Week 33 - Environmental Art Techniques Part 04 Floating Decals/Vegitation

 Final shot

Making the Wanted Posters

I used Dylan Abernethy's Substance Painter Sticker smart material to quickly blockout and map the stickers, extracting the base colour, roughness, and normal maps for in-engine use. Unfortunately no holo-wanted posters here :P

I made the poster in Photoshop using a previous render of Purah and a combination of smart objects, colour dodge, and desaturate filters.

I made three variations as to create a unique effect as all of them are overlapped, especially using a chunky brush in substance painter made this entire process a dream. Then I baked them onto a plane.

the nodes are straightforward, just being 2D texture parameters so I could easily switch stuff out.

Grass Shader

the grass shader was straightforward, but mainly in the idea I could gut an old project for the key functions I needed :)

Week 33 - Ireena Kolyana Sculpt

Out with one Dungeons and Dragons project, and into another. This time I am focusing on the main NPC of Dungeons and Dragon's 2016 Curse of Strahd Campaign with the central NPC, Lady Ireena Kolyana

Ireena Kolyana is a central NPC in Curse of Strahd, serving as the reincarnated soul of Tatyana, the lost love of Count Strahd von Zarovich. As his latest obsession, she is pursued, bitten, and under immense psychological distress, prompting her brother Ismark to ask adventurers to escort her to safety in Vallaki

She is my party's favorite NPC in our campaign and pivotal to the majority of our stories; as a result, it is bittersweet to be able to connect with her character through art. 

Beauty Shots:

Key Art

Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, permission to create her was obtained before the project began :)

FEEDBACK:

Feedback from Caden Peterson regarding the previous version:

• Overall, you'd do better with strong planarization of the face, then adding volume back as necessary, like literally take the slice tool and just start hacking away at excess geometry.
• Furthermore, the brow and cheekbones are giving you quite a bit of trouble. You're putting too much emphasis in the mandibular notch when in reality it's just high cheekbones that don't need to be as pronounced as you have them.
• The opposite is happening with the brow, you aren't stressing it at all. The bridge of the nose is far too smooth. and has no plane change like I would expect.
• The general proportion is alright, but the eye shape and position on the face is killing you, they need to be a bit higher up, and the eye shape needs to be tweaked. Remember that the eye is surrounded by a bunch of fat deposits and loose skin that make up the eyelid and protect the Maxilla
• Also EYEBROWS—you love putting eyebrows above or below the brow line but never at its apex; the brows always, always, always, ALWAYS go on the outermost point of the brow ridge. the frontal bone of the cranium

The previous version that Caden critiqued:

I found that I really struggle with understanding what makes faces unique and the structure that they are built on; as a result, I tended to copy one face and then use it elsewhere; however, to avoid same-face syndrome, I tried to make her feel unique from Purah.

I decided to make custom alphas since many of the shapes were repeating throughout the design, breaking them down into their basic shapes, I would be able to work later on to add the more finite details, such as sharpening the notches on the triangles into proper points.

I designed the alphas in Adobe Illustrator and depending on the mesh used them as straight alphas or used Zbrush's ability to turn the alpha into mesh to boolean into the right shape.

Example of using the diamond star pattern and extruding the bottom to create cuts in the skirt

Reference Board:

Resources:

One area where I wanted to differentiate Ireena's project from Purah's is in the end result. Since this is a concept that relies heavily on a dramatic lighting setup to make the textures pop I  wanted to use this as an opportunity to bring her through the character workflow to eventually be painted. As a result I started looking into ways to improve my retopology workflow through Zbrush, which now includes EaZYREMESH by Francis-Xavier Martins

General resources used for this project, all of which were used in Purah's sculpt:

• 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

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)