[WIP] Serpent Vase

rexo12

Hello. Been a very long time since I've posted here. Work, uni (and life...) left me with zero time to do any 3D art. This is a small project just to prove to myself I can still finish something!

This is a vase by Tiffany Furnaces i saw (and was infatuated with) in the NY Met. during a trip I took earlier this year.

Above is the single photo I took just to remind myself that it existed for later, before I discovered that there are very few photos of this on the internet, and none of them of a high quality.

This is the current state of my high poly. The snake skin was an incredible pain to work out.

I'm not super happy with the state of the snake heads. I've spent a lot of time mucking around with them, and I have kind of got in too deep to really work out what's wrong with them. Some feedback on these would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to make this an opportunity to play around with Unreal's Substrate framework properly, which I'm really looking forward to, having spent all year doing my thesis on the engineering side of material layering.

Feedback welcome please!

Eric Chadwick

I think it might help to study snake anatomy, and incorporate that into your sculpt. They tend to have really distinctive, and frankly really beautiful, skull & muscle shapes which you could exaggerate a little. Since they are a focal point of interest.

Fabi_G

This looks like a cool project
Are the snakes posed using curve deformers? I think putting a snake in a more neutral pose would make it easier to do overpaints and adjustments it based on anatomy references. Some distinction between belly and top might improve the look further. Keep it up!

sacboi

Could perhaps subtllely emphasize anatomical features of the skull? 

Hopefully without compromising your references stylistic aesthetic because I share Eric's sentiment, they're indeed beguiling creatures which from one brief encounter in the aussie bush, can most definitly attest too.

rexo12

Appreciate the replies.

I think maybe what I'm missing is the jaw muscles. I also think the start of the neck (erm, body?) is too far away from the end of the mouth, looking at refs the mouth almost hinges right at that point.

The piece itself is much more square than this however.

He also seems to be a bit lumpy at the moment, which i've been trying to refine out but don't seem to be getting anywhere fast. I've unfortunately not set myself up for success with respect to underbelly details, I like the idea but i think I'd need to merge the body and head again.

rexo12

Took a break from the sculpting since I have spent too much time on it. Did some bake tests, and am working on prototyping the glass material. My references have very wide and even specular sources which makes the glass appear much more diffuse than it really is. I did find a single additional image that has better detail:

As well as some broader references for Favrile glass in general.

Annoyingly hard to find material of the glass in motion, everything is just panning across still images which is not useful for understanding how it responds to light. This vase seems to be a special case of Favrile glass too, being much more opaque, and separating the iridescence from the base material is proving to be difficult due to their similarity.

Iridescence experiments in-engine. This is using the Thin-Film helper to modulate the F0/F90 by the surface thickness & IOR (and i suspect also view direction...) Obviously wildly off at the moment. I have been using this article as a reference: https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/color_science.html (chapter on pearlescence/iridescence), alongside Epic's substrate content examples.

Also sketching this out in Substance. The workflow for this is going to be a bit tricky, since there isn't a one-to-one mapping from any of Substance's shading models to the Substrate parameterisation, and there's possibly layers involved too (although I expect I can do without explicit layering). My plan is to do as much as I can with masks and rebuild the material from those masks in the shader graph, rather than exporting parameter textures.

The marbling needs to be more fluid, but also more uniform, if that makes sense? The marbling stays broadly horizontal, particularly on the upper parts of the vase, and the swirls seem to repeat with the ribs of the vase.

Towards the bottom of the vase the swirls appear to 'bulge', too. Finding this balance is probably what is throwing off the rest of the marbling. To generate the marbling I am warping horizontal stripes by some curl noise, which will broadly imitate the actual action that creates this effect: swirling the blown glass in some acid mixture (or so I think, anyway). The vase also seems to have this view-facing purple tint to it that I am unable to really replicate so far.