Hades Fanart - Primordial Chaos

Alemja

Hello everyone! I have been working on a fanart of the character Chaos from the game Hades (amazing game btw if you haven't played!)

I am pretty close to finishing the sculpt, and this is what I have so far, the concept is done by SuperGiant games for those who aren't familiar with the character:

My plan is to bring make a low poly for this (no particular polycount target) and have it animate since it's one of the characters from the game that doesn't have a 3D model and I think it would be cool to see them move. Because the concept only shows the front of the character, the back is my interpretation and design, At this time I don't have any plans to use any special shaders but I am thinking about creating a custom AO/Cavity map that will help simulate the lineart and stepped shading, I haven't done nay tests for that so of stuff yet so it's still up in the air. My plan is to use Marmoset 4 to render.

Here is a very early lighting render, this is more to understand how the shapes are feeling and if I can get the lighting somewhat close, this will change a lot as I go along:

I'm open to any crits and comments!

CoreyJArt

Hi Alexandra,

   A few notes, I think for the lighting if you look at the shadow under the nose of the concept and match that, you will hit the lighting.

for chaos' face (funny writing that) finding some good reference of a face you like could help you make decisions.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/83598136814095860/

or the actor from lucifer could be good.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/28147566412647415/

The faces around his waist, I think finding areas to push further into accurate anatomy would be a good look and help catch the light better.

for instance the emaciated cheek on one, the bridge of the nose on another, stuff like that.

In the concept at the bottom is a block of red color, might be cool for this to be a flowing skit, and the faces are spilling over it? Just a thought

I think really pushing these areas in green to get an almost lapel shape of a jacket would be cool.

Alemja

Hey @CoreyJArt Thanks for the pointers!

The volume of the face ring around the shoulders is a good catch, I'll tweak those a little more. For Chaos's main face, I would normally agree with going for something based off of an actual person for other projects, however in this case I want to go more concept accurate. If there are particular areas on their face you think could be refined to match the concept better, I would be happy to hear it. I think refining a few of the faces on the flesh ring is valid and I'll polish them up a little bit more, again trying to go concept accurate as best I can so there is a limit to how realistic I can make them. The red skirt at the bottom I was thinking about handling in the low poly, I didn't really see a need to sculpt it out since I don't think it would need a normal map.

Alemja

Hello everyone! It has been a little while, I've been working on this off and on over the last couple of years and I thought I would share an update:

I have decided to go with Unreal for this project, I tried using marmoset with a cell shader I saw for it, but it doesn't work with version 4 and other initial tests didn't quite work as I wanted. After doing some research on how to get a cell shaded look with it respecting PBR materials, it seemed like Unreal was the choice. This is the initial import with some very basic textures and I think it's promising!

If anyone is curious about the shader, I followed this tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQhdbH8O7Oc

It seems the be the only one I could find that could read PBR materials and youCan also do color gradients, which really works for this project as the in-game still has a bit of that going on.

There are still a lot of things I need to do, like a proper texture pass and I have more more shader ideas for things like the starburst looking shape behind them.

Here is the low poly model and rig:

It's a little on the heavy side, sitting at about 420K triangles for everything, and a lot of that is from the stems and flowers, which are high enough that they don't need normal map bakes. I can just texture them straight up as they are. Every color has it's own UV sheet, and nothing is overlapping. It's a bit excessive and more than I would normally do if I was going for games, but since I really want to get as accurate as I can to the still from the game, I think it will be worth it.