FMP Biker -Sculpt 3

I managed to finish the sculpt at the by Wednesday, the third week, just as I wanted. I didn't have a lot of changes to make, mostly just making adjustments. I worked a bit more on the folds of the fabrics but I didn' add any wear or damage to anything because I think it would be more efficient and easier to tweak if I did it directly in Substance Painter. Also, I was thinking of making different wear stages for the textures if I have time, for example, having a standard one, not too worn, and a really worn and beaten down one, so having wear on my sculpt wouldn't really help me with this.
I added some simple accessories, I am not completely sure if I should add more, but if I need to I'll just duplicate the ones that I already have. At this point, I have all the elements that I need in place and if I need to change anything it would be easy to reuse what I have.

I am leaving skin details, like pores, for Substance Painter as well, again because it would be quicker and easier to adjust them, and also I could add colour/roughness variation at the same time.

For the hair, I will leave it as it is for now, as it gives me the overall shapes and some direction for the hair strands, I don't think I need more to build the hair cards on top of that.

I am thinking to add more details to the jacket, something like patches or pins, but I will try that out in the textures. Also, I will add stitches and seams with the textures too. 

At this stage, I am ready to start the low poly. I only have a few objects to retop completely, as most of them I've made as low poly models from the start. Hopefully, I will be able to finish the low poly in one week, and then unwrap and pack everything in a few more days. This way, I would have 2 weeks left to do the textures, hair, rig and put it in the engine, which is still quite a bit of work but I hope I'll manage. 

FMP Biker -Sculpt 2

Spent the start of the second week finishing the block-in, I tried to add all the remaining elements before moving on to detailing everything. I still have a few more objects to add but they are mostly small details, just accessories, so I'm leaving them for now.

After I had most of the things in place I could start going over them and sculpt the details. While doing this I was mostly looking at my references to get the shapes right, folds and other details. I tried sculpting mostly everything on layers, so it would be easy to change and I could compare how things looked before and after. 

For the objects which would be repeated in more places, I tried making the low poly first and the subdividing it and sculpting it, so I would save some time later down the line and wouldn't have to sculpt the same thing over and over (for example, the spikes, chains, belts, buckles). 

By the end of the week, I managed to get some sculpted details on everything and things were starting to look good. I still have quite a few things to add and fix, the body, head, arms and hands need more work, and the fabrics as well. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't manage to completely finish sculpting in two weeks as I planned, mainly because I was quite sick the first week. Still, I am hoping to finish the sculpt with another 2-3 days of work and save some time on the other parts of the project. I am trying not to get too stressed so soon and take my time with everything to make it look good, rather than just finish everything very quickly. 

This how the model was looking at the end of the second week, hopefully by the middle of the next week I'll be able to start working on the low poly. 

FMP Biker -Sculpt 1

Started working on the first character for my FMP on Tuesday, the first week after the holiday, as Monday was mostly spent handing in the first term projects. I spent some time during the holidays gathering references for my characters so I knew quite well what I wanted to do with this one. I didn't do some proper concepts for it, only some simple sketches in which I mixed outfits from my references, just to visualise the character a bit better. In terms of clothing style, the main idea for the character was to make him quite punk, biker looking but also show somehow the fact that he is religious, which I thought would make an interesting contrast for the character and also with my other character, who should be a demon. One of my main goals for these characters is to show their personalities through their designs and tell a story with everything, so I am trying to keep this in mind when making decisions on their design. What I was looking for when gathering references were mainly things that looked interesting visually, would match together and the idea of my character and would be difficult to make, as I want to push myself and do more complex models which would also be functional, just as in the real world. Also, I want to present my character in two ways at the end, one with the scarf and sunglasses and one without those, so I am trying to make it look good in both ways.

I started with a body block in to get the proportions right and then exported that to Marvelous Designer to start making the clothes. I only used Marvelous for the vest and scarf, and everything else I did directly in Zbrush, except the boots, glasses, buckles, and some belts which I made in 3dsMax because I wanted to get some clean bases to work on. In Zbrush, I made everything in a similar way as I did with my previous characters, mainly extracting shapes, cleaning their topology and moving them in place, or just inserted primitives to work from. I used Zmodeler quite a lot this time to clean the geometry because I wanted to start from clean, low poly bases for everything. I hope this will help me save some time with the retopology as well. 

This first week was mostly spent only working on the block-in, as I had a bit of trouble getting back to speed after the holidays, especially because I was sick the entire week and couldn't concentrate very well. Also, I wanted to take my time with everything so I would have a good start, rather than rushing and having to do a lot of fixing later on. 

This is everything that I managed to do in the first week, there is still a lot more stuff to add and fix but I hope I can finish everything in the next week, as I planned to spend 2 weeks on the sculpt. 

Hidatsa Character -Update

Applying the feedback that I got for this project, I went back and packaged the textures a bit better, so I had the metalness and roughness map in one texture. Also, I checked the textures again and made some slight tweaks, especially for the hair. I changed the material settings for the hair in Marmoset, and worked a bit more on the texture for the hair strands and made the more subtle, as I thought that they were too obvious and I wanted them to blend in the hair mesh, rather than stand out on top of it. I made some slight changes to the lighting as well, toned down the colours and the intensity a little bit and changed some angles.
Overall, I am quite pleased with this character and I feel like I managed to improve a little bit from my previous one, but for the FMP I need to take a bigger step forward and improve all parts of the process, the sculpt, retopology, texture, hair and presentation.

SO Character -Update

The first thing I did after the formative hand in was to finish the rig and pose the character. In the end, I used 3ds Max to do the rig because I am more used to the tools in there and I would need to learn a bit more before doing it in Maya as well as I would in Max.
After getting the feedback, I went back and made a few changes to the character to take it a bit further. Firstly, I changed the white pattern on the T-shirt, I took the old one to Photoshop and hand-painted on top of it to make it look crisper and higher res to match the rest of the character. Also, I added more wear to the clothing, added some discoloured stains and a few clumps to the T-shirt and the pants. For the coat, I added larger, more visible slashes and more dirt, especially in the lower part of it. For the rest, I just checked everything again and only made very subtle changes.
In Marmoset, I changed the material settings for the hair as the light was reflecting a bit weird in some areas, mainly because of the SSS settings. I didn't make a lot of changes to the lighting, just toned down some of the lights and adjusted the others. Also, I added a very simple backdrop so the background wouldn't just be a flat colour. Initially, I planned to add some kind of smoke alpha to the sword (as it had in the concept) but gave up on the idea because the sword is bright enough as it is and another emissive surface in that area would draw the attention too much from the character.

Helmeted Character -Update

After getting the formative feedback and carefully reading it, I made some changes based on it to improve the character. Firstly, I changed the scarf texture completely, I kept the same pattern on it but worked on the wear of the cloth more to try and make it more believable (changed the fabric texture, added clumps, stains with colour and roughness variation). Also, made the wear on the other materials more visible from a distance, changed the wear on the skin to a few big slashes, rather than more smaller ones. I changed the values and saturation of the colours a bit as well, made the red gradient on the legs and arms stronger, changed the base colour of the scarf to a desaturated purple/pink (from brown) and made the pink edges on her top more saturated. I tried to change the overall roughness of the different body parts to make them stand out more from each other. Worked a bit more on the belts and pouch, added more details and wear to make them a little more interesting, and changed their base colour too. Also, I spent some more time working on the AO map to try and make the transition between the materials and body parts nicer.
In Marmoset, I changed the lighting setup completely as I thought it wasn't working that well for my character as it previously was. I added a simple backdrop to frame the character from the background better and more butterflies because I wanted to use their emission to bring out some reflections in the metal parts.