Sam Payne - BA (Hons) Games Art

Bug Legs!

Before I could look at rendering and texturing my monster, I needed to give it legs. Overall I decided to keep mixing things up based on reference from my thumbnails, so my monster has a leg formation similar to that of thumbnail 2, even though a lot of my design is based on thumbnail 3. I sculpted this by using Zspheres, a feature where you can draw spheres and turn them into actual geometry based on the desired shape, making use of see-through in Zbrush, i made it easy to fit the legs to specification based on real reference.

This formed my basis, before I went and sculpted my details onto the leg, eventually I ended up with this for my sharkbug’s legs.

In general, I feel that my model still has that technological aspect to it, but more rustic, decayed. I’m happy its turning out this way, as I can use it to further convey that my monster is angry, due to its neglect over the years. Aside from theming, this is how my monster looks with the legs and everything connected to the main body.

I am incredibly happy with it. However, this week doesn’t end on this, I still have to texture and render it ready for paintover in Week 6. Instead of using substance painter, I made use of blenders shader nodes/ texture nodes features, that can be used to create procedural textures that fit exactly what I need to make, such as rusted metal, brass, copper, etc.

This is an example of a rusty metal procedural texture using nodes, I had researched it and found quite a concise tutorial which helped greatly, especially with understanding how nodes interact with specific results. It also allowed me to apply the rust to other materials, like on the wings. Originally the wing texture node were circuit boards, however with these nodes, I could add rust and discolouration to them, only to emphasize that point of abandonment.

Rendering!!

Now that textures were in order, I could now start the rendering process, to get ready for paintover in Week 6! I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to have the final image composed, so I took a few assorted shots of the sharkbug until I found one that I really liked and wanted to stick with. I also did a clean render with all the lighting, materials in my desired posed to see what it looked like.

Here is the first clean full render of my sharkbug, no additions, or anything else, just the render. I was really happy with the way the red lighting came out on the eyes, as it looks almost clockwork-like, and incredibly ominous, along with the red afterglow and the heat coming from the sharkbug’s mouth, its so hot its white.

From this point, all the work I can do is entirely paintover work, so keep an eye out in Week 6, to see how my final render looks!

Nano Mesh vs Micro Poly

One crucial part of developing my sharkbug beast, was an idea I had having the head of it be entirely metal, and wanting to use the alpha I had made previously as the material to replace the head with. However, there were 2 ways of which I could do this, and I was trying to find the better way. Nanomesh is part of ZModeller, which allows you to place an insertmesh in the center of a poly, or polygroup, whilst micropoly replaces the faces with the material.

Originally I experimented heavily with Nano Mesh, as it had way more control variables, and this was the typical result.

It looked good, however, it was way too layered for me, and it made parts of the head too thick to the point where you’d miss out on the details, also the way it overlapped at the mouth specifically really put me off of using it overall for my final head product. On the other hand, Micro Poly did exactly what I needed to do, and in similar poly count!

I’m really satisfied with the way that each little sheet of metal stretches out to fit the entire shape of the shark head, and you can still clearly see the texture and bumps on the metal itself, providing in my opinion the perfect amount of detail for this part of the body.

Body Construction!

With the head in a good state, I started working on the body for my sharkbug beast, I even prompted to create another alpha to use as a subtool, as I was unsure on how to create a precise wing, using sculpting, and due to the level of precision I wanted, alphas were needed. Here is a look at the body in the earlier parts of this week!

Throughout the week, I kept working on this until I had finally reached a good fundamental point, where I was ready to start focussing on other aspects, such as the wing/arms and the legs and finer details, before moving to photoshop.

Here is the alpha I used for the metal wings below. At this point in the project, I really wanted to start pushing pipes and cables, etc to try and drive that techy look.

On top of this, I also had made a small node/coil object in ZModeller, as advised by my lecturer, considering how cables and pipes just came out of parts of the body, and it seemed incredibly un-natural, which was a great criticism for my work.

But for now, this concludes my Week 4 antics, in Week 5, I look to create the legs for my sharkbug beast, as well as start looking at lighting, possible rendering and composition, ready to move it to photoshop for paintover. I also want to look at making use of texture nodes, so that when it comes to paintover, my job becomes a lot easier.

Base Head Done!

Just in time for the beginning of the week, I managed to finish the head of my sharkbug beast, I am quite happy with it, but there are still things I wish to add to it so it is more detailed, like the idea of covering the skin in that alpha metal sheet I made, or making a small mesh to add to the eyes like a camera or something similar, really to bring out that technological feel.

As you can see, the small panel part is a different colour, and this is due to it being a different subtool, it is its own model, but its been appended into the head. I like this idea of having a panel with wires and such connecting, the concept of wires connecting to things and miraculously working is such a fun concept to me, very curious and I want to push that aesthetic. Lips are a bit messy still but better than before, and im happy with the nose overall at this point. I am also quite proud of the head fin, as it looks quite blocky despite its round feature.

Array Mesh!

Our lecturer introduced us to a feature called Array Mesh, where you can take a mesh, duplicate it a bunch and mess with settings to position it into something, like a pattern. It is classed as its own subtool, and was quite fun to play around with, I made this curvy mesh loop illusion thing by just having a play around with it.

However, whether I’ll use this technique or not is unknown to me at the current stage.

Sculpting Time!

With thumbnails and brief ideas planned, it was time for me to start the sculpting process of my monster. This week primarily focuses on creation of the Head specifically.

Within the first half of the week, this is what my sculpted head was looking like, a bit rounded and not really that sharp, but the idea was definitely there, specific parts of the model needed to be worked on, such as the lips, nose, and upper head, as it was quite flat and lacked any detail.

Alphas!

A method made known to us by our lecturer, was the use of alphas! You could draw a shape or object in photoshop using specific colours (greys and whites) to represent alphas, then import them into zbrush and create a 3D mesh out of them. Throughout the project, I hope to make great use of these tools, as I believe they can help me tremendously add extra detail I would otherwise struggle with, easily.

Aside from these things, this week was just focussing on the base of our model, and I am continuing to work on the head into week 3, as there are still a few things I wish to experiment with before finalising the head of my shark-bug beast.

Introduction!

For this half of the unit, we have to create a 3D monster using sculpting and paint-over methods! It gives me the chance to properly learn Zbrush, and add to my roster of skills moving forward with my work, so I am extremely excited to learn it. Like the 3D Character half, there is an assortment of themes that we can follow for our monster, of which I will display below.

For this project, I am choosing to make a Beast/Animal, who’s emotion is rage, and motivation factor is Drone. I chose these as it gives me the opportunity to experiment with different types of design, ranging from modern to steampunk, and I will explore different avenues and ways of which I can do this throughout the weeks.

Sculpting Exercises!

Before we go and start sculpting our character, I need to learn the fundamentals of Zbrush, and how to properly utilize all that it has to offer. We started by first looking at basics and also using a template sculpt to mess around with. We learnt how to insert other meshes, what brushes we should use, for example DamStandard (BDS) and ClayTubes (BCT) for the best results.

Here is an example of a head template I added stuff to:

This session also included a quick tutorial on DynaMesh, Zbrush’s remesh software. Very simple, a click of a button, and then ctrl drag to remesh your object.

Alongside this, I had a go at sculpting a head at home, with proper anatomy and dimensions. It was a very fun process, and I really enjoy sculpting in Zbrush, even after only a week of learning it, so I quite enjoyed this exercise.

That aside, criticism is the way for me to move forward here, and my lecturer did a good job pointing out where I went wrong with this sculpt, and from his criticism, I understand that my sculpt looks way more stylized compared to realistic in terms of proportion.

Animals and Thumbnails!

Considering I am creating a Beast/Animal, I need to study what types of animal I want to use for the project, so I can understand their anatomy, and also create a design that accurately reflects how their anatomy works in the real world, so I can have a believable monster. Considering my emotion is rage, I chose a shark for my base animal to reference and sculpt around, to constrast this, I wanted to also use the praying mantis, as whilst it doesn’t directly convey the emotion of rage, its swiftness in its movement towards prey is intimidating.

Originally for this exercise, I tried to draw the anatomy from looking at it, and then afterward I would copy the anatomy from the images. Notably, that my shark drawing wasn’t sharp enough in its shapes, and that it was either too long, or too short. A good note that my lecturer said, was that I should try and experiment with different species of shark, as they all have varying anatomy, as well as real world images, as those are more dynamic, and actually has me plot the anatomy as supposed to just copying it eye from eye. I will attempt this again.

With the mantis, I almost got the 3/4ths of the head, but my general head is a bit blocky, and the body has a few limbs that are out of place. Also my anatomy studies aren’t detailed enough, and are just general shapes, which may not really help when it comes to putting this into my design.

Here are my first few sketches and designs for my monster, on the left you can see how I tried to block it out with the anatomy, and then piece it together on the right side. I tried a contrast of mixing elements, I quite like how the legs work in the second one, but I also like the design of the head, back and arms on the third one. As an ultimatum, I will combine the aspects of thumbnail 2 and 3 to create my design. I will also draw it in a bit more detail, to understand where I am going to convey the drone aspects, as well as experiment with the different eras of technology in my concept.

Rigging and Weight Painting!

Now unfortunately, due to the nature of Grub’s design as a character, I was unable to run him through mixamo, as the software had absolutely no clue how to rig Grub in general. As a result of this problem, I had to result to manually rigging Grub. I first tried to achieve this by making use of Rigify, a blender addon that helps with generating rigs, but unfortunately, it also had no idea how to make IK’s and other rigging essentials work for Grub.

As a result of this, I had to manually rig my model, making use of IK, and weight painting Grub entirely by myself.

Something you may also notice, is that the hair is much like the old hi-poly version from previous weeks. It is, but also it has been retopologised, specially by Zbrush’s Zremesher. I managed to get it down from 120,000 polys to around 25,000 polys by clicking 2 buttons, and it ends up looking so much better than my decimated version of the hair.

Moving onto the weight painting I did for this project, the process took a while even having used blenders transfer weight function to make a basis for the clothing, but ended up struggling a bit, as the cloak and trousers would keep clipping and dragging the wrong weights which was quite infuriating. I noticed however, this wasn’t a weight problem, but a general problem with topology, as the two parts of the trousers were physically attached, so i seperated them to fix the problem. Besides, here are some examples of my weighting process.

All of these work with IK that are assigned on the rig, and look quite accurate. The hair looks the smoothest out of all, as that was the part I weighted last after learning a really efficient way to smooth out the weights by using the blur brush. If I ever had problems with the weights, I would drag out the skeleton, and remove any un-needed weights or incorrect weights, and that worked quite well.

Texture Painting!

To make Grub look like Grub, I needed to texture paint him. Due to the limits of skylanders being my IP, I couldn’t go for photo-realism (not that it matched my style regardless) so I went with a more pixel based texture style, and did this by using blenders texture paint mode, and there are specific fall-off settings for brush drawing that means the outer is pixelated rather than soft and smoothed, corresponding with my IP choice.

Originally, I used substance painted for a few things, such as the crown and the hair, and these I did in 256×256 to fit with the actual texture size of skylanders originally. However, I soon discovered that having a higher resolution conveys the detail better in the end as there are more pixels for the fall-off to flow to.

I held off of adding normal and bump maps to this model, as back in skylanders age of texturing, this technology wasn’t readily available, and let alone could perform on devices, so I chose to keep the colours and textures flat for this reason.

Animation!

Considering Grub refused to work with mixamo, it meant that I had to create my own animation for Grub. Originally I had planned to do a jumping wave, but I had to compromise due to my IK’s making things difficult. As a result, I went with a basic energetic jump. I ended up fully rendering this and having it uploaded with a few sounds. The final result is about 4 seconds long.

With the animation being complete, this is the final step of pipeline for Grub! It was a fun project to work on, and gave me the ability to tackle modelling a character head-on, as in previous projects I was always more of a supportive role when it came to character development, so it felt satisfying to make everything on my own in such a short amount of time!

Hair!

By far, one of the most difficult parts of Grub to model was its hair, mainly due to it colliding with parts of the model and having to rest on top, but in the modelling process, not the rigging process. Even then, I was struggling on the type of method I would use to create this hair, at first I wanted to sculpt it, but it didn’t end up going well, as it ended up being incredibly flat and too hi-poly.

To resolve this problem, I was introduced to a different method, revolving around using modifiers. In this specific example, I’d use curves to outline the shape of my hair strands, then use a modifier to create a mesh around it, so I can reshape it and scale it, it looked like this:

Using this method was much easier, as I could still follow the drawing I had made of Grub’s hair, whilst also being able to go around and create a lot of depth with my models hair, it also looks incredibly smooth as well, which is satisfying. However, this was also an incredibly hi-poly process, and would need to be decimated down the line to keep a similar type of shape.

Decimating did much to my model in terms of reducing poly count, and also stylisitically. I feel the way it looks now is more likely to the game I have chosen to base my design off of for this project, as it still has very low poly aspects to it, and a lot of the detail is in the texturing. On the side though, it is nice to have the model look similar stylistically at points.

Retopology!

One problem that has remained uncontested throughout this project for me, there are way too many polys on my model of Grub. I had previously noted in earlier weeks of this blog, that my topology was quite poor throughout the project, and as a result, I was left with an incredibly unoptimized character, around 170,000-180,000 verts, which was way too high for just a character. So, I had to fix this urgently.

Most of this was done by making use of blender’s ALT select, which selects a whole line of connected edges. I made extensive use of this to reduce polys and edge count, whilst also trying to keep as much detail as possible. For some cases such as the gauntlets and sleeves, I had to merge those manually, as them being separate missed out on detail and caused gaps. I also managed to fix my modifiers for the crown, whilst being able to remove and work with the poly count, so overall it looks much better.

Originally, I was introduced to an addon called Retopoflow from a classmate, however I struggled to use it for this project, and was more than happy to reduce my polycount by just shedding edges that I wouldn’t’ve needed at all for the models detail. On top of this, any detail I do want to rectify, I can just do so in normal mapping when I texture my model. If I had managed my time better with this project, I would’ve tried to make retopoflow work, but considering my problems were easily fixed, it wasn’t ultimately needed.

UV’s! (Part 2)

WIth my models being retopologised, I now needed to re-uv my models, remark seams, and make sure that my UV’s would be bearable to use when it comes to working with the model in substance painter. Luckily this process isn’t too daunting to me now that I had retopologised my model, and now that I made sure I knew how to use ALT select in the most effective fashion.

For now, this is the update I have for my work during the holidays, and I will discuss about rigging, texturing and animating during week 6! A bit of a crunch for the project, but I believe I can do those in a timely fashion if I manage to keep my head down.

Going backwards, to move forwards.

This week, I have seen more mundane tasks being appropriate for the progression of Grub, as it turns out that my topology throughout the project has been quite poor, and is causing problems when it comes to me creating more detail in my model, whether it be through modifiers or through sculpting. Essentially, this week just consisted of me quickly doing some UV, finishing off the rest of the clothing and making sure that all the parts of my model are up to the highest quality possible for the project.

At the start of the week, this is what I was working with:

Whilst this wasn’t inherently bad, I definitely wanted to change it, and fix it, as there were a few glaring problems, such as the pose it is in, weighting it is going to be difficult like that. Secondly, it is missing clothing and features from the design, and last of all, there are quite the noticeable number of topology issues, especially with the hands and the crown.

Handy Work

First matter I decided to attend to, was fixing and remaking the hands, as they were incredibly messed up, and didn’t resemble a hand in the slightest, so I decided to remake them. With the previous version of grub, they were originally part of the arms, and I had realised that doing that is terrible practice, as you cannot get an accurate shape to work with easily, so I made a new object.

But before I show you it, I want to display the old hands as a reference point:

As you can see, these are not the best hands to make for the character, with the remake, I made sure to give enough space for each finger, as well as enough depth to make it seem accurate.

Clothing! (for real this time)

Finally, I was able to finish the clothing aspect of Grub this week, but the hair is still to be added, tldr modelling is almost fully done.

To make the crown, a lot of work had to be done to it, including a lot of re-topology and adjustment in detail. During this time I also found out that using Simple on the Subdivision modifier was really useful in conveying the style of Grub, as my personal style has a lot of sharper and direct lines instead of curls and details, but I need to make sure it compares to the Skylanders look, as that ultimately is the main style for this project.

UV’s

With my UV Mapping process, I have been a bit lazy in how I have done it for this project. Ideally I shouldn’t have as many islands as I have for my model, but I am going to use Substance Painter for texturing throughout this project, so I decided to get the only bare UV’s from blender’s Smart UV project and use those for substance painter.

As you can see, with these texture maps, the islands haven’t been arranged properly, and its all over the place, this is due to me planning on taking my character into substance painter, and working from there on the texturing process, and considering Substance Painter only needs a base UV map, I didn’t focus on it too heavily, I will in the future though as it is good practice.

For me to even achieve these UV Maps as well, I had to backtrack a lot, I was told that it was easier to UV with the Mirror modifier, so I had to cut all my models in half, and re-uv them as it would generate half the amount of islands this way and still apply to the entire model, which has happened in this instance. It also gave me the chance to touch up on my topology and apply and fixes.

Current State of Grub!

Currently I feel like im in a good spot with my model, now I mainly get to focus on texturing, rigging and animating Grub, which I am excited to do overall. Here is the current state of him!

Hi-Poly and Low-Poly

Coming into this project, I had made the mistake of creating my hi-poly model, before my low poly model, making it harder for me to show my process and flow in this assignment. I tried to rectify it by unsubdividing my model, but to very little success.

A massive difference was made with this as well, considering my unsubdivided at best was around 1,300 faces, whereas my new low-poly model is around 400-500 faces, which is much more efficient and detail can be added easily by use of loop-cuts.

Clothing – Quite Problematic

First of all, I have absolutely no clue how clothing works in blender or maya, it is something I have never really worked with, besides when I used to rig characters in college, and whilst I understand how to weight them (only in blender) I have absolutely no idea on how to actually make them. In this project, specifically Grub’s design, this is going to cause a big chunk of problems (unless I sculpt).

However, I could sculpt, but at the same time, I am not sure how I can achieve this, and make it look realistic with physics and all, so im trying to go with the route of clothing simulation, before apply a modifier, to varying degrees of success. My first attempt was atrocious:

However, my second attempt went much better, but there still were some problems with it:

There are still some problems, but I am looking to fix these as I go along with the project, as the rigging and texturing stage of this I feel wont be as bad for me as I have experience in both of these skills. One more thing to note, Grub’s trousers are part of the body, as I want to texture straight onto it and use normals there.

UV Mapping!

I have previous experience in UV Mapping, but never thought of the idea of optimising my UV Maps. However, considering most of my model is mirrored, it makes a lot more sense to map the island to the same so that my textures display perfectly on both sides. However, I will show an example of the current state of my UV maps (as of 6th March 2023).

However, there is much work for me to do on these, and was the result of me just marking some seams and doing a regular unwrap, I need to optimise this.

Current State of Grub!

I felt like I didn’t make enough progress, but the next stages of this project are resurrecting old knowledge, I will ask others for assistance on how to work with clothing, and I do want to do some sculpting. Also I thought the weekend was a day longer than it was, e.g. on Sunday I thought it was Saturday, whoops!

Art Styles, what do they mean?

Before getting into the process of trying to create base models of my character, I need to consider what an art style actually means and refers to, as to just creating something similar, in order for me to be fully immersed in my project in order to produce the best final model possible. In my case, I really have to consider the 3D style of a Skylander: how is it rendered? does it have highlights? is it lowpoly? what is its color scheme? does it make use of normal textures? what should the quality of my textures be?

Many different factors need to be considered so that I can understand exactly how I want to do things with this project and plan accordingly to different problems I may encounter.

In this example, I can see that it makes use of shadows & highlights, looks somewhat low-poly (excluding head and hands). It doesn’t appear to make use of normal textures or mapping, all of it looks modelled and sculpted, but still follows the cartoonish approach, I note this style due to the large hands, small general body, as well as squished face proportions, whilst also being wide and covers enough of the face to give space for more detail. However, there being no outlines can make it hard to skew my point, but at the same time, it is no where near realism

Maya v. Blender

When it comes to deciding what im going to model my base in, I have to look at the 2 main contenders for modelling, and factor in benefits and cons. For example, I have much more experience in blender than I do Maya, but Maya has better UV mapping for example, however, I personally dislike its keybinds and shortcuts as they aren’t as user friendly, when compared to blender’s shortcuts. On top of this, I find the UI of Maya to be hard to read and figure out, resulting in the general experience of me using it for this project to be quite unsatisfactory. In this case, I am going to use blender purely for the workflow speed, I need to dabble in Maya in my spare time.

Colours & Silhouettes!

Before modelling, I needed to come up with my colour palette for Grub and also define its silhouette to see if the design is recognisable just from its silhouette, this in turn makes a good unique character as it can be defined based on its unique features.

Modelling time!

Now its time to model Grub, woohoo! First things was the basic head shape, I started by creating a cube, and adding a subdivision surface modifier on it, and upscaling viewport to 4. Why this over a regular UV Sphere? Mainly due to topology reasons, when it comes to sculpting later on, it is much easier with a subdivided cube, as all of the topology is square, where the top of a UV sphere has triangles, causing complications in sculpting.

When creating the body, I also made use of a cube to start it off, I also worked with the mirror modifier on, so that my character would be exactly the same on both sides, something which my drawing unfortunately didn’t do, and did cause some delay in my workflow, but not massively. A main struggle im looking at is how im going to get clothing working, possibly soft-bodies to vertex groups. For now, here is my progress on Grub (as of 26.2.23).

Texture Practice

In a short lecture from this week, there was a crash course on texture making, specifically in photoshop as supposed to substance painter, which was quite refreshing, as i used to texture make mainly in college before coming to UAL. Here are the results from that workshop! (note textures are in 128×128)

For now, that concludes week 2! Next week I’ll focus on making sure my base model is fully established, and that I can go into sculpting and starting to texture some parts of the model!