Lost Undead
polycounter lvl 10
Concept design and gameready model of the knight inspired by dark fantasy.
Modeling: Maya/Zbrush
Cloth: Marvelous Designer
Textures: Substance Painter
Render: Marmoset Toolbag in realtime.
Project artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WK2zR2
Modeling: Maya/Zbrush
Cloth: Marvelous Designer
Textures: Substance Painter
Render: Marmoset Toolbag in realtime.
Project artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WK2zR2
Replies
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3doNXD
Hi to everyone, my name is Alexandr Novitskiy and this is a short breakdown of my latest work “Lost Undead”.
Project artstation is here.
In this article we will talk about steps which can make your work closer to a very best result.
Today we will talk about: concept, silhouette, texturing and cloth, rendering.
I wish to guide you through the most popular problems in representation of the idea, shapes, texturing and lightning. You should do everything in a quick and easy way.
Let’s begin from the very beginning.
My first move was an atmospheric concept which shows desirable emotion and color palette. I made a quick photobush around 20 minutes to generate an idea using images of the skull.
I prefer not to start modeling without any representations of my ideas. But sometimes a good way can be to model something from imagination ---> overpaint it using photobush techniques. I use both methods in my practice.
First of all you should have a cool model, do you? If you don’t, let’s talk about the first step which can help you with your creative approach. The silhouette.
I think that this is the most important part in the modeling of anything. YOU SHOULD HAVE A NICE SILHOUETTE. Remember it.
Everything starts from the concept and silhouette. At the beginning, I made a silhouette only, then I did a quick kitbush of basic shapes using simple geometry and my other models.
Next step was to finalize the model and it was the easiest part in the work. After completing the model, I simulated a cloth for my character in Marvelous Designer. Clothing consists of three parts: 2 scarfs (small for neck) and a big one + knight’s cloak. Sure, there was a skirt as well as pants and chainmail, but it was very easy to make and not interesting for us at all today.
Clothing like a cloak or scarf can change the silhouette, so you should control these things by checking your model in a black mode.
The texturing stage is most pleasurable for me. My challenge was to make everything as simple as possible, so I tried not to use hand-painting or hard ways to make simple things.
70% of my model is built of metal. So this material is most important in the work. In metal I made next scheme:
base metal material. This is a material with all information about pure armor. Just steel with a slight mark of aging.
Damage. Here I put information about deformation (using cavity and AO maps) and old dirt.
Patina. This is the most beautiful layer which contains information about oxidation.
For all materials I used grunge maps for a fill layer without any hand paint!
Clothing was an interesting challenge for me. I knew that many people created it with zbrush and put most of the height information at the sculpt stage. But I decided to try to avoid it and make everything using alphas and substance painter only!
I’m very glad with the result. But I’m sure that additional sculpting can make it even better!
At this stage I have some rules:
- Do not use HDRI (totally)
- Do not spam light sources! Start only with 1 light. Maybe it will be sufficient for a best result.
- Use backlight and fill lights with slightly different colors
If you need a more detailed guide about approaches in texturing, you can read my another article here:
https://80.lv/articles/how-to-model-a-robot/
Thank you for reading!