Digital Sketchbook: 3D Character and Creature Art
polycounter lvl 3
Hey, I'm Sasha, an aspiring 3D Character / Creature artist. This thread is going to be to document my progress in learning new techniques and trying to push my work and portfolio before I graduate next year. I'm starting it now as I have some projects planned for over the summer and thought it could be useful to get some feedback along the way! I'm working towards AAA, I'm really inspired by the creatures created at Creative Assembly. Not much else to say right now but please follow along!
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The first thing I'm working on is hair cards! I feel like this is the thing I've paid the least attention to so far and it can really drag a piece down by having bad hair. These are some examples of hair I've done previously:
So I've not had too much experience with them and it's always been a rush to get the hair done for an assignment. I decided to find some tutorials to follow and found a game ready hair course for free on YouTube, by Trigon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5-0VM2eS_o&list=PLhphbo2gS6Vy5hAjadYLgXgTDVWlw2y4U&ab_channel=TriGon
I bought GS Curve Tools and Fiber Shop (ask if they do a student discount, they gave me a 20% off code!) and they have both been insanely useful and made the process so much easier and fun. I love how I can edit the hair cards so easily and go back and forth between them. Here are my results so far, I'm about halfway through the tutorials..
Already can see so much improvement, and it gives me hope for making some really nice hair styles for my characters in the future. Any feedback please let me know, I'm eager to learn! I'm rendering this in UE4 btw :)
Final renders !
I'm really happy with the final results considering what my hair cards looked like before now! The polycount was a bit high (40k) but I'll focus on lowering that in future projects. Any tips or feedback are appreciated!
I thought it was time to work on another character for some practice and learn new skills! I'm remaking this piece of artwork by Klaher Baklaher in 3D. Here's my progress so far
I'm rendering this piece in UE4. I think when I'm done with the majority of this project I'll come back to making some higher quality game-ready eyes, as these are just edited iris photos. The current focus is learning clothing as I've not attempted it in Marvelous Designer yet!
I'm also looking forward to creating the hairstyle for this lady too, with what I learned in my previous course :)
I might just move on from that last project for now and keep going with some of the new skills I want to learn before I run out of time over summer. I've just started with Marvelous Designer and re-created the outfit I was wearing, and it's surprisingly easy to get some nice results! Definitely going to mess around with this a lot more and see what can be done with this software. The possibilities are endless :)
I made the textures just using Clip Studio Paint and images of the FarCry Primal logo from google. Lot's of fun
Another clothing test :) I'm just re-creating the outfits I wear as its a quick easy bit of practice for me
and an eye sculpt I did, as i realised i need to go back to the fundamentals and learn more before trying to do a full character or even full face.
A couple more practice outfits in Marvelous Designer..
I made an eye to use in future projects, based on the digital human eye setup. I used their cornea refraction code, and remade the rest of it myself with parameters to change the pupil size, iris colour, sclera colour etc. Very happy with the result for first attempt! I'd like to make some completely myself in the future, without relying on third-party code for the refraction part.
Some recent sculpts in ZBrush, the dragon is for the Dragons Rise ArtStation challenge
Outstanding thread. Captivating renders. Bookmarked it.
Made some improvements with feedback
Retopology! After a while of not working on this I finished up the sculpt with some finer skin details and moved onto the retop. I want to pay extra attention to learning how to retop suitable for animation and deformation, even though this project wont be rigged or animated it will be good practice.
I started with the hands, which turned out to be trickier than expected! I mostly followed this topology guide, which was really informative. Is it meant to take hours to retop one hand? Because this guy has 10 hands, I'm going to have to figure out a way to reuse the same hand. Any tips would be great on this one!!
Final Render of the gifting dragon! I decided to scrap retopologising it, as it wasn't in a T pose so it wasn't working out well. I ended up compositing the ZBrush renders in Photoshop :)
I made this ecorche for Makosh, a four-armed Slavic goddess. I used ZWrap to create a solid base for the body, cleaned it up a bit and now have a good base to worth with! The book The Resurrectionist was an amazing resource for figuring out the anatomy of a four-armed character.
Working from this concept:
Progress on Marzanna bust :)
working from this concept:
I've also been working on remodeling the Fish Market stall from 2nd year. This time, my inspirations are Assassins Creed Odyssey and natural gatherings like mushrooms and herbs. But I need a bit more direction with this one, I'm going to brainstorm what I want to convey in the piece.
Makosh progress!
Love the work youre doing! Bookmarking this!
playing with shaders on my previous hair cards project, looks so much better!
Texturing Makosh :)
Starting the outfit in marvelous! It'll be the first full project where i use marvelous as a part of the pipeline
Progress! Not sure how the pipeline works from here, do I pose the character, re-simulate the clothing then take the clothing into ZBrush to refine it and add to it?
I've learned a lot about the baking and texturing pipeline while doing this character, I feel like I have a flow that works now! Creating full characters won't be so intimidating any more
WIP! Wayne is 15, based on an action figure. Looking for feedback on how to make him look more characteristic and interesting. See reference below. Thanks!
Looking for feedback!
Working on hair cards!
Pretty much finished with this bust now! The beads are definitely too high poly for a game-ready character, but I kept them as is for this render
Finished this one up too!
Forgot to post the finished market stall, not character related but it was good to practice my hard surface skills!
My entry for the Search for a Star character art competition
This piece of clothing is a freelance project for an ancient Greece inspired game. I really took my time over this one because I wanted to improve my ability to model clothing
High poly character WIP. Concept art by Dima Dmitriy
Texturing WIP…