[wip] Another Scifi Soldier

bkost

Most recent progress 



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Hey all, here I'll be logging my work in progress of a new character I'm building. 
In this project I will be exercising my organic hardsurface modeling, material breakup, and a touch of concept design.

My aim is to quickly iterate and see what works in Zbrush, focusing on nailing the primary forms first and slowly hop into medium forms and so on. I will see how long I can stick in Zbrush with this project. Dynamesh to Subd lowpoly is fairly simple with the Topology brush. Once I'm happy with the large + medium forms, I will hop into Blender for the tertiary high frequency details (or maybe just sculpt em following Keos Masons workflow?). 

The final model will be in between a concept character and game ready model rendered in either Marmoset or Eevee. I will not be focusing much time on a clean lowpoly and uvs. I wish to have a quick turn over. 

Mood board - 

Progress 01 - Helm blockout
 

bkost

Here's my initial blobby dynamesh blockout of the armor. Next is to refine the shapes and focus on the silhouette and primary forms. 

I find the first few steps to be the hardest, staring at a blank canvas is intimidating. Starting from a basemesh to extract forms can help make this task less frightening and speeds up the gap between blocking out and detailing (which is the fun part!).

kanga

Looks like a good start. I like to have the arms raised a little higher to make it easier to work under the arms and its a good starting point for animation motion. Don't forget to relax and spread the fingers so you can work on them, unless you just want this figure as a concept model.

bkost

Hey Kanga, thanks! Yeah, I don't plan for this piece to be animation ready. Just a concept model 

Here's some more progress. Continuing to block out the forms, beginning to run the topology brush over pieces for easier manipulation while in subD.

I've been fiddling around with shape language and exercising my concepting muscles. Specifically on the back and ambiguous areas of the concept. I'm pulling from various 2d and 3d pieces. To get a better feel for the art direction, feel free to take a peak into my ref board 

bkost

Running through the piece with some more topology brush rebuilds.
Not feeling great about the back piece, I pulled some ideas from a Mass Effect armor set. Noticing now that it doesn't match well with the aggressive sharp diagonal shapes I've got on the front. 

I'll look for some for concepts that fit with the front design and leap off from there. 

Nuclear Angel

I think something that could give your character more edge in the back would be to do something with the spine, have some plates that follows down from the neck to the back, I have always loved that shape and I think that could be cool! 

bkost

Finally coming around to posting the results of my piece. This is how far I got during the month long friendly competition amongst my coworkers. 

The concept ended up being a mashup of Iron man and Venom bio-suit aesthetics.

Thanks @Nuclear Angel! I pushed the spine plates a bit more after seeing your comment. As of now, I'm going to push this piece to the backburner. I may come back and polish it some more.





I fiddled with making a bio material shader in UE4. Here are the results!

https://youtu.be/ajerEwWmnIU