hair cards

Nuclear Angel

@bkost Thanks for the wakeup call, I really needed to add more breakup cards as well vary their lengths and widths. 

My references are these: 



And this is currently my diffuse downsampled:

bkost

I think you may need to edit your textures more. Try over exaggerating the differences between the texture strips with clumps. For example here is one of my texture sheets. Through a lot of trial and error, I learned that the textures need to be drastically different. Thick, thin, 1 clump, 2 clumps etc. When you end up placing your textures on the head keep in mind it needs to read well from far away. We spend all the time up close and personal editing the strips, take a step back and see how it reads when the character is in full view. 

Nuclear Angel

You where right on the money @bkost thanks for the tips and calling out the texture cards. I have spent last days updating the haircards, the texture and the shader. It is not completely done, but good enough for now. 

I have also started to texture the leather parts of the outfit. So I will keep up with that and finish up her textures next. 

AndresZambrano

Good progress on the characters, hair cards are such a pain, I wish games could run fine with hair systems. 

Nuclear Angel

Thanks Andres, and yes you are completely right! One day maybe in some years we will all have to forget the wonders of manual hair card placement ^^ 

Nuclear Angel

So I have got all the textures on a first pass, now I got to go over them all again as well as go over the haircards and make some final tweaks. I have also started to retopo the book and I will hopefully have it done by the weekend so I can wrap all of this up. 



Details:

Nuclear Angel

So I have baked the book and started to texture it. 

I got the teeth left to do and also I got to do the rigging to start my work on a final render, I will probably tweak the textures some when I got it posed up. I am thinking of giving it some story elements in the texture with blood splatter and a scene that could be like a diorama. Not sure on the final scene yet.  

truemkar

Looks very interesting and reminds Bloodborne 

Nuclear Angel

@truemkar Thank you! 

So I have rigged her and started to pose her. 

I have tried two different poses and I am also playing around with different backgrounds. The skinning is not final and the same with some of the texture work, I have noticed some things I want to change now with the textures when I have started to give the scene a more fleshed out lighting.

I will also try a new pose later this weekend one that is a bit more neutral, not super happy with the second one. 

I would love feedback on anything you people can find. 

Thanks for watching.



background color tests




Pose number 2 test

truemkar

the dark grey one looks great

Nuclear Angel

@truemkar Yes you where right on the money with that one. Grey it is!  

And I am finally done! 

Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this one. It have been a blast. 

I have more high-resolution images over at my artstation, breakdowns and the like as well.  

GrevSev

Holy fuck this is MILDLY sexy.

bkost

Wonderful work Nuclear!! The final beauty shots have turned out great! 
You really nailed down the lighting of the scene, your face and hair texture in the last shot are great. I'm curious how did you set up your hair shading? If you can recommend any resources I'd appreciate it! I'm trying to work with white hair as well and it doesn't look too great haha

I'm excited to see your next piece Keep up the great work

Nuclear Angel

@GrevSev Thank you! I am confused on the "Mildly" sexy though xD

@bkost Thank you for the nice comment and thank you for helping me out during the process, was damn nice feedback! 

Regarding the hair then. I started out by following this tutorial and copying the hair shader right up and down. 

But I had to do some tweaks as her hair is dark brown while the one I am making was white. There was a lot of playing with it back and forth to end up with the result I got in the end, but to give you an headstart I can show you my settings and a quick breakdown. 

First of all your scale determines a lot of these settings, so before you can even try to mimic my settings you need to match the scale I worked of. 



Now when you got that covered here you go on the settings. 



I would say that most of the final look comes down to playing with your specular values in conjunction with your Scatter Depth and Translucency Depth.

Scatter depth controls the softness, and if you go to overboard with it it looses all the interesting shadows. But to low and you loose the soft feeling of hair.

Translucency depth helps you get more influence from lights, and the shorter the haircards the lower this value should be. Unless you want the hair to pick up all the light there is. I chose a lower value as the hair looked wonky under her hat with a too high value.  

To play with the specular I recommend that you color the hair a bit so you do not have white highlights on a white base. To do that I just changed the albedo tint color. 



I hope this helps out Bkost. Just do not forget to play around with the values, it is the best way to learn.  

bkost

I appreciate all the info you've provided for the hair shader setup, I'm learning a lot from all this info and that article!
Thank you Nuclear! Cheers

slosh

Damn, big level up Nuclear!  This turned out fantastic!

Nuclear Angel

@bkost No problem I hope it will be of great use to you . Make that Starman shine!

@slosh Wow thanks Slosh, it means a lot to hear that from you! 

Mehran Khan

this lovely! reminds of gungrave.