Not sure if I missed it somewhere, but I was wondering how you painted your texture on the sculpt. You're probably going to focus more on texture later when you create a low poly, but I was just wondering because I love how soft your texture looks and I would like to start practicing painting on a sculpted surface instead of my current process (unwrap > photoshop).
haha man i always feel bad to post so frequently without artz but thanks a ton you guys
xvampire: thanks!
Jessica: thanks a bunch
Gannon, Tigerfeet, Hang10, & disanki: nice! hope that approach works out for your projects
TerraBite: thanks a ton
Del: dang that means a lot, man! thanks!
duncan: thanks dude!
STRIKER: thanks! if there's one thing i strive for it's great justice
crazyfool: thanks a ton man!
Scythe: haha I'll just have to think of more obscure puns next time!
MeintevdS: haha i think i just default to spheres for everything, there might be a faster base to use, or to just immediately rock out a curvetubes
dustinbrown: yeah man, Skankerzero brought that up earlier too. I might bend them up into position before baking
konstruct: haha glad you dig
praetus: thanks! I love chunky sculptural hair so that was a huge inspiration
Zelenkov: whoa, that's a huge complement
Guedin: thanks a bunch!
Mask_Salesman: hahaha thanks man
Lavitz: sure thing, polypaint is super cool for this type of thing, so that's pretty much all I use it for and then later I'll refine it in photoshop. There's nothing fancy about what I do though, it's just really soft broad colors at low opacity
HOTNESS! move that tail outta the way it's blocking my VIEW! Haha but seriously good job, only nit pick I have is that some of the folds look a little unnatural. The puffs around her shoulders, could use some more weight and compression. Little bit more tension at the base where it meets the belts too. The leggings could use some luvin too. A little extra cloth compression/Tension around the knees and top of the leggings like in the concepts you posted.
Thanks for posting your methods btw, I learned stuff.
DockRock: thanks a ton man! glad you dug the hair vid! I'm excited to see the finals too, I've been getting the behind the scenes sneakpeaks from the other peeps!
daphz: thanks dude! Some day maybe I'll get to the point where I'd feel comfortable livestreaming like you badasses
dudealan2001: thanks! It's awesome to share a recap page with so many badass artists
JeremyRM: thanks man! glad you dig
Ravenslayer: hey! thanks dude!
Scythe: thanks man!
Spatz: thanks a ton dude
MeintevdS: whoa! I didn't even realize Zbrushcentral did that sorta thing, thanks for the link! I saw Spatz got a spotlight and toprow too
El Scorcho: Thanks a bunch! and thanks for the crits, those cloth bits bothered me too after seeing how nice and clean yours are on your recent character. I'll try and refine them before I bake
so this is a pretty boring update for a friday night haha but I figured I should show that we're still alive :poly122: Stage4: Round 1: 'We can rebuild her... We have the topology'
So I'm not a huge fan of retopo, and I'm definitely not as good at it or as eloquent as other people so I won't bore you with too many of my thoughts :poly124:
Haz talked with me about what kinda poly budget I should shoot for on this character, and he suggested rolling pretty mid-high current-gen. This is in line with my goals, as I've been trying to reach into as many different specs as I can for folio purposes, and it's been a sorely missing hole in my work.
On personal work I prefer to sculpt from a pretty lowrez nondescript basemesh just so I'm not tied to any particular details or quirks of that base cage. But that made the retopo process a little longer because I didn't have a base that I could optimize as a start for my lowpoly aside from the mostly SubD head and a few of the easy details like belts/buttons. In production I'd probably start out from a base cage that had a little more detail to speed up the retopo process a bit. Ultimately, it's a negligible difference to either spend longer on the basemesh or longer on retopo where there are more streamlined tools, but I like just that little bit of extra freedom in the sculpting stage.
I tried out 3dcoat retopo tools for the first time, which was pretty awesome to at least get a rough start, but until I get more familiar with it I'm much more comfortable and fast with graphite's retopo tools in 3dsmax. I'd definitely give it a whirl though if you're curious
Stage4: Round 2: 'Protect yourself from harmful UVs'
I don't think there's a ton someone like me can talk about with UVs haha.
I tried to UV some portions as I went along such as before using Shell or Symmetry, just so it's a little quicker to manage once I started doing the current uv layout. I tried to keep some of the like-colors near eachother in the uv layout just in case of color bleed and all that jazz.
Looking at other people's maps, I've decided that I guess I generally use too much UV padding, so this time I let uv shells get a little closer than I normally would. I left some gaps in there for other parts I'll add if/when I get to them - such as the bow on the tail, extra hair bits, and mouth bits... and wings will be on a separate map whenever i get to them
I opted to split it into 2 maps only because I'm planning on trying out that fancypants comb-mapped hair madness that Ben Mathis wrote about and I figured it'd be best to avoid wasting the combmap space on non-hair stuff.
lookin gewd. your retopo looks a bit excessive tho. a good tip is to only model out where there are major changes to the silhouette. i could see a few areas in which it could be reduced much without it being to harmful for bake. good luck
You have various parts as different objects. When unwrapping, how do you have all the objects in one UV square? Do you just attach everything in one object, unwrap, then detach again?
You have various parts as different objects. When unwrapping, how do you have all the objects in one UV square? Do you just attach everything in one object, unwrap, then detach again?
you can select all the objects at the same time and throw in the unwrap modifier. you can unwrap separate objects that way.
Tits: No problem, it's actually pretty simple to make turntable gifs: Zbrush:
go to Movie->Modifiers
set your spinframes to something reasonable (probably 20-30 just to keep filesize down)
id set 'Recording FPS' and 'Playback FPS' to something like 5 (though you can change this in the gif)
then just hit turntable to render it out
hit export, and set it to Animation (if you use h264 it'll dim your renders )
or in 3ds max (maya's similar, probably just do a window->playblast[]...):
animate a turntable for 20-30 frames
go to Tools->Views - Grab Viewport-> Create Animated Sequence file
set the frame range appropriately
set the playback FPS to like ~5
then render out an avi
Then in Photoshop (has to be 32 bit!)...
file->import->video frames from layers
now you can edit it if you want in window->animation
and you can just export with File->Save For Web and save as a gif
Hang10: thanks man! the poly budget is super lax for now, I usually stick pretty low so I'm trying out the ~20k range :poly115:
conte: haha thanks yo!
garriola83: thanks man, I'll probably see about optimizing now that I've gone through the bake but I don't want to lose the smoothness if i can help it
nightFlarer: As garriola mentioned, in 3ds max you can just select all the objects you want and then add a UVW modifier to all of them (Do note that this does some tricky stuff behind the scenes so if you use many custom scripts not all of them will work correctly cuz it's a major pain in the butt to implement haha)
Cordell Felix: Thanks dude haha
Torch: lol!
MoP: Hey man thanks a ton! That means a lot cuz i've always dug your work too
urgaffel: thanks man! glad you dig, and haha i thought i had weird musical taste. so im glad you dig that too
Stage 5: Round 1: 'Better Than Mama!' (map baking)
Once again I don't think there's much to say that the others haven't covered in their writeups. I used Xnormal for a few reasons - it's fast, I have a lot of high poly and/or dynameshed meshes that'd be too hefty for max to load, and i'd have to do a ton of bakes because of how i split up my low poly.
That's definitely one down side to having a lot of separate overlapping objects in your low poly rather than fewer watertight connected pieces. The major benefit being that if you're okay with dealing with all those bakes it can possibly be cleaner. Or if your machine can handle it, I would have tried out miauu's RTT Assist script
So I ended up having to do ~40 bakes I think, nothing fancy at all about the normal map bakes, then i baked vertex colors(polypaint), and the AO bakes were super simple too, I did do the hemisphere thing for AO bakage like Haz suggested in this post though
Combining the bakes into one map is always a drag, so I usually make a photoshop action to do it if i have more than a few, it's super quick to make but since actions are stoopid and rely entirely on names rather than any variable settings, you have to remake it each time I'd be surprised if there aren't scripts already to do this cuz it wouldn't take long to make a really nice one. Anyway here are the steps:
open up all your bakes, and create a new document for your combined map
go to one of the bake maps and start recording an action (window->actions->new)
go to channels, ctrl+click the alpha channel so you can use it as a mask
go back to layers, alt+dblclick the layer to convert the background layer to a normal layer
group it if you want
apply the alpha selection as a layermask for the group
right click on the group and duplicate to the combine document
ctrl+w to close, don't save
then STOP recording, now just hit play on all the other bakes and you can combine your map in well under a minute even with the 40 normal, 30 ao, and 5 polypaint bakes i had
Anyway, so I did a little fixups but this is pretty close to being a raw bake-out+quickie spec mockup. It's pretty awesome to have such a smooth lowpoly that it bakes out so clean without too many shenanigans. I hope to take it a lot further now that I'm on to texturing though.
I also made a timelapse of the first part of her demon wing if anyone's interested. It's just a skull though :P super generic I know [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiULVSdhyNs"]GuiltyGear - Necro - Stylized Skull Timelapse - YouTube[/ame]
Thanks a bunch yallz!
Fnitrox: thanks man, the 'guide' stroke is just a standard brush with sharp alpha
nightFlarer: thanks haha, I hope so
mr_ace: haha thanks man! your comment is why i posted up a new vid
Screwonhed: hey thanks a bunch!
Ferg: Thanks dude!
Scythe: thanks man! Super glad you dig
Alismuffin: hey thanks a bunch and glad you like the vids. I don't think I have much knowledge to impart through the timelapses, but if they can be motivating then im super happy
SanderDL: thanks! That consistency is not something I'm used to haha
underfox: hahah @ skeletor, that's what I was saying to myself as I was doing it
Bonus Stage 1 - 'A Challenger Appears!' (sculpting the Necro wing)
So I said I'd be waiting til after the course to start the wings, but I didn't want to lose the sculpting groove i've slowly been getting into and wanted to try out some techniques that've been bugging me about this personally challenging thing. I don't think i'll have the time to finish them before the course ends so I'll just leave this here for now. I'd appreciate any crits though
I made another timelapse with hopefully a little more interesting workflows than the last one. I didn't record the last part where i did the twirled up tapered cloth bit though because i didn't save the first time through and i lost the video and my progress . I think the really dense feathers are what caused it to crash so i was too afraid to record it again. It's nothing new though, just a few cylinders pushed around and dynameshed
the wings themselves turned out a little meh too. I think the feathers were just too high poly to play around with decently . In the end I'll rebuild them either as planes and groups or just as more static texture-centric geo wings with less obvious repetition. Anyway, what am I doin here! I really need to get back to texturing :poly122:
I tried to annotate a few things in the video but it gets all formatted weird when it's embedded on here
so you may wanna just turn them off or just view it on youtube
Replies
Thanks a lot for the video, would have never thought of using a sphere for hair
Great work
xvampire: thanks!
Jessica: thanks a bunch
Gannon, Tigerfeet, Hang10, & disanki: nice! hope that approach works out for your projects
TerraBite: thanks a ton
Del: dang that means a lot, man! thanks!
duncan: thanks dude!
STRIKER: thanks! if there's one thing i strive for it's great justice
crazyfool: thanks a ton man!
Scythe: haha I'll just have to think of more obscure puns next time!
MeintevdS: haha i think i just default to spheres for everything, there might be a faster base to use, or to just immediately rock out a curvetubes
dustinbrown: yeah man, Skankerzero brought that up earlier too. I might bend them up into position before baking
konstruct: haha glad you dig
praetus: thanks! I love chunky sculptural hair so that was a huge inspiration
Zelenkov: whoa, that's a huge complement
Guedin: thanks a bunch!
Mask_Salesman: hahaha thanks man
Lavitz: sure thing, polypaint is super cool for this type of thing, so that's pretty much all I use it for and then later I'll refine it in photoshop. There's nothing fancy about what I do though, it's just really soft broad colors at low opacity
This course that you guys are doing is so incredible! I can't wait to see the finished results from all of you.
definitely your best female char yet
Gratz dude
Thanks for posting your methods btw, I learned stuff.
daphz: thanks dude! Some day maybe I'll get to the point where I'd feel comfortable livestreaming like you badasses
dudealan2001: thanks! It's awesome to share a recap page with so many badass artists
JeremyRM: thanks man! glad you dig
Ravenslayer: hey! thanks dude!
Scythe: thanks man!
Spatz: thanks a ton dude
MeintevdS: whoa! I didn't even realize Zbrushcentral did that sorta thing, thanks for the link! I saw Spatz got a spotlight and toprow too
El Scorcho: Thanks a bunch! and thanks for the crits, those cloth bits bothered me too after seeing how nice and clean yours are on your recent character. I'll try and refine them before I bake
so this is a pretty boring update for a friday night haha but I figured I should show that we're still alive :poly122:
Stage4: Round 1: 'We can rebuild her... We have the topology'
Haz talked with me about what kinda poly budget I should shoot for on this character, and he suggested rolling pretty mid-high current-gen. This is in line with my goals, as I've been trying to reach into as many different specs as I can for folio purposes, and it's been a sorely missing hole in my work.
On personal work I prefer to sculpt from a pretty lowrez nondescript basemesh just so I'm not tied to any particular details or quirks of that base cage. But that made the retopo process a little longer because I didn't have a base that I could optimize as a start for my lowpoly aside from the mostly SubD head and a few of the easy details like belts/buttons. In production I'd probably start out from a base cage that had a little more detail to speed up the retopo process a bit. Ultimately, it's a negligible difference to either spend longer on the basemesh or longer on retopo where there are more streamlined tools, but I like just that little bit of extra freedom in the sculpting stage.
I tried out 3dcoat retopo tools for the first time, which was pretty awesome to at least get a rough start, but until I get more familiar with it I'm much more comfortable and fast with graphite's retopo tools in 3dsmax. I'd definitely give it a whirl though if you're curious
I tried to UV some portions as I went along such as before using Shell or Symmetry, just so it's a little quicker to manage once I started doing the current uv layout. I tried to keep some of the like-colors near eachother in the uv layout just in case of color bleed and all that jazz.
Looking at other people's maps, I've decided that I guess I generally use too much UV padding, so this time I let uv shells get a little closer than I normally would. I left some gaps in there for other parts I'll add if/when I get to them - such as the bow on the tail, extra hair bits, and mouth bits... and wings will be on a separate map whenever i get to them
I opted to split it into 2 maps only because I'm planning on trying out that fancypants comb-mapped hair madness that Ben Mathis wrote about and I figured it'd be best to avoid wasting the combmap space on non-hair stuff.
How can you make a turntable gif of your character?
you can select all the objects at the same time and throw in the unwrap modifier. you can unwrap separate objects that way.
Zbrush:
- go to Movie->Modifiers
- set your spinframes to something reasonable (probably 20-30 just to keep filesize down)
- id set 'Recording FPS' and 'Playback FPS' to something like 5 (though you can change this in the gif)
- then just hit turntable to render it out
- hit export, and set it to Animation (if you use h264 it'll dim your renders
)
or in 3ds max (maya's similar, probably just do a window->playblast[]...):- animate a turntable for 20-30 frames
- go to Tools->Views - Grab Viewport-> Create Animated Sequence file
- set the frame range appropriately
- set the playback FPS to like ~5
- then render out an avi
Then in Photoshop (has to be 32 bit!)...- file->import->video frames from layers
- now you can edit it if you want in window->animation
- and you can just export with File->Save For Web and save as a gif
Hang10: thanks man! the poly budget is super lax for now, I usually stick pretty low so I'm trying out the ~20k range :poly115:conte: haha thanks yo!
garriola83: thanks man, I'll probably see about optimizing now that I've gone through the bake but I don't want to lose the smoothness if i can help it
nightFlarer: As garriola mentioned, in 3ds max you can just select all the objects you want and then add a UVW modifier to all of them (Do note that this does some tricky stuff behind the scenes so if you use many custom scripts not all of them will work correctly cuz it's a major pain in the butt to implement haha)
Cordell Felix: Thanks dude haha
Torch: lol!
MoP: Hey man thanks a ton! That means a lot cuz i've always dug your work too
urgaffel: thanks man! glad you dig, and haha i thought i had weird musical taste. so im glad you dig that too
Stage 5: Round 1: 'Better Than Mama!'
That's definitely one down side to having a lot of separate overlapping objects in your low poly rather than fewer watertight connected pieces. The major benefit being that if you're okay with dealing with all those bakes it can possibly be cleaner. Or if your machine can handle it, I would have tried out miauu's RTT Assist script
So I ended up having to do ~40 bakes I think, nothing fancy at all about the normal map bakes, then i baked vertex colors(polypaint), and the AO bakes were super simple too, I did do the hemisphere thing for AO bakage like Haz suggested in this post though
Combining the bakes into one map is always a drag, so I usually make a photoshop action to do it if i have more than a few, it's super quick to make but since actions are stoopid and rely entirely on names rather than any variable settings, you have to remake it each time
Anyway, so I did a little fixups but this is pretty close to being a raw bake-out+quickie spec mockup. It's pretty awesome to have such a smooth lowpoly that it bakes out so clean without too many shenanigans. I hope to take it a lot further now that I'm on to texturing though.
I also made a timelapse of the first part of her demon wing if anyone's interested. It's just a skull though :P super generic I know [ame="
I knew from the holo sculpt you'de be my favourit of the course xD
also loved the skull timelaps... what's the brush you use for the first "defining" stroke for folds in the cloth?
Looking nice, the bakes look clean. Can't wait till you're done, almost there
Awsome work, i can't wait to see it finished completly.
Fnitrox: thanks man, the 'guide' stroke is just a standard brush with sharp alpha
nightFlarer: thanks haha, I hope so
mr_ace: haha thanks man! your comment is why i posted up a new vid
Screwonhed: hey thanks a bunch!
Ferg: Thanks dude!
Scythe: thanks man! Super glad you dig
Alismuffin: hey thanks a bunch
SanderDL: thanks! That consistency is not something I'm used to haha
underfox: hahah @ skeletor, that's what I was saying to myself as I was doing it
Bonus Stage 1 - 'A Challenger Appears!' (sculpting the Necro wing)
I made another timelapse with hopefully a little more interesting workflows than the last one. I didn't record the last part where i did the twirled up tapered cloth bit though because i didn't save the first time through and i lost the video and my progress
the wings themselves turned out a little meh too. I think the feathers were just too high poly to play around with decently
I tried to annotate a few things in the video but it gets all formatted weird when it's embedded on here
so you may wanna just turn them off or just view it on youtube
[ame="
Just wondering.
You're the man, funky, this shit is magic.