Month: March 2024

Zbrush time!

Its been a while since I last used Zbrush properly for a project, I believe it was during Games Art Pipeline last year, when I was working on the monster for Peter’s Unit. So lest to say there is much catching up that I need to do. However, I remember the essentials thankfully, so I dont feel as scared as I would be if it was the first time I had to use the program.

I started by increasing the polycount of the model by making use of the DynaMesh function and turning the subdivision resolution up high, to about 500, resulting in a model with around 130k polys, compared to a 10k base mannequin. Now whilst I could go higher with this to add even more detail, the body of the squid itself doesn’t need to inheritly be detailed, as texturing solves a lot of the issues with it, on top of its suction cups on the tentacles being a whole seperate entity as it would be practically impossible to extrude those out of the base mesh, let alone sculpt all of them.

Whilst I’m not particularly proud of the eyes, its something that can be easily fixed, i will just have to refer back to my moodboard to look at how a squids eyes work properly as supposed to this look. A case to be made in Overwatch, Hammond whilst incredibly stylized has eyes that make sense, so its important I replicate this feature in my sculpt/model.

Suction Cups…

Now for the suction cups, I made a base singular cup in blender, and instead of just planting them around and mirroring it as any normal person would, I decided that it would be a great idea to import it into Zbrush, then use array mesh, and manually split the new merged suction cups as seperate subtool before rinsing and repeating. I did this for 8 limbs, and it took infinitely more time than if I had just done it in blender, so from here on its just going to be a lot of wasted time and small progress sadly. I will show how it looked in Zbrush and blender, but I was not satisfied with my pipeline at all.

I repeated this same process until I had completed all 2 legs, as I could make use of the mirror and weld tool (thank god) to minimize the amount of work I had to do in terms of manual array work. At this point, why didn’t I just turn to blender to place the suction cups more efficiently; sheer will to get it all done in ZBrush. Also I was at the time thinking of retopologizing the suction cups into the base mesh, however, it looked absolutely terrible and destroyed all solid shape and foundation of the suction cup, and sorta just squished it and made it mushy.

This process was generally, quite painful, and I haven’t sadly got many screenshots of my process here, but if you know anything about array mesh, it was slow and monotomous, so I’m very much glad its over. I continued working on this process over Week 5 for the arms as well, so I will mention it slightly and provide blender screenshots, as I dont have any Zbrush ones, till week 5!

Sculpting and Mannequin time!

My main focus for this week was to start the process of sculpting, and to do that, I needed to make a mannequin of the base shape of my character to sculpt over in zbrush on. I have made 2 iterations, with the only difference being how the arms are made, as there was an issue with the arms and getting it to shape properly with the suit on. Here you can see that the arms overlap in a chaotic and not very optimised way.

As you can see, the arms are quite messy and also overlap uncomfortably. I tried making use of proportional editing as that was my best percieved motion on creating dynamic shape positions for a mannequin, however it didn’t turn out well and was unusable, so in the end I had to recreate the arms, luckily, only just the arms, as everything else was fine.

Immediately you can see that the new arms look a bit different in the sense that they are straight for the majority of the arm, and this is due to the fact that the upper bits of the arms will be hidden by the suit/armor that the squid will be wearing, so there is no need to interpret an accurate limb as it’ll be hidden, sure it may be useful for the purpose of animation, but I have ways to settle issues such as this, and having arms like this will directly help me achieve what I need to do when it comes time to it.

For the suit, it was quite simple to model, and wont need much else except for some detailing and exterior parts, however a lot of that can be done near to the end!

From this point, I will be working in Zbrush! Until it is time to retopologise my model. See you in Week 4!

Thumbnailing!

After deciding what concept I wanted to push and persue thurther, it was time for me to start thumbnailing possible versions of it to decide what I wanted to ultimately model! Below is the 3 “3/4ths” (3/4ths is really hard) perspectives of my chosen design.

I chose thumbnail 2 in the end, as I liked that it generally had a larger silhouette compared to the other 2, as the space it takes up is distributed evenly. However, from this, I cant say it is the final thumbnail, as I decided to make a change before starting to model the basic mannequin for the squid to be sculpted.

I decided in the end that it would’ve been better if I had a seperate slot for its arms built into the armour, that way it can keep its 8 limbed design as should be, but appear way more anthropomorphizied than its counterpart in the thumbnail designs, ergo; overwatch. But with everything finalised, it was time to start creating the base mannequin that I would be using for the sculpt. Till week 3!