[WIP] Vintage stylized cooker

simonBreumier

Hi all

I'm trying to reproduce the old cooker from this amazing concept by Servando lupini:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qzk8P

My goal is to get used to a stylized asset workflow. Also I juste learned Zbrush basics and thought it would be a good training since the object has a few decorations to sculpt. I've watched a few tutorials for the occasion, especially focusing on how to make the engraving and decorations of the metal parts.

Here is my first blockout, trying to get the proportions right.

I've tried to get it as close as possible to the final silhouette to reduce the retopo work after sculpting, though some of these organic shapes (such as the corners) might just be easier to retopo later.

Tell me what you think

icegodofhungary

I would add a bevel to the edge of the cylinders used for the stove eyes. That will help your baking turn out better. I would also spend a little more geo in places like the feet to get a better silhouette. Especially with stylized stuff, silhouette is key. It's good to be economical but don't be afraid to use more polygons, they're pretty cheap these days. Getting a strong silhouette is the priority. And making those surfaces more rounded will help your bake come out cleaner.

simonBreumier

Thanks for the feedback ! 
Here's an update, I added more geometry especially to the very sharp edges and worked a bit on getting a more bulgy/toony silhouette

simonBreumier

Hi all !

I finally found the time to get back at it and started working on the sculpting part.

As I expected, I had to go back on the silhouette a few times, as I figured during the process that some things would just not bake right after and would be way cleaner if modeled directly, but I'm quite happy with what I've learned doing mistakes .

Being a complete beginner at Z-brush, it took me time to figure out how to do most things, especially the ornaments on the corners.

This tutorial was a great help to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmpM2qgoQ28 , then the fun part was to experiment during hours and hours.

I'm starting to get satisfied with the result I got, tell me what you think

simonBreumier

Started to work on the texture. Up to now I've always been painting on my projects directly so I decided to try doing it proceduraly for once using substance painter. I added a few shadows/highlights by hand in the end as I could not manage to get them procedurally. I also had to iterate a bit again with zbrush to adjust a few things.

I'm still looking for the most relevant workflow for texturing. Here I've chosen to work with one different 4k textures for each object. After painting in substance it resulted in a load of different textures (as I had about 10 separate objects) so I wrote a simple script to import all those textures to the right object and channel within blender automatically. I'm sharing it just in case it could help someone (even though there might just be a simpler approach I did not catch ): https://github.com/simonBreumier/Substance2Blender

Hope you'll like it, tell me what you think

simonBreumier

I took a break from texturing and messed up a little with animation to give it a little bit of cartton life

I'm planing on adding a few bolt swinging away to give it a... cartoony living machine feel

Before that, I think I might try dong an atlas to get all those textures in a single one a free my RAM memory a bit.

MisterWolfen

@simonBreumier This is a fantastic piece dude, if anything i think the hotplate area and the chimney need a bit more colour variety, just a little too homogeneous in my opinion, i think overall the topology could also be tidied up a little bit, don't be afraid to collapse more edges and merge more vertices into tris to save on polycount Otherwise super cute little cooker

simonBreumier

Thanks for the feedback ! I finally found the time to work back on it a little.

I tried to add a little bit more color variations and cleaned up a bit the topology (as much as I could without messing up the UVs)

Also added a bolt bouncing out to make it live a little bit more alive and did a quick stylized wood plank material in Substance designer to give it something to rest on.

I've learned a lot through this little project but now I think I need to move on to something else.

I added a sketchfab link and a workflow detail in my artstation:

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