***Latest***
View it in: Marmoset viewer:
https://bradmyers82.artstation.com/portfolio/dishonored-fan-art-30dd3188-0a75-4ed8-a0b8-28623a6f3390
Final screen grabs Marmoset:
dishonored fan art diffuse painting tutorial:
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Anger Sculpt WIP:
I wanted to take a stab at creating a character with skin inside marmoset2.
I was originally considering making the whole model but this will be faster and in the end I won't have a half naked crack whore on my website, so thats good. lol.
I'm using the concept below as my reference. I like the fact that she has sorta a joker makeup thing going, so I'm thinking I might turn her into a harley quinn character actually to put my own spin on this. Basically I'll just give her the scars around the mouth, black eyeliner running and some lipstick, but no white makeup.
Another thing I want to do here is create several facial expressions. This is another thing I haven't done before and I think it would be a good challenge.
Here is the concept:
Here is where I'm at now with the sculpt (very early), and hair obviously placeholder.
Replies
Plano, Texas to be exact. I'm trying to be a modeler too, and its always a pleasure to meet some more Texans on the polycount forums
Very cool you live so close, I'd love to checkout your work! Keep me posted!
Post a profile screen cap?
slosh: Thanks man, and yes, hair is very temp. I'm planing on using maya paintfx to create the hair card texture and then use 3ds max to build the hair planes via path deform on a spline. I have built hair cards in the past before but never quite this way, well see how it goes.
Justin Meisse: yea nose is a little jacked right now. I'm gonna clean up a lot in the next sub-d for sure. I'll pay extra close attention to that nose tho now that you mention it.
bagelhero: Yea, I'm generally not good with side profile work. for some reason I never like how it looks compared to the front faceing view. I usually use the side image just to line up the sillohette and that's how I use 3 quarters images too for the most part. Not sure if I should be doing a lot more than that tho.
So far I have just been eyeballing everything so I know I'm probably far off in many respects. On the next update I'll do some work trying to overlay the image with a proper fov and see if I can get it closer matching.
But since you guys asked for it, here is the same sculpt with better angles for you to see. I also dialed up the fov to 80 since I think it matches the concept better. That front shot of the concept has some extreme perspective distortion which I like actually.
Oh, and you will see I modified the concept side shot a bit. I think in the concept from the front view her head is tilted way back, but in the side shot its much more front facing. So I tilted the side view back to match the front better.
Most obvious thing that I can comment on right now (I'm at work) is her nose is very different. You've got a concave, kinda broken nose, but hers is actually this kind of distinguished, convex shape. Definitely bring the first indent behind the tip of her nose out, and the bridge of her nose should be out further, too. It's like a soft arc. Tip of her chin could be out a little further, too.
slosh: Come to think of it, I think you are right. I was thinking of attempting to improve on the look in dishonored by using the alpha cards, but it would probably loose that nice stylization they have in the game. I'll go for the chunky look they do first and see where that takes me. Maybe I'll play around with brushes in zbrush, and see if I can just create the hair there. If not, I can always model it out in max. Thanks dude!
Oh, and I'll fix that forhead too. I noticed that I didn't have enough curve going on there just recently actually.
Still just eyeballing stuff, didn't bother overlaying the ref. just yet or moving up in sud-d's cause its just too easy to spot errors still.
Here is where I am at now...
But I'll probably take a stab at modeling the hair first or at least a first pass at it.
After looking closely at the hp model from the game, its clear that the hair was simply sculpted, nothing too fancy.
Was looking up some methods for doing this style and I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIWVqvya8_M
Looks pretty much like dynamesh at a high res and connecting poly tubes as needed. I'll give this method a shot for the hair.
I think the concept is not easy to work from, since the two drawing don't really line up. The artist might have had two photos as a base, but not taken at the exact same time. (You can still see that the head might have been rotated back in the profile to accommodate for this.)
The girl in the concept shows some attitude, which makes it interesting. (Head tilted back, eyes looking "down" which changes the area around the eye socket quite a lot.)
Looking at your head this is kind of present in you front view, but less in your side view, which looks a bit like it had a protruding jaw area.
Noren: yea, I know what you mean about the side view. I'm still not happy with it either. I think the point you bring up about the side ref not matching is a good one. I'm thinking I will move away from the side ref some and just try to make it more aesthetically pleasing. I'll probably use some real world ref. and mesh it together. So I'll def. work on that more, thanks dude!
Been just working on the hair, still adding some pieces here and there. I'm not sure if I went too crazy with the detail, if I should have hinted at stuff more. I tried to mix smaller and larger shapes, but not sure how well I actually did with it. Any advice on that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for all the help everyone so far.
Here is an update...
I started refining the facial planes, changed up some proportions by eye balling stuff, and started to move away from the side concept (instead of just blindly following it).
Next up I want to sub divide this again and start really detailing, and getting some 'A' symmetry in there.
I sub-d her a couple of times and did some detailing. I think I'm gonna do a polypainting pass next.
I feel I'm getting close to having this first sculpt done now, but after polypaint and some more adjustments I still need to do those various facial expressions. Probably gonna be a challenge for me, so lots of work ahead still.
Started working on this again. I wasn't really happy with the likeness of the sculpt before so I reworked a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna possibly do a bit more detailing, but I'll polypaint this next before I do that.
I would tone down those super prominent sternocleidomastoid muscles however (those front neck muscle connectors). They look completely separate from the structure of the neck itself. You should definitely keep the well-defined cleft in the center of the sternum, but the transition into the trapezius muscles might need to be softened a bit.
Rocket Brian: yea I tend to over do the neck muscle in my sculpts all the time, thanks for bringing that up, definitely something I needed to fix.
Here is an update, I apologize for no polypaint yet. I spent a shit load of time really re-working the sculpt again. The problem I ran into was, I found that in some of my last passes I lost the basic shapes and forms of the skull and there were areas just too far off anatomically. I think what happened was I got too into the likness part moving stuff around and forgot about the basic anatomy.
So I reworked the forms, and did a test render in keyshot (this is my first time using that program). It instantly became apparent that my model looked off. I could see all kinds of flaws once in keyshot and it helped a lot actually identifying stuff. The challenging thing here is that the reference has a very strong feeling fov, and in zbrush perspective is all crappy and faked. So I was making changes in the wrong direction back and fourth all the time. So I've been using keyshot as my baseline for matching the sculpt to the reference and I think its looking a lot better now. Anyway, just figured I would explain all this cause its been a really good learning experience for me when handling the wonky zbrush perspective issues.
I also ran a final skin detail pass since they do that in dishonored, and threw in some eyelashes for the hell of it. I probably should flatten out the eyebrows some, but maybe I'll leave it.
Here she is compared to the reference now in keyshot.
and here is the difference in keyshot and zbrush with the exact same fov (look how flat the fov looks in zbrush).
Just did some polypainting and a tad more detailing/tweaks.
I need to retopo this, uvs and do bakes next.
Three things regarding Zbrush and its odd form representation :
- Even if you attempt to match the theoretical FOV and/or focal length of your reference in Zbrush, you are correct in assuming that it will still look off because of the very nature of the brush viewport which is not real 3D. And since you are now relying on Keyshot to double-check all that, then you might as well go all out and actually use another, more traditional package along with Zbrush in order to make broad form adjustments to your lower subdivision levels for instance. Modo, Blender and Mudbox are all valid options, and I think Maya has sculpt tools as well now.
- When in Zbrush, try to *avoid* shift snapping to front view as much as possible. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but even though it is a handy feature it can easily trick you into assuming that you are looking at your model straight on while it might actually be at a certain angle (head tilted slightly forward, or back). I found this to be the main culprit in cases when the look and feel of a model seen from the side doesn't seem to quite gel with the look and feel of the front view - like what you used to have earlier on. This issue seems to happen much less frequently when using sculpting packages which do not have such a snap to view feature.
On top of that, nothing guarantees that the angle of the head in the side view in the reference image is exactly the same as in the pose struck by the character in the front portrait. So, you could try to adjust that side reference image, rotating it a bit if needed. As a matter of fact, I would even say that the nose painted in the front view of the concept art piece (a little bit curled up, like a skinnier Charlize Theron) is not quite matching with the nose represented in the painted side view (straight, like Keira Knightley) so I think there is a choice to be made here. But it looks like you found something cool already anyways
- And lastly, Matcaps don't help either since they flatten everything, and somehow hide surfacing problems.
Good luck ! It's shaping up nicely
Here is where I am currently at now. I built the lowpoly, uvs, and baked everything out. What you are seeing here is just a basic material setup in Marmoset2, with 1 spot light, environment lighting, and baked maps. So there is no spec and no gloss at all yet. Lots of stuff to do still, but I'm happy to finally see this coming together now.
I'll probably start sculpting a few facial expressions soon as I intended to when I started this project. But It should be super simple to bake out the normals for that so I'm not expecting its a huge task really.
Any comments or crtics would be greatly appreciated.
My only crit is the position of the mouth/chin position. Check the concept and you'll see the head is tilted back and the chin sits on the same plane as the brow. You've got the chin further forward rather than following a smooth arc from the forehead, giving her jawline an almost masculine feel (yes, I know she's a lady of the night, but anatomy should still apply here). Pull the chin back so it sits just forward of the base of the nose - leave the upper lip where it is as that protrudes more than the bottom.
imo, as a nitpick i'd add a little bit more obvious brushstrokes on the texture to get that "concept art" look that dishonored was aiming for, also i'd give the render a more "yellowish" tint, right now its aiming more towards red and i think it would help to have some stronger yellow/blue tones in certain zones, specially on the face.
but yeah, those are minor points, looks awesome overall.
riot/PitelinM: Thanks for the crits guys! I'll definetly play with the ligthing more and post processing at the end. The brush strokes idea is actually something I was planning on doing in the beginning of this and totally forgot about, lol. So thanks for reminding me, I did some playing around with it and I'm really digging it! Really happy for that crit!
Quick update, playing around with brush strokes in the albedo. I tried to go heavy with the changes so you could really see it well. Let me know what you guys think.
However, I can see a disconnect with the other materials so I'm gonna see what I can do about simulating this painterly vibe around the whole model. Still have a long list of things to do, but getting closer!
whats_true: I totally agree with you. I'm giving it another pass!
Well given the feedback I attempted to work some more on the diffuse stylized approach. I actually changed it a lot, but its not super obvious. I guess from that first shot so much is in shadow you can't see a lot of it. But when I move the lights around and stuff I notice it is looking a lot better. Sorta been trying to balance the painted light with the model because I want to push the stylized look without totally breaking the in-game lighting.
Also I've been working on facial expressions in zbrush. I'll post that up once I'm further along.
Here is my diffuse at half resolution...
Here is a couple of screen grabs...
BagelHero: Thanks man, that's exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for. I've never done facial expressions like this so I really don't know whats correct. I just had my wife pose and I took pictures at front, 3quarters and side. lol.
Here she is with the lower lip lowered some, and I made the teeth longer so she dosen't have that baby teeth look.
The hair before was decimated and had a really high poly count, and the eye lashes were cylinders from zbrush (now I'm just using a plane with alpha.) So I decresed the poly count a lot with these two optimizations. I also made a low poly teeth and gums and I'm currently finishing texturing that so I can show the lowpoly off with the angry facial deformation.
Also did some more tweaks with the face diffuse, and added a shadow strip under the eyelid and a wet strip on the lower eye lid to simulate tears in her eyes.
List of things to do still...
-stylize the hair diffuse, necklace and teeth/gums with that painterly look.
-sculpt/bake a sad facial expression
-work on final lighting in marmoset and material tweaks.
-I'm hoping to get this working with the marmoset 3d viewer in the end.
-fancy presentation sheets.