Sketchbook: birb

birb

Hey there! Despite joining Polycount nearly an year ago I never came around posting any work of mine. *gasp* Time to set things right!

I have considerable experience in a tangential area in the games industry—concept art and illustration—, but for all intents and purposes I'm really new to the professional side of 3D art so please, C&C are absolutely welcome!

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Projects

Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) Start / 2021-02 LATEST

Monster Part I: Start | End / 2021-01

birb

After writing a critique yesterday I just couldn't get the original concept out of my head. The color work was highly satisfying and that facial structure was a bit unusual. I felt compelled to investigate it in more depth and see if my assumptions were correct.

I don't know if I'll take this piece any further or what, seems too much work for something I'll likely not include in my portfolio—that would be weird after critique'ing it, I don't mean to poach anyone's subject!—but here's the result of my late night sculpting section.

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Project Goals

- Get a feel of this facial structure
- Check my likeness and concept art interpretation skill levels
- Bonus goal: Concept art expansion skills
- Practice male anatomy / wrinkled skin
- Beard!
- Artistic color stylization in a PBR format
- Get a sense of a possible mixed Blender and ZBrush sculpting workflow


Original Concept by Feng Wei

A turntable with more or less same light and angle from original.




I took progress shots and I'm sorry it looks so much like "How to Draw an Owl: 1. Draw a circle. 2. Draw the rest of the owl"!




Beauty shot!



Everything was sculpted and rendered in Blender (Cycles / raytraced for turntable and beauty, Eeeve / Realtime for progress). It's been a really long time since I tried dynotopo, so instead of starting from a human base mesh as usual I started it from the default cube. I'm pretty pleased if not surprised with the performance!

birb

Monster: Now with 200% more eyes.



Painted a 10min placeholder texture to decompress after a long day. Details on shot 2 are also temporary, only to check if SSS alone can carry the gashes coloring. Blender can't handle this level of detail, I'll likely be forced to jump into ZBrush from now on.

birb

Still not feeling like jumping into ZBrush, indulged a bit more on hair and horn materials instead so the later doesn't look so much like pressed catnip cat toy.

I love how raytraced light lets you sneak all manner of colors into the albedo, wresting some degree of artistic license back from physically-based shaders. Real time light is more annoying, flat enough it amplifies hue shifts requiring adjustments to other maps.

birb

I'm sorry Mr. Monster but I don't feel like wrestling with your thousand wrinkles just yet. Maybe later, for the sake of completion. I do feel like making studies though, and that's what I did this weekend.

I finally caught up with the new season of His Dark Materials. When I read the books as a kid I didn't care about Mrs. Coulter. I didn't like her because she was a villain and I didn't like how she was written either. That's not the case with the series version. I love the nuance given to her and fantastic portrayal by Ruth Wilson—who has a fascinating face and knows to pull off very wicked smiles. So hey, a quick fanart!

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Marisa Coulter (Ruth Wilson)
Project Goals

- Capture her likeness
- Get more comfortable with dynamic topology for 100% humans and varied sculpting tools

References Board

 

Key takeaways: 1. The practice has paid off, I'm starting figure how to do sharp plane transitions in Blender. 2. Tried to leave the dynamic topology level of detail relative to the brush in the beginning to mimic ZBrush but I hate it. I should figure how to lock it in ZBrush instead!






Quick texture and hair to check progress as usual.

birb

Worked on her pendant design. It's never in focus in the series nor are there outfit exhibitions out yet to clear up what it's supposed to look like—my best guess is that's based on the Magisterium's crest. Appropriate for an agent of the institution and mixes well with the human habit of wearing symbols of faith.

Reference

I spiced it up with a sunburst motif which she seems fond of and ended with a little golden compass x Magisterium abomination.



It's nice to see my years old gemstone shader works fine in Eevee!


Oh! And sure, a near polypaint-like texture and placeholder everything ensure it'll look bad, but she was looking exceptionally lifeless and I didn't understand why. It turns out I forgot to switch the meniscus render visibility on.

ggrazziano

Beautiful work! Your renders have an oil painting feeling on them

birb

@ggrazziano Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! I'm afraid my background as an artist with a painterly style is showing. 

Speaking of which, time to break out the secret weapon. It's been fun and a good practice to eyeball everything, but this project reached the delicate stage of finer structural adjustments. Any heavy-handed edition will break other things and get you hopelessly running into circles. People measure stuff at this point. Me? I paint over it!



This is more than having something to reference to, I need that experience of quickly iterating over the planes I want to adjust or downright missed. Attack plan in hands, I gave it a new elastic brush pass + separated lips and created a mouth bag.

Dishonest renders cycling through all lookdev HDRIs available—beware, their softness and good colors make anything look nice and the absence of harsh light transitions washes out issues.



The skin shader got a minor upgrade too with procedural SSS, roughness and normals on top of the same albedo.

sacboi

Like these

Also I think it's nice to just imagine, what Rubens, Rembrandt or Caravaggio would've thought about the tools we use now... 

birb

Thanks!

sacboi said:

Also I think it's nice to just imagine, what Rubens, Rembrandt or Caravaggio would've thought about the tools we use now... 

I like to think they'd love the unlimited colors and having all paint you can wish for—and how working with these lovely colors won't poison you to death!—, the tidiness of working with the digital medium and the prompt access to models and ways to calculate perspective and repositories of knowledge on anatomy and optic. They'd be awed and terrified by the degree of realism we achieve now, and they'd take that solid base and twist it into wonderful new styles.

I'm afraid a few of them might have rejected it all though. Artificial barriers like the high cost of supplies and foundational art theory being an exclusive property of masters' studios were torn down, to not speak of the diminished importance of the contact networks necessary to secure good patronage (aka the people with power, money or both) which was the straightforward way to pursue this career if you weren't born into money. When you get a widening of the labor pool you also get those knee-jerk push backs out of fear of obsolesce or just being no longer seen as so special. I don't think they'd be exempt from it.

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Just to say I made progress here's a silver and garnet pomegranate brooch for Marisa.



The exact composition, finish and missing tiny details depend on the outfit. I have ideas I'm not yet sure will pay off.

birb

Hey, psst. May I interest you in some eyeballs?



Her previous ones were hue-shifted placeholders stolen from another character; Now I'm using this project as an excuse to overhaul my eye texture generator, making the switch to a fully procedural approach.

Welcome to hell!



This is hands down the most challenging procedural shader I've worked on so far. The noodle node tree goes on forever and I didn't even mix in the color pattern and limbal ring part of the shader yet. The crypts of Fuchs in particular—the diamond-shaped tears in the outer ring aka cilliary zone—are a royal pain to get right. I'm happy it looks organic and has reasonably good Y insertion points, but unfortunately this is the wrong flavor of organic and falls apart really quickly up close.

+ new references dump

Ruth Wilson's eyes


Ridiculously large irises compilation