A Continuing Ballad of 3D Art, Pt. 1

Hello, everyone!

I'm pleased to announce that for my final semester at FIEA, I am actually going to be in San Francisco doing a 3D modeler internship at Zynga! I'm really excited to move to a different place and learn hands-on about what it means to be a 3D artist in the games industry. Of course, I will not be able to share anything I'm working on at Zynga, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be totally silent! I still want to force myself to continue improving so I can continue to build my portfolio for the future.

I had a lot of fun with my previous creature project, so I decided to go for another. After a little poking around, I stumbled across this fellow:

(I wish I could find a better link/reference to the original artist besides the watermark on the image, but my extensive reverse Google search hasn't brought up much. Credit goes to mDD, wherever you are, thank you!)

I picked this creature for the challenges it presents. The leaves and flowers and butterflies would provide challenges with cards, which I haven't really used as of yet. The bulkiness of the hands and the junction of where they join the arms also seems like it would provide a challenge.

I've already started working on the body, as I plan on doing the trunk-like body, legs, and arms with a sculpt and then adding the foliage, mask, and tail to that body in Maya. The next time I update, I hope to show off the body after it has been sculpted in Zbrush and retopologized in Maya! Thanks for reading!

3D Portfolio Piece #3: Textured and Ready to Go!

Hello, everyone! I'm here to show you the fruits of my labors over the last few weeks. I retopologized Bwompers to a game resolution state (those tentacles were kind of a pain!) and also painted up some textures for him. After you put everything together, he ends up looking like this:

"Bwompers" by Alex Papanicolaou on Sketchfab

Over the next few days I am going to be looking to bring him to life either through 3D printing (depending on facilities...) or giving him a posing rig and giving him a small animation. Time will tell!

3D Portfolio Piece #3: Meet Bwompers!

Hello everyone! It's about time I shared with you the next portfolio piece I am working on.

This time I decided to do a creature, which is something of a return to roots for me as I was always most interested in creatures and monsters and critters growing up. As an homage to this, and my first video game obsession (Spyro the Dragon), I decided to pick a concept from Creaturebox (who do work on Ratchet & Clank for Insomniac) and work on it.

So after some deliberation, I picked this guy:

After consulting my friends, we named him Bwompers.

I started in Zbrush and, after making sure proportions were correct with Zspheres, I began sculpting. After several laborious weeks of this, this was the end result of my high-rez sculpt:

And here's a fancier render in Keyshot:

Next I'm going to do a game resolution model for him and begin texturing! See you in a few weeks!

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Posing and Animation!

Hello everyone! In addition to finishing the models and the texturing, I tasked myself with making a posing rig for Bali and giving him a very light idle animation. Here it is! (Apologies for the low quality; I'm trying to find a better way to record my screen.)

And here are some (slightly higher-quality) stills of the pose!

I will be getting this into Sketchfab (both with the cloak and without) very soon, so I'll add those here when they are ready as well!

The total polycount (for all objects) ended up being 31,967. Bali was 25,283, the mask was 4,164. the sword was 2,244, and the cards for the cloak were 276.

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Textured Up!

Here he is, all textured up!

There are still a few things that I want to do, if I should have time; I plan on adding a posing rig onto the character, adding the scarf and the belts attached to the sword, and then the "life" I want to add to it is get some cloth physics onto it in UE4 so it can have some light animation.

But... that's for next week. (: Thank you for viewing!

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Game Resolution Model & Normal Maps

So here's my progress at the second check-in!

And here's the topology:

Textures still need to be consolidated, touched up, and generated (when it comes to color & PBR textures), and the sword needs more work, but I did a lot of work and it was a blast! I really want to finish it as soon as possible!

3D Portfolio Piece #2: High-Resolution Sculpt

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I posted last. There's been an absolute gauntlet of things to get through here at FIEA, but I managed to find some time to split between Maya and ZBrush to create the (preliminary) high-poly sculpt for my second portfolio piece, the main character Bali from the webcomic Bird Boy (one can view the concept art from the previous post).

The reason why I'm calling this the preliminary high-resolution sculpt is because a lot of fine-tuning needs to be done in the face and hair especially. The costuming, however, I believe is close to done! I just need to insert a few laces and beads, but that can be done with the finishing of the face. Then it's onto retopology and texturing.

Which you guys will get to see in the next few weeks. Thanks!

3D Portfolio Piece #2: Concept Art

It's summer semester and it's time to focus on my next portfolio piece!

I'm still going to be working on the GW2 armor set, as I ran into a few technical snags over the brief summer break we had, and I still have to get the low-poly made for texturing.

Regardless, time moves on, and I decided to head in a more stylized direction for my second portfolio piece. After going between a few ideas, I settled on working on a 3D model for Anne Szabla's comic protagonist, Bali from Bird Boy.

I took the liberty of making a consolidation of concept art for him:

This would be multiple pieces, including the base model (on top) as well as several props including the mask, sword, and cloak.

I'm excited to work on it!

3D Portfolio Piece #1: High-Poly Sculpt

Good morning, everyone!

As you remember, I've been working on the female Norn stag armor from Guild Wars 2. I was permitted to go up to the high-poly Zbrush sculpt for my final turn-in, as I will continue to work on this with retopology and texturing in the next few weeks (and then I'm submitting it...!).

After a lot of toil, here it is:

It was a lot of work, since I'm still fairly uncomfortable using Zbrush for hard surface modeling, but I feel as though I managed to work between the forms Maya produced and the program to make something I'm proud of... even though some of those forms (in the chestpiece, boots, and helmet especially) escaped me, much to my frustration!

Here's the concept art, for comparison:

art by Kekai Kotaki

I learned a lot about Zbrush during this, so I feel as though I'll be more comfortable to head back in there for my next project. There are a few things I still want to touch up on before starting to build my retopology, largely having to do with the face. I want to improve it, but I was having trouble with Z-Remesher so I could get a decent base to work off of. Though the face isn't hugely important, I did want it to look nice, even though I probably will obscure the eyes.

So my current plans are to retopologize this during break and then use the first week or so of summer classes to make the textures look incredible.

Thank you!

3D Portfolio Piece #1: Blocking Out in Maya

So over the last few weeks, I finalized my figure sculpt (which needed a lot of anatomical fine-tuning, though unfortunately you can't really see it now!) and began to build out the forms of the armor in Maya. At this point I'm about 80% done (and I will update this post when the rest of the pieces are finished). One I have the armor pieces ready, I'm going to take everything into ZBrush so I can get the details sculpted out onto them. Then it's back into Maya for re-topology for the game-resolution mesh!

At times I worry that the complexity of this and the skill necessary in ZBrush might be a little over my head, but as I continued I grew more confident and started to have more fun. Now I'm excited about getting all the forms finished so I can take the next step.

Edit: Okay, I put in the time and finally got all of the forms in there. Next, I'm taking everything into Zbrush for a little texture- and final form-building before starting the retopology stage!

2D/3D Art Homework #21: Substance Abuse

We continued exploring Substance with Painter this week! Being able to apply the functionality of graph-based Designer with the more artistic approach of Painter was really nice.

Here's the helmet design that I ended up with after playing around.

I especially liked being able to use opacity and emissive masks.

Here's all of the layers as well:

Enjoy!

3D Portfolio Piece #1: Base Sculpting

Hello, everyone! Though we are still wrapping up things on Substance, I wanted to do a brief update on what I would be doing next in class. Focusing on character modeling, sculpting, and texturing, I am combining my first portfolio piece for 3D art with an art test that I am currently undertaking for an internship at ArenaNet.

Here is the image that was provided for the art test:

They asked for the character on the right: the armor for the female character model.

I need to do some research on hard surface sculpting in Zbrush, as I've never really done anything like that before this point, but I'm very excited to get into it. I did already get started, however, by making a base sculpt for the female figure. I decided to sculpt it out myself instead of finding a model online, partially for practice and partially because I really like figure drawing and sculpting.

So here it is so far:

With that squared away for the most part, I will be proceeding to tackling the armor in the next few weeks. And then there's making a low-poly game rez model in Maya... and then texturing!! So keep an eye out for it!

2D/3D Art Homework #20: Look At This Graph

So, I really love Substance Designer.

After following along with the videos, I messed with some of the setting for the map (mostly in the base color area, though I did take the grunge and add it to the roughness as well so it would look like actual dents and pits) to make my own version of the helmet.

Here's the finished results:

Detail shots to show the roughness masking for the metal wear and the dirt.

Looking at the graph that I made...

This is the full graph. Most of them are merely blend nodes with both the helmet and the back piece to generate an output map. The areas that are a little bit different are...

Pictured here, the base color and roughness maps. Here, I used the Mask ID node and the metal edge wear node to mess with the color and the roughness, making different areas of the helmet different colors and masking the edge wear so that it is matte instead of specular, like the metal of the helmet. I did the same for the brown dirt and grime I put on the helmet as well.

(Also, there's something about making graphs in Substance Designer that makes me want to post this awful meme:

Enjoy! (: )

2D/3D Art Homework #19: Weapon Concepting with Maya

It's been an extremely hectic week with getting everything ready for the Capstone vertical slice presentation, but I managed to get some time to get at least one weapon design finalized before the presentation and spring break begins.

So here's one idea for Chao's weapon! He's a bruiser who uses blunt weapons, so some of the designs are pipes which he uses. This one incorporates the jiangshi talisman as a design element.

(The talisman symbols stand for "attack," "struggle," and "claw.")

This was fun and now that I have the modular pieces ready to go, it shouldn't be that difficult to get the rest later over the next few days. Cheers, and have a nice spring break!

Edit: Now that I'm back from spring break and GDC, here's all of the weapon concepts together!

2D/3D Art Homework #18: Vehicle Concepting with Maya

For this week we were tasked with something similar to last week, except our focus was on vehicles instead of environments. Amongst us in the Channeler group, we decided on three different vehicles for the three different districts. I chose that which would be associated with the manufacturing district: a kind of rail vehicle for the transport of all of the boxes and barrels of manufactured goods that were produced in that area.

I looked specifically into railroad handcars, thinking having the touch of spirits manually getting the goods from one place to another would be interesting. I also found designs for steam handcars, as well as other types of vehicles that were powered, so I got some designs with actual fuel being used as well.

I actually did not know that we were doing paint-overs until very, very late in this assignment. That is the reason for the quickness of them, though hopefully this gives an idea of how they would be colored.

2D/3D Art Homework #17: Environment Concepting with Maya

This week we were tasked with making several variations of an environment concept in 3D with Maya. I collaborated with my fellow Channeler artists and we split up the various environments in our game between us. I took on some of the more narrow alleyways and backstreets of Kowloon City.

I ended up making one set of geometry and went into attempting to make it look different based on various modular props we worked on and shared between us.

We've been talking about implementing distinct districts in Kowloon. Our major declensions are a food district, a residential district, and a manufacturing district.

This is the manufacturing district.

Severity was paramount here—there are no doors or windows that aren't functional. Because this is a backstreet, there aren't as many doors into the buildings, and the windows are high to provide light into the building, but not high enough that they are decorative or allow people to look inside. There is a lot of trash cans, piles of refuse, and barrels of liquid (which could be something being produced).

This is the residential district.

I went really heavy with the gates and bars in this one, to make it seem as though the area really is under curfew and lockdown after certain hours. Most doors have bars and gates in front of them, and there are some signs and garbage cans to show that these areas are used and lived in. The lanterns help illustrate this as well, providing light to help the spirits back to their homes.

This is the food district.

A street used to go towards some off-the-beaten-path restaurants, I illustrated this with signs to show that these are the fronts of places to eat. There are a few barrels (deliveries?) and some trash cans and lanterns as well to show that this is a street that is used, even though it is away from the main thoroughfares of Kowloon City.

And that's it for this week!

2D/3D Art Homework #16: Final for 3D Concepting

And... here they are! Working out the glow for the fire was the main challenge with this, as well as attempting to paint in gold that looked metallic but still kind of "soft" (as gold typically is). Hopefully the effort showed through!

I had fun with these, but I'm excited to start on a new project this week.

Capstone "The Channeler:" Final Character Designs

I'm actually pretty proud of how these turned out. After a few weeks of taking these designs against a razer, from the thumbnail stage to this finalized design, this is what the characters I did the art for looked like.

Forecast for next week

Next week, I will be working up three of the designs in Photoshop and ZBrush to a high level of polish. I'll be working on F, J, and L.

2D/3D Art Homework #15: Mesh Inserting

I tried to apply the criticism given, especially when it comes to layouts, order, and the eyes. The mesh inserts, I had trouble with. Removing layers and things like that so I could mess with the geometry caused my ZBrush to crash repeatedly, and at one point my file corrupted and I nearly lost everything! Thank god for saving older iterations.

I think I'm going to do a lot in the paint-overs next week, since I enjoyed it so much in class last week. I'm still struggling with Zbrush through unfamiliarity—I'm going to try to take on more personal projects to become more familiar with it so I don't feel as afraid as I do with messing it all up. I'm getting better, but it's a process.

I used the mesh insert brush as well as the extract for some "armor" pieces. I sort of wish I'd used the extract on C, F, and J, but I couldn't smooth the pieces away to build off of them, so I'll keep that in mind for next time.

I turned the wolfish one a little more so one can see the tail I gave B.

Sculpt Paint-Over

I worked on a sculpt paint-over in class today that I ended up fairly happy with, so I thought I'd share it!

I'm looking forward to this stage in 2D/3D class in a few weeks now, haha!

2D/3D Art Homework #14: Toil and Boil

This week I tried very hard to take constructive criticism to heart, heavily revamping each of my models (and adding a fourth—apologies!) before I started work on the variants. To tell the truth, I was having some issues with the variants, as it became difficult to mess with the sculpt as much as I was able to once it was taken off of Dynamesh and layers & subdivision levels were added. Because of this, these are really just foundations for variants which I will build off more of next week when we begin to do mesh inserts.

I also worked much more on making everything look professional, so hopefully that paid off...!

For the humanoid model, I wanted to keep the overall teenager-y shape of the body, instead starting to take it in different thematic directions. The first introduces runes and "fire" coming off of joints, which would be further worked on with a fiery "mane" next week. The second begins to incorporate decorative elements which would be further expounded on.

For the more bestial model, I took one in the direction of being a little more wild, with fur tufts that could perhaps be colored bright red and maybe even animated with a wavering animation. The second is much more decorative, like above, giving him some interesting inorganic-yet-organic pieces to play with in the future.

For the more spirit-like model, I played around with proportions more than adding decoration and detail. The first mimics the humanoid model, though the second a little more portly while the third is more angular and forward-leaning, with some rakes to make him seem more wispy.

Here's the sculpt that I started from scratch on. Admittedly a little simple, but I wanted to go for a much more stylized ghost-type character with a form that focused less on anatomy. I also had more fun with the head variations with different animals.

And here's all of them lined up all pretty in a row!

I look forward to further developing these next week.