Common Art Homework #5: Intricate Work of Starfish Butt Sculpting

(Sharp-eyed followers will notice I skipped a week for common art homework. Last week was a level design and I didn't take pictures of it... I might add that in later.)

This week, however, I began to fall in love with Zbrush. I didn't understand it at first, but now... I'm thinking about writing odes and sonnets.

We were meant to sculpt the starfish character we modeled earlier. I actually used my own model for this; I felt proud of it, so I wanted to take it through to finish. Here is what I ended up with!

I ended up really enjoying this process and I can't wait to do more sculpting in the future!

2D/3D Art Homework #5: FOUR FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!

This week, we were tasked with going through all the previous steps (modeling, UVs, sculpting, baking, and coloring) in a single week. So I got to work!

I went with the barracuda-looking bass fish. After some work modeling, this is what I ended up with.

I took that into Zbrush and went to town sculpting it, eventually ending up with this beastie:

I baked out a normal map for that sculpt and it ended up looking pretty good! I then painted it up and I ended up with this in Maya, which I then took into UE4:

The only self-criticism I think I have in retrospect is maybe not making the color map a little bigger and more high-resolution so I could've been a little more detailed with it, as it gets kind of fuzzy-looking when you get closer. But otherwise I think I'm pleased with the final result and I enjoyed it!

2D/3D Homework #4: The Return of UE4

Look at all those cannons!! With textures included and excluded and with lines on the mesh and everything! Anyways, after porting those into UE4 and messing around with the settings for a while:

Looks like a bona fide video game art asset in a level! After four weeks of work, I'm feeling pretty proud of that end result.

Common Art Homework #3: Modeling

Lots and lots of polygons and modeling this week.

He was a lot of fun, even though I time-managed poorly and ended up doing almost the entire thing very late at night.

I'm naming him Starboard.

2D/3D Homework #3: Shake, Bake, and Mudbox

This one was a doozy. The best part was realizing I'd baked all the wrong maps mid-way through, screaming at the ceiling, and furiously re-baking so I could effectively implement them for Mudbox.

Many, many hours later and I am pleased with the results. Just wishing it hadn't taken so long.

First, we start with the normal baking. My UVs were different because of a different method I used to manufacture them. I had to paint out some problematic bits, but in the end they worked well enough.

So you can see how ugly these are.

Next, we baked out ambient occlusion maps and positional maps and colors and all sorts of things and I'll condense a lot of this because it got muddy (ha ha, gettit), but in the end I ended up with something like this.

Of course, luck would have it that I barely used that ambient occlusion and color map when I took the thing into Mudbox. Instead I used another method outlined in the tutorials, using masks within the program itself. I then painted on some personal details, changed colors around, and then stamped on textures and rust. In the end I ended up with this pattern as well as this model. I'm actually fairly proud of the end result!

Anyways, that's it! After all the frustration, I'm happy to put it behind me, but I'm happy with how it ended up! On to bigger and better things!

Common Art Homework #2: Character Redesign

For Common Art this week, we put ourselves into groups and decided on redesigning a Nintendo character. My group decided upon Yoshi, and after a few iterations of different concept art by Chunzi and some discussion, we decided on a concept of Yoshi that changed his character from a species of his own and into a sort of "good Koopa" that might've worked with Mario in a differently-designed Mario universe. Chunzi worked up the final design for the character, for which I made this model sheet. KC did the background for us, which was themed to be something of a more city-based environment for a very different sort of Mario story.

I guess Mario, a simple Mushroom City plumber, had to enlist the help of "bad Koopa gone good" Yoshi to help rescue the stunning dame Peach from the clutches of the evil mob boss Bowser or something!

2D/3D Homework #2: UVs and ZBrush Texturing

For the first step of this assignment, I wrangled UV mapping in Maya for the cannon models I did last week. UV mapping doesn't frustrate me as much as it seems to others, but I did approach it in a different way (using automatic mapping instead of manually unpacking it, oops); all of the UV mapping I did in undergrad was on organic objects, so that's how I learned it. Hopefully these UVs will end up being useful during painting, though. Hopefully...

Next I made liberal use of the Multi-Cut tool and various other means to make the model into a high-resolution version, even when being smoothed. This is the end result in Maya, after doing this and also applying a Blinn material to make it a little shinier.

Finally, I took the model into ZBrush and used vairous brushes and things to apply some metallic textures and weathering to it to make it look a little older and worn. This was a render of the final result, which I also decimated down from roughly 7 million polys down to less than 2 million. On to the next step next week!

ZBrush Experiment #1

My first experiment in ZBrush! We pushed and pulled a sphere into whatever we wanted, so I ended up with this face thing. It was fun, and I'm looking forward to learning more about the program.

Common Art Homework #1: "Mess Around in Photoshop"

I decided to not head into something super detailed or complicated, and I restricted myself to the Pen Tool (muffled screaming) because that was what was mostly covered in the instructional video for this week. I vastly prefer painting in Photoshop, so I'm hoping we can do some of that later! I guarantee this will not be the last ferocious beastie that I draw (particularly of feline or canine variety) because I love stuff like that. This was really quick but I had fun with shapes! More to come.