WIP wolf knight sculpt, based on the awesome concept by Wu Shenyou
Made in Maya and ZBrush
Next up, texturing!
Meet the new beastie. It hunts people looking for their keys under streetlights: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is."
Based on concept by Yishu Ci
Sabertooth tiger! A game-ready 3D model suitable for realtime. Sculpted in ZBrush, retopologized and UV mapped in Maya, baked and hand painted in Substance Painter, and rendered in UE5
Based on the awesome concept by Fabio Murino
Technical breakdown of how I made the Nutcrusher:
I began with the high poly sculpt, which was initialized as a blockout in Maya, then brought to ZBrush for sculpting. Then I went back and forth between the two software with each new asset to add to the sculpt. You can also initialize assets in ZBrush, but by combining the two you have more efficient topology control which allows you to sculpt cleanly in a cartoon style.
After the sculpt was finished, I brought it back to Maya to create the low poly version, conformed onto the high poly, and its UV maps. Both parts simultaneously complicated and boring but actually quite fun once you get the hang of them. This is the final geometry, onto which the high poly light, ambient occlusion, and curvature information will be baked in the form of 2D texture maps in Substance Painter.
Also in Substance Painter I used hand painting techniques for the first time on a character! Really fun but I have a lot to learn about it. I also still used the Roughness, Metallic, and Normals channels, which aren't always used in a hand-painted style, but in this case worked well.
Then it's back to ZBrush with the low poly this time to pose it. I'm not a rigger so I use the Transpose Master Zplugin to pose by hand, just for the render. In an actual game dev pipeline she would be rigged, and the A-pose in which she's modeled makes this possible.
Finally in Unreal Engine, I applied all her materials with their many channels (BaseColor, Roughness, Metallic, Normals, and secretly a touch of purple Emissive light in her hair!). I created a plain backdrop, made a 3-point lighting system, and set up multiple camera shots using keyframes and a combination of moving the camera vs. character. Lastly, I built a geometry-based rim light with a fresnel mask material (check it out in the first image!), plus outline and shading post-process materials for the final shots.
fun pretend person for a fun pretend game :)
made from scratch in Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and UE5, referencing concept by Yishu Ci and with special thanks to Anna Beganska
I'm not the same anon but orange and brown are the same hue which means brown can only exist in the absence of enough light to make it orange which also means brown is actually just dark orange and also that while neon orange can exist, neon brown is impossible. I love colour theory
Hmm to me, that would make brown the strange color, not orange :) Strange that we think of it as its own hue. Like pink...really just any tint/shade/tone that's so culturally important we've effectively promoted it to hue. Now THAT'S some color theory I could get into.
When did you get into medieval art?
There was an Arthurian Literature class I took in 2021 and the book of Chrétien de Troyes had this really awesome little manuscript art on the cover and I've been hooked ever since.
The proportions! The horses! The castle window peepers! That poor knight!
Did you take any art history classes or regular history classes?
I took every art history class my university offered, which were almost entirely western and one of the professors rarely made an appearance to their own class. Not to say I don't know anything, but my knowledge is definitely skewed.
technical question-ish whats your favourite bits of the 3D art process and the 2D art process?
This isn't exactly what you asked but what I've been really appreciating lately are, for lack of a less corporate term, the transferable skills. To continue my thoughts from the previous ask, artistic principles translate easily between 2D and 3D. This seems obvious in one direction of 2D -> 3D, where the typical path is someone learns art principles like composition, form, color theory, etc, in 2D and then later learns 3D and applies that knowledge to the new medium. But after spending about a year in full time 3D land and completely forgetting to draw, the next time I picked up a pen to make a traditional 2D illustration, I discovered things like my spatial and shape language skills had VASTLY improved. They both inform each other and that is the coolest thing in the world to me and truly one of my favorite things about both of them!
Sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but how well do more traditional digital art techniques translate into 3D modeling? Are they just completely different skill sets or is there overlap?
Sadly they're pretty different in terms of technicals. There's some basic concepts e.g. masking, baking, blend modes, which come up in both but for the most part it's a whole new beast. But there's a ton of overlap in terms of artistic principles, and that's the thing that really takes time and practice more than the software literacy.