[Finished] Persian Guard

Pav3d

Hello!

After not doing anything realistic for a while I wanted to return to it, so this time im doing a Persian guard, loosely based in the Sassanian period.

This painting by Ludwig Deutsch was the main inspiration for the lighting and mood of the final piece.

The model is a bit far in the high poly but can all still be changed so Id be appreciative of any feedback!

Feathers will be remade properly at the texturing stage.

Head still needs some refinement and pores/wrinkles

Her axe

Here is the mood board compiled at an earlier blockout stage

iam717

i am late!, looking forward to it.

Pav3d

Hello,

Been a while but I have been working on her. Spent a lot of time in Unreal doing material work and figuring out MRQ (Missed how easy it was to render in Marmoset ) As well as texturing, designing embroidery and engraving, and endless texture tweaking!

Now to continue posing!

hwaminjung

Amazing work

Pav3d

Thanks @hwaminjung

Wrapped up on posing, and I can say this is finished! Lots of learning done in Unreal

MagicMeister

I saw this on artstation earlier today and just had to stop and stare for a while! Really excellent work, I'm motivated and impressed.

Edit: looking at the final textures compared with the block out phase, I'm curious about the embroidery. Is that done on a separate mesh from the rest of the tunic, or is all of the tunic one singular mesh that is divided up into separate textures?

Pav3d

Hey thanks @MagicMeister

The kaftan has multiple UV sets, the first is the usual for the bakes

The second is where the embroidery is tiled, then both normal maps are blended together in unreal.

Each tiled embroidery has its own material and then various masks allow for things like damage and dirt to be overlayed on top.

This is the main reason I made this in unreal as its material editor allows for more complex materials.

View in 3ds max, Kaftan normal only

Embroidery normals added, seperated but not blended

Requires the underlying mesh to be built to support the embroidery trims (similar to doing environment art assets)

Tangent view in Unreal, The folds and damage from the Kaftan are blended on top of the Embroidery

View of the Embroidery material, the preview looks a bit broken since it can only visualise the uv space in 1:1

HarlequinWerewolf

Gorgeous work! I've seen that kind of multiple UV set method used for stitches, I need to give it a go for something more complex! Thanks for the breakdown

MagicMeister

Yeah that's extremely generous of you to share your process, thank you!

I've often wondered how I would tackle layered embroidery, if it would be an entirely separate piece of geometry or something like this that can be layered in texturing. Hopefully I can adopt a workflow like this when I get to texturing on my current project. Again, thanks for your breakdown that's really awesome to see.

Edit: did you project that embroidery pattern onto the high poly at some point in order to plan out where the support loops needed to go on your base mesh, or did you just model the loops where you wanted it to go and then project the pattern in texturing before baking out the normals?

Pav3d

HarlequinWerewolf said:

Gorgeous work! I've seen that kind of multiple UV set method used for stitches, I need to give it a go for something more complex! Thanks for the breakdown

Thanks! Its essentially the same sort of workflow, i used it on the stitching on the boots and trousers

MagicMeister said:

Edit: did you project that embroidery pattern onto the high poly at some point in order to plan out where the support loops needed to go on your base mesh, or did you just model the loops where you wanted it to go and then project the pattern in texturing before baking out the normals?

No problem

So i created the low poly for the Kaftan as normal.

I then used slideknit, a max script that flattens out a model into its UV shape, which allows you to conform models to specific areas of it surface.

on top of the UV shape i created strips of embroidery that were controlled by a spline. These strips were then conformed to the mesh using skin wrap

Embroidery Strip:

Embroidery Strip conforming to the low poly:

I then combined all these meshes and cut the embroidery into low poly. A very time consuming task :P

MagicMeister

Thanks so much for all of the insight and getting to see under the hood with your process, it's a huge help to someone like me who has the art skills but is still putting together the technical, software side of things. It does seem time consuming, but at the end of the day the result speaks for itself and I hope I can incorporate something like this using Blender as my primary low poly asset software. My current project doesn't have any traditional, emboridered clothing like this... it's all fantasy leather pieces and metal armor, but I'm sure I will come across something in the coming months and I'll definitely be referring back here to see if I can piece together a similar workflow.

Great work

pxgeek

Hot damn, your materials work is superb!!

And thanks for sharing your process too!

Alex_J

as usual very beautiful and inspiring work