[WIP] Frankensword PBR Prop

JunkieKong

I've been rejiggering my folio as I'm looking for work, and somehow I still don't have any PBR art in there so I thought I'd remedy that. I wanted to do a pretty simple stylised prop, something I can actually finish while job hunting, and I settled on making this cool weird concept from James Loy Martin https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4Onol

I'll try putting updates in here so you can follow along with the progress, C&C welcome.

Here's what I've done so far.

I like to chuck a sculpt into marmoset early because zbrush perspective and lighting often makes things look jank.

JunkieKong

Wee update on the sculpt, it seems mostly in place just need to spend a bit on the details.

Crazy_pixel

Looking good so far! That would be an awesome ingame weapon 

JunkieKong

Alrighty, I think I'm calling the sculpt done and started the retopo in my tool of choice - 3D Coat.

JunkieKong

It's been a while! Dropped this after getting swamped with work, but have had time recently to get back to it. Retopo is done, UVs are done and baked maps preparing for texturing. Hopefully more updates coming soon.

pixelpatron

Great! I wonder if you could make a scrolling UV sheet for the pupil/iris of the eyes so they look around....

JunkieKong

@pixelpatron That's a very good point and something I wondered myself! For now I've just put the eyes on the same texture sheet as everything else, maybe when the texturing is done I'll look into it because that could be a very nice effect.

VesaN

I love the concept you’ve chosen! Can’t wait to see it textured.

JunkieKong

And here it is textured! It's in UE4 and I'm working on the presentation, happy with most of it so far.

I did just about everything in Substance Painter with a final pass in Photoshop to get some details from the diffuse into the roughness. I still don't love Substance for something so stylised as this when I'm trying to get a painterly texture, it's just not that nice to paint with and missing some pretty basic features. But it did save me effort in other areas, I'll stop griping now.

Now that it's set up in UE4 and looking pretty close to how I want it, time permitting I'd like to look into some things like animating the eyes, maybe a cool shader that makes the flesh pulsate, and maybe some physics bones on bits would look cool if I give it some movement. We'll see.

VesaN

JunkieKong said:

time permitting I'd like to look into some things like animating the eyes, maybe a cool shader that makes the flesh pulsate, and maybe some physics bones on bits would look cool if I give it some movement.

Ew, that would be disgusting but awesome, combined with some disgusting slime noises, and electricity pulses going through the wire, I would call job done. Even without any animation, this is looking fantastic! Neat job

JunkieKong

Oh dear I completely forgot I had a thread for this going. So it's years later, but I did actually resurrect this project to finish it off (I'm as surprised as you are). I carried it over to UE5 and then set up a bunch of physics driven movement, made an animation and called it done.

I also documented the process on my blog, so have a read if you're interested. Part1 Part2

dur23

pretty damn rad.
I can imagine the squishy (ick!) noise it makes on impact.

iam717

love it make game around it, neow!