Week 45 - Kotallo Headdress, Horizon Forbidden West Fan Art - Retopo & UVS

   Milestone 03 Check In: Retopology & UVs

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards with sub-surface scattering & ray tracing

Unreal Engine, Hair cards in normal base colour

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards without alphas & an ID map

Substance Painter, Hardsurface metal pieces, 2048x texture

Wireframe, 82k tris with hair - 46k without

Schedule

[06/16] BLOCKOUT [✔] -- First pass ofeverything; 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

Extra Renders

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards in normal base colour

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards with sub-surface scattering without ray tracing

 Critique

Massive thank you to Richard Bacallao from Cohort 21 for the feedback! His main notes go as follows (6/28):

1.  The biggest thing I see right now is a lack of density for the hair itself.
• You have very visible clumps of hair that end up making the cards themselves look flat, especially near the tips. Add some more cards to those bends at the tips to help fill them out so they don’t look super flat
• I see from your renders that you have large and medium-sized clumps; I’d go in and add another layer of both big and medium-sized clumps to add in some more overall density and coverage. You already have a good amount but just a bit more to push it further and just keep an eye on any clipping or intersecting
• The overall strands of hair in your big clumps also need some more density to help with coverage. I’d also make them look slightly more generic to help avoid seeing repeated patterns in the hair style.
• 
  
2. One thing you can do for your new layers of hair cards is to start cross-sectioning them to give the illusion of some layering happening, all of your cards follow the same flow so crossing some cards over each other where a few are going in an opposite flow can add some believability to the piece
• I’d also start thinking about a flyaway hair layer, adding in that sort of visual noise where it’s quite subtle and can bring the entire thing to life.
  
  
3. My other big critique is overall resolution of the hair cards and the clumping of the hair cards. Don’t be afraid to go all out on this resolution
4. For more of a sort of tuft fur look I would look into making the overall shape of the cards to be wider at the base

Nick feedback:

• Although im not using a high poly for this project, since the main learning focus is centered around the hair, I should throw the hardsurface parts into zbrush, hit them with a dynamesh and polish so the edges can be slightly bevelled.

thanks for coming to my TED Talk <3

NOTE: Posted early for critique purposes