Week 44 - Kotallo Headdress, Horizon Forbidden West Fan Art - Refinement

  Milestone 02 Check In: Refinement & Hair Cards

Marmoset Toolbag, Showing the first pass of hair cards with no colour

Unreal, with & without proxy head

Maya renders, with & without wireframe

I hated how it was coming out, so I locked in. >:D

While working on this project, it was requested of me to make a breakdown of both the hair and beaded straw; it goes as follows:

Beads & Straw

For the straw and beads, I decided to try something a bit weird; looking at Aloy's model, they rely pretty heavily on single 256x256 or 2048x512 textures to ensure all of the details in the player model are properly captured. The Aloy Recon outfit, which for context is customisable with set colour palettes and has different upgrades with some elements being shared in different outfits, has 15 different texture maps. Below is an example of one of 6 different rope maps for the outfit. It is 2048 x 512

My plan was to create relatively easy geometry to work with and then use a similar rope atlas/extra planes to add differentiating detail, such as frayed edges.

I started with multiple planes of the same height and thickness, then used a randomize transformations bonus tool, now native to Maya 2025, to vary the top edges of the straw in different ways that still felt natural

One of the main problems I had in the first week of this project was the overwhelming expectations I gave myself on this project. This began the mantra of "think simply, think foundationally", which would continue through 90% of this project. For the beads I did exactly that, rather than trying to do fancy tips and tricks and get hung up on the details.

 I took my nowvariedd straw, threw it in ZBrush and made one bead with an ArrayMesh modifier. I focused mainly on the first third of the entire straw mat, making sure to get the proper variation I wanted, including a small extrude for depth, and then exported it. Back in Maya I cleaned up any overlapping beads/areas with overabundance and made sure they generally lined up with the straw

Finally, I used a nonlinear bend deformer in Maya to get the semi-circle shape. The deformers have been such a help for this project, despite constantly forgetting they exist. Especially with the small bends to many of the hard surface areas, the lattice deformer has been awesome to slightly nudge things back to where they need to be.

Hair Cards

This has been... interesting to figure out. At its most basic level, I understand how hair cards operate and function; they are long planes that display a texture and utilise their UVs to dictate which strands are being shown. In practice, I know nothing and have never known anything.

I've been very back and forth on this entire process of how to format the hair, specifically, with what kind of fur it's made out of. In Kotallo's official design, there are similar small puffs of fur used as trim in his skirt and pauldron; however, this fur is short and might look awkward with the sheer amount of mass that is required in the headdress. 

Because of this, I've played with the idea of utilising a bird-feather approach when creating a structure for the hair to follow. Where the marginal coverts would be the pieces closest to the scalp and the primaries and secondaries and the silhouette-breaking strands.

However, for my test I focused more on getting the idea across rather than getting hung up on details; something, something, make it exist first, then make it good.

I started by using a free version of Fibershop to make some test strands. I noticed in the main reference and final Kotallo design the hair clumps together to form large sections. For the time being I focused on making three different clumps: a primary (blue), secondary (red), and tertiary (green)

Admittedly, I didn't spend as much time as I could have. I created a 'mohawk' of NURBS curves evenly spaced to create the main silhouette to account for the hard surface pieces of the headdress. These curves didn't need to be exactly right but more or less create the general silhouette and movement of the hair tufts.

The main tool I used for this was GS Curve Tools. I dont remember when I bought it, but it has been incredibly helpful in creating and controlling the different curve tools and their associated meshes

I used the curves to spawn several instances of cards between them, or tubes depending on need. From here I have several options to work with the curves, either by making new strands based on my original tubes/cards, designating UVs, or creating randomisation with the cards to make them look a bit more natural.

Example of some of the randomisation options: for this I mainly stuck with twist, width, taper, and profile.

The majority of the actual options for GS Curve are going to be found in the Curve Control Window; here I am able to control the length and width of the curve, how many divisions exist on each curve, the normal direction, as well as orienting the normals to a mesh, and the amount of twist on the curves.

The current version of the hair is okay for a first pass; I am already thinking of different ways to improve it, such as the bird feather method for layering. Surprisingly, the current version is much lower in polygon count than expected; the blue section is ~1500 tris, red is 400 tris, and green is 560 tris.

Looking through the texture files for Aloy, and keeping in mind the fidelity difference between the two, I'm genuinely surprised how chaotic Aloy's hair card (2048x2048) appears. My knowledge in hair cards is at the most basic of levels, but seeing hair sections that exist in non-linear spaces, such as the top right hair section, exists. Somehow I assumed that hair cards always had to be linear due to warping from UVs. Additionally, the highlights on the larger sections of hair is extremely interesting; they seem almost random rather than done intentionally.

Fixes

For the most part, everything has been going smoothly minus that first week; however, that was largely due to non-school circumstances. The majority of the issues revolve around the slight deformation of the hard surface materials, largely due to how they were constructed.

As I mentioned earlier, a big problem I had at the beginning was the mental complication of this project. To make it a bit easier on myself, I decided not to worry so much about optimisation and instead work with ngon geometry to ensure the forms came first. As seen below, I created the far-left piece, which I call the 'upper jaw', and then broke it apart, far right, to kitbash the middle piece together with similar geometry. Then I cleaned up the mesh to remove Ngons and broke it apart in different sections to make future UV-ing easier. 

I do expect to have to redo these parts at some point, or at least modify them for the faceting on the final mesh; however, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for now.

Schedule

[06/16] BLOCKOUT [✔] -- First pass of everything; establish the form and sizing for all objects

[06/23] REFINEMENT & HAIR CARDS [✔] -- Refining the hardsurface and rope designs into a high poly; create a first pass of the larger plume/hair cards

[06/30] RETOPO & UVS [] -- Retopology, uvs and a secondary hair pass

[07/07] TEXTURING & RENDERING []  -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Tools used: Maya (Ahoge & GS Curves plugin), Substance Painter, Fiber Shop, Unreal Engine

 References

For this project, since I escaped the soft fleshy bits of character sculpting, a lot of my references are just trying to understand the shape language that Horizon Forbidden West uses for their warriors, in this case the Tenakth Marshalls.

Horizon Forbidden West – Outfit for Kotallo by Brian Loh, pre Embassy Questline

More Renders:

Showing the first pass of hair cards with no texture, Unreal Engine

Showing the first pass of hair cards with colour, Marmoset Toolbag

Hardsurface with no hair, Marmoset Toolbag

thanks for coming to my TED Talk <3

Week 43 - In Plain Sight, Sol Hair Research & Yarn Proxy

This sprint I spent a majority of my time working on secondary character art needs such as working out the workflow for Sol's hair, breaking down Metahumans for their parts, and designing the first proxy of the Yarn Ball character.

Hair Research

For our style, I spent some time looking at In the Valley of Gods, specifically with their character Zora, on how they do hair. This turns out to be a multi-layered approach with a basic mesh and hair cards stacked ontop of them

For this, Ive been testing out both Ahoge and GC Curves as Maya Plugins to see what the best way to get the volume we need for a coiled hair texture. This process started with a mesh volume, then converting that into a random number of curves with Ahoge. Then processing those curves into either cards or tubes to be textured.

Currently Im working with Fibershop to make proper hair alphas/curls, however I need more time with the program to create the effect I really need.

For the Barista, I took one of my Metahumans from a personal project, extracted the face, hands and hair at their lowest subdivision, and reconnected them in Maya. Alongside this fixing other notes that Jocelyn and Jordyn had for me.

Metahuman head raw.

The yarn has been tricky from the start since there are not many good references for how a yarn character should look. I did my best to create a rounded cube and then extrude out segments wrapping around to create individual strings. I used a material in Zbrush to see how a similar shader to the one we're making would affect it.

Week 43 - Kotallo Headdress, Horizon Forbidden West Fan Art - Blockout

 Milestone 01 Check In: Blockout

Im going to say straight up I hate how this is coming out; however, due to more personal life problems, this is the best I could manage for this week.

Schedule

[06/16] BLOCKOUT [] -- First pass of everything; establish the form and sizing for all objects

[06/23] REFINEMENT & HAIR CARDS [] -- Refining the hardsurface and rope designs into a highpoly, create a first pass of the larger plume/hair cards

[06/30] RETOPO & UVS [] -- Retopology, uvs and a secondary hair pass

[07/07] TEXTURING & RENDERING []  -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Tools used: Maya (Ahoge & GS Curves plugin), Substance Painter, Fiber Shop, Unreal Engine

 References

For this project, since I escaped the soft fleshy bits of character sculpting, a lot of my references are just trying to understand the shape language that Horizon Forbidden West uses for their warriors, in this case the Tenakth Marshalls.

(I dont have the images at the time of writing this blog post but I also had both the Horizon Forbidden West and Zero Dawn art books physically infront of me that I was referencing; I will add them ASAP.)

Clean versus annotated breakdown

I was able to find a free model of Aloy in one of the Tenakth armor sets to break apart and see how they do everything, however I will mention it is the wrong clan since the designers of this game are incredibly cool and made each subsect of the Tenakth -- Desert, Sky, and Lowland -- all have different designs in their specific armor types

This is the Aloy Tenakth Recon Outfit, extracted by Tosyk, my third favourite set in the game. There is a pretty important note that "if I have this model, surely someone must have extracted Kotallo's model, especially since he's one of the most beloved characters in this specific game." I thought so too; it turns out extracting models from HFW is incredibly difficult.

One aspect I immediately learned from this model is that there's actually an entire texture map that is just an atlas of rope. That is so incredibly cool and isn't appreciated enough. I also stole Aloys' face for a mannequin to make sure proportions are correct.

Also, Aloy has baby hairs on her face. I love these artists so much.

 Back on topic, working on this project is something I've wanted to do for an extremely long time. I played HFW right when I got into the major, and every couple of years I end up right back at it's development process. In 2022, when I got my Blizzard scholarship and got access to the GDC Vault I watched the Guerrilla Games presentations over and over and over again. Specifically these three come to mind a lot while working on this project.

Although im not happy with the general blockout, I am really excited on the experimentation for the hair cards. In Common Art I've gotten the opportunity to work with and learn new workflows for creating afro-textured hair for one of our main characters. I believe I can apply some of the same logic to here. Although this is most likely just utilizing curves rather than the volume-to-curve pipeline we're using in CA

CA pipeline uses a volume -> proxy hair cards or mesh -> curves -> final cards pipline which allows us to keep everything editable while visualising the end product.

For Kotallo's headpiece it would likely just be focusing on the curves

Week 42 - Ireena Kolyana, Curse of Strahd, Sculpt - Texturing & Rendering

 Milestone 04 Check In: Texturing & Rendering

  References

Key Art: Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, 

permission to create her was obtained before the project began :)

Schedule

[05/19] BLOCKOUT [✔] -- Overall blockout complete; some secondary forms emerge, but the overall flow of the piece is present. Polypaint used to differentiate material types

[05/26] SCULPTING [✔] -- Detail sculpting completed. All objects have secondary and tertiary details present.

[06/02] RETOPO & UVS [✔] -- Retopologizing the model down to a goal of 30k tris, following reference from Overwatch 1's character models (Source).

[06/09] TEXTURING & RENDERING [✔]  -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows rather than hand painting due to time constraints. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Shortfalls

Oh boy, due to a tremendous amount of life issues, this project did not go well. I genuinely believe that my absolute love of the character and consistent Dungeons and Dragons nights—where we actually play with this character—are the only reason I pushed through and finished her.

That being said, there are many, many, many things I already plan on going back to fix and tweak, one of the biggest being the faceting of the basic mesh. It's especially noticeable in the lit versions of the renders, but some areas of the hair and sleeves have significant faceting due to hardened edges.

Another fix to make is in regard to the gauntlets, they're just... bad. overall. I ran out of time making the gorget so the gauntlets never really made it out of the blockout stage. even in the final version, they kind of just have some gold thrown on there to make them seem like they belong.

A little bit silly of a fix that was intended for optimization was the hair tubes being uncapped at the end and entirely open. This was the first time I took a sculpt like this through my process, so to avoid hurting myself with around 30 pointed hair tubes, I ended up clipping the end off. The intention was to go back later and merge the verts together so the UVs would pinch closed.

If I were to get a grade for this project, Id honestly expect something like a low 80. Although it is done, it did not meet all of the requirements that I started with, including polycount or even the original texturing method. There were too many corners cut to justify a higher grade; however, I know I am an extremely harsh critic of my own abilities.

Extra Renders

At some point early in development, I got the idea to render the final version in Unreal Engine. However, due to time constraints and my general dislike of Unreal's rendering setup compared to Marmoset, I went back to what I knew best. However I did make some small things to... encourage me, including a plug-and-play master material for the maps so I didnt have to keep setting them up individually for all my 3D projects

And adapting a Regradable VFX for a sunspot to create an evil darklord power for Ireena to wield. for some reason.

Very basic rig for posing

Process Shots:

Comparing the different stages of texturing, I'm someone of a snob when it comes to hand-painting software, and I really don't like any of them, so I used a combination of Substance Painter, Clip Studio Paint, and 3DCoat to achieve the final product.

(1) Substance Painter was used to lay down the initial flats, using a smart material called Simple Diffuse to streamline some of the tedious processes of laying down flats, such as setting up a light and applying ambient occlusion & curvature.

(2) Then I transitioned to Clip Studio Paint, using their rather unknown and old software, Clip Studio Modeler, to outline Ireena's face and apply gradient maps. Substance Painter and 3D Coat both have their own quirks that make it difficult to become comfortable in for me, so I used CSP to align levels and 'start fresh' when blending modes were behaving oddly or I needed to focus on small render areas.

(3) Majority of the painting was done in 3DCoat since it was a program I wanted to learn and eventually became comfortable to work in. As soon as I realized I could lock meshes and the rough way the hierarchy worked, it became a lot easier.

I transitioned away from the Overwatch style of rendering in favor of my own personal style, mixed with a cheeky bit of Arcane, due to my friend group having a big focus on 2D art recently. Two of my friends are Concept Artists who have been working through commissions, as such leading to many discussions on art practices, one of them being a notion that 3D artists don't use gradient maps. As an example,

This is one of my close friends Shayna Chevallier/Usagi.Bunbun who heavily utilizes gradient maps in her work to create unique colour combinations.

For the shirt and the gold I used a combination of two different maps, one affecting the shadows and one affecting the highlights; that way the colours could be unique between them,