Week 40 - Ireena Kolyana, Curse of Strahd, Sculpt - Sculpting

Milestone 02 Check In: Blockout

 References

Since I'm following a single illustrative interpretation of this character, a lot of the focus was put into shape definition and anatomical structuring, particularly on the glabella (skin between eyebrows) and quadratus labii inferioris (muscles on the corners of the mouth)

Key Art: Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, 

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

Shortfalls:

For this week, the main goal was to get all of the sculpting finalized to continue onto the retopologizing in the later weeks. However, I didn't get all the sculpting done, specifically on the gauntlets. The gauntlets use the same design as the gorget, previously described as the 'breastplate' or 'chestpiece' in previous weeks, which ended up being an extremely tedious process of breaking Maya.

The process I used for making the gorget involved modeling the key shapes onto a plane, focusing on the base glass, shapes then expanding outwards to create the frame. Originally, this was going to be achieved with alphas; however, due to the complexity of the gothic design and this talk at the 2023 Zbrush summit from Blizzard's Overwatch team, I decided to continue the design in Maya

The gauntlets bring their own challenges in the form of their complexity compared to the gorget; the shapes have very little breathing room against the other stained glass pieces, requiring them to be a tight fit.

This method led to its own downfalls, mainly there being an issue with the inner corner of the shape frames, the yellow polygroup, not going far enough in the geometry, causing the glass shape underneath to be fully seen

Closeup of the gorget

Same image above with polygroups

Another main issue I had was in regard to matching the reference image, because of the nature of posing and stylization of the drawing. Hegval notes the style is reminiscent of Hades, a lot of the anatomy works but is seen at a much wider focal length, bringing many of the details much closer together than I'm able to achieve inside of ZBrush. This could be a case of 'illustrator anatomy' versus realistic anatomy; however, I attempted to follow the reference as close as possible to the sections I could.

A common question I got when making this sculpt was regarding the use of orthographic versus perspective view mode. I feel somehow the issue above is related to the nature at which Ireena is posed; however, I don't know of a specific fix for this.

Orthographic view of Ireena versus Perspective

Resources:

I mentioned these resources last week, however I rewatched them over the course of working on this project and I really think they significantly improved the workflow and direction of this project. Being able to peel back the overall design concepts, both in a professional and casual setting, such as TBSkyen for League, and understand how and why characters are designed a certain way adds a whole new level to the creation process.

It is mentioned in one of the videos above, but Renaud Galand's gumroad has a fantastic free hair brush and matcap/material library that has fit in perfectly with my workflows!

Additional resources:

• Ruffle Insert Multi-Mesh Brushes for Zbrush by Alexandra Jackson
• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Mark Lambert's Hair tutorial
• Chloe Worthy's Beginner Headblock in Zbrush
• Sean Forsyth's Cloth Folds

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 handpainting due to time constraints. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

*During the retopology phase I'll be looking into different methods to work through the gauntlets and potentially redoing the gorget. In the meantime, they will proceed as normal until an alternative can be found.

Blockout & Unreal Blockout

Week 40 - Sketchbook Tour

 Digitigrade Leg Study (2hr 45m -- 05/20)

Fun note about this study: it was not supposed to be regarding digitigrade legs; rather, it was supposed to be a sculpt of Kindred from League of Legends, who I've become a really big fan of. However, her legs are digitigrade, and I got really fed up with not having my own base model that included this unique leg combination -- so I made one for myself.

An example of Purah with the legs to show how they adapt to a finished base

Vampire Mermaid (05/15)

One of the Discord servers I moderate for runs monthly art challenges during the summer and fall to help encourage students and alumni into building healthy art habits and experimenting with different forms of game art. The community decided the theme would be vampires, with underwater coming in a close second.

I wanted to combine the two forefront prompts and create a deep-sea bloodsucker, mainly inspired by World of Warcraft's Nagas, and create something low-stakes and monstrous.

These two are actually from week 35, but due to personal life events, we were delayed in posting!

Rivers, Scratch Challenge (1hr 30m -- 04/20)

Trey Clover, Proportional Challenge (5h -- 04/23)

Week 40 - In Plain Sight, Barista Sculpt

For this week, I finished the main sculpt of the Barista character and will be working on retopologizing her while creating a proxy for our rigging artists and animators to use for blocking.

I ended up keeping all of the details in ZBrush after looking for further reference for the apron, noting that the strings could overlap the edge at the top of the jeans to hide the fact the apron isn't actually attached. Especially if this is a background character, small details like this should be easy to work with. 

References:

Resources:

For this project I used Sean Forsyth's cloth folds and Mypixielab's IMM bows to help work through the intricate shape of the tied threads.

Further Resources:

• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Sean Forsyth's Cloth Folds

Week 39 - In Plain Sight, Barista

Important context for the assignment portion of this post: I was away on medical absence until Monday May 18th so my contributions are limited.

For our project, I was tasked with designing one of our background extras, an unnamed Barista that will appear in several shots to make the cafe feel more lively. Everything below her neck has to be seen, including shots up close to her boots, so I focused on making loose clothing that is general enough to fit with our early 2000s aesthetic, but not boring.

One problem I've been running into is regarding the physics of the apron versus the positioning of everything else. I am looking at experimenting with a simple version of Marvelous Designer to create a pattern of the cloth for primary details/basic string placement then add details in Zbrush

References:

Perforce Proof:

Week 39 - Ireena Kolyana, Curse of Strahd, Sculpt - Blockout

Milestone 01 Check In: Blockout

 References

Since I'm following a single illustrative interpretation of this character, a lot of the focus was put into shape definition and anatomical structuring, particularly on the glabella (skin between eyebrows) and quadratus labii inferioris (muscles on the corners of the mouth)

Key Art: Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, 

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

Resources:

At the point I stopped working on this project on week 34, I started doing a lot more short-term studies, particularly of different D&D characters' faces and hairstyles. Since working on the first version of it, I've done a lot of studies into making good hair within Zbrush and the different methods utilized (see Week 35's Sketchbook Tour for some of them)

That being said, both Chloe Worthy and Mark Lambert have been two entirely different ends of resourceful help with these studies. Both have very comprehensive guides for how they do hair studies, with Lambert's being stylistically simpler and easier to digest, while Worthy is able to build on that understanding.

I found Worthy's tutorial "ZBrush Beginner Tutorial - (Very Beginner) Perhaps the Beginner of all time"  extremely helpful for getting a secondary look into how a master artist approaches head sculpting

Additional resources.

• Ruffle Insert Multi-Mesh Brushes for Zbrush by Alexandra Jackson
• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Mark Lambert's Hair tutorial

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 handpainting due to time constraints. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Resources for the texturing section:

• Overwatch Character Creation Pipeline - Blizzard Entertainment Overwatch Team - 2023 ZBrush Summit
• How Overwatch 2 Heroes Are Created

Blockout & Unreal Blockout