Midterm Industry Review - The Frozen Stag - Ice Druid Sculpt

I forgot to post this during industry review but better late than never lol - she was completed week 27 for reference

SEE THE FULL POST HERE

First Draft

This draft was mainly regarding which rendering setting I was using, either Unreal Engine or Marmoset Toolbag, as well as learning the best method to pose her.

I ended up using a basic white material with a subsurface scattering setting over the edges, which utilizes the depth to allow for a nice ice-y look.

Shoutout to one of my students, who upon seeing the last render, knew what she had to do:

Test Printing

Even though her main sculpt is complete, I do want to find time to properly key her full body pose (above) and get it printed. Being able to do some test prints helped me identify key issues I would have with the full body, such as how incredibly fragile the fingers are and how more objects than expected need to be solidified to others.

test 02

Final Reference Board

Week 32 - Sabertooth Groom Experimentation

The project for this week focuses on how to make grooms utilizing Houdini for hair generation. I utilized my concept for Purah's third form, the Primal Shoosuva as a reference to create a basic head sculpt, minus the horns, and went through two seperate tutorials to learn the rough process. 

Key art of Purah's third form, the Primal Shoosuva

Process Images

Left to right: Hair placement painting, length of hair painting, hair + curve combination

curves only, hair only

Base Sculpt

I used Arvid Schneider's 'How to Groom Hair & Fur in Houdini' tutorial for the majority of this process, going through the basics so I could run my own experiments and play with the different tool settings. For this part of the process, I didn't put much focus on the realism/reference of Smilodon's hair, but rather on understanding the process and what goes into making hair generation content. A real, "Make it exist first" workflow

This project was inspired by AVASCOT's Groom Shader as a base, specifically its ability to make realistic blends of hair throughout the same coat utilizing masks. Although this wasnt utilized in this portion of the experiment, I'll be making revisions in favor of this plugin.

Reference Board

Debugging

I knew this would be part of the process and something to keep in mind, but I find it really interesting. that you are still able to see tiny amounts of the skin through the fur. While looking through other hair card references for humans, I came upon this diagram from Mountain Dog Studios of their real-time hair breakdowns. If I am able to spawn hair within small areas and have the system react accordingly, I think this would help give more control and a fuller volume to the groom.

One of the biggest problems with this groom so far has been the inclusion of hair where I don't intend on it. This has been especially noticeable in the mouth with lots of hair growing into the lips. Even if the hair isnt long, the small dots don't disappear with adjustments to the base fur map.

Week 32 - Vertex Painting

 Beauty Shot

Texture Maps

Debug vertex painting preview

Vertex Painting Nodes

Week 31 - Trim Sheet Texture

Key Shot

Sculpt

Texture Bake

References

Based mainly in World Of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth (2018) and Legion (2016)