Art of Romain Durand

RDurand

Hey, it's been ages since I was a bit active here, but with the recent events of Artstation going to shit, twitter burning and other social medias being a pain, I thought that here would be the best place to share some art and receive feedbacks/critiques. I'll try to update it everytime that I'm making something new, here's some of my latest stuff, was a lot into Zelda TOTK, so I made some handpainted PBR fan arts. 

kio

Hey Romain these look great - maybe you could write a few lines about your process on these? Not looking for a tutorial, more about how you approach it from a high-level view

RDurand

Hey @kio sure!
Regarding the process, I'll start out by blocking things in Maya, I want to get the shapes 99% done in there before going further, this will also save me time later if I ever have to do hand retopology. (hello nanite) What I'm looking for during this step is :

- No 90° angles
- No straight lines
- Big/Medium/Small elements
- Curve vs Counter curve shapes
- Rest Areas / General composition rules

Instead of simply exporting a low poly, I'll export a subdivided high poly (meaning that I also need to do a pass on the edges.)



Then, I go in Zbrush, where I'll do multiple passes : 
- Storytelling pass (damages, scratches, broken edges, etc etc)
- Final shape polishing



Then I go and do my Retopo/UVs, trying to keep things as straight as I can without too much deformation, and as readable as possible, because I will handpaint in photoshop on the UVs directly (I personnaly don't like 3DCoat/Substance Painter for handpaint)
Before going in the albedo painting, I'll also handpaint some parts of the normals on top of the bake, just to fix some stuff that I don't like about the bake itself or in order to add some sharper details in places, I even like to break the normals a bit so that the light gets some interesting play.


Final step would be the texturing process, where I start with simple flat colors that I layout on the UV shells, adding gradients with a first general gradient allowing to ground nicely the object, but also with local gradients for color variations I then go and start breaking the gradient 'perfectness' and adding color variations (I'm bad at explaining this, there's a lot of gut feelings) Finaly, some storytelling, rust, scratches, etc.

Roughness/Metalness, I grab my albedo as a base, and then play with it, overpaint a bit and then the final step is the integration in UE. 

I hope that this was helpfull!

kio

ah yeah thanks - thats perfect actually, because I wasn't sure how much highpoly etc is even part of this   - thanks for the writeup!