• Jlog
  • Contact
  • Characters
  • Concepts
  • Projects
    • Meow Meow Space Force
    • Pitch Jumper
    • Pain In Your Highness
  Jen Melnick​3d Artist and Illustrator

UPDATES

Swamp King Process

2/6/2014

 
This guy started out as a really quick 15 min sketch back in November. I just loved his lips and derpy expression so much that I wanted to see if I could bring him into 3D. When I found out about the Blizzard Character contest I thought it would be a great reason to push his design and really have fun with a painterly texture style. 

Step 1. Concept
Picture
















The initial sketch and a quick 20 min color/light study. I  had a pretty good idea of what colors I wanted him to have so this was a pretty fast process. I grew up always having some sort of freshwater tank in the house and always loved the colorful catfish-type breeds you could get. At first I played around with the idea of him having more muddy colors like a real catfish, but decided that if he was an NPC you were trying to find underwater from a distance, than I wanted you to be able to see specs of color from afar. I didn't want him to totally pop out, but I didn't want him to blend into a watery blue blur.

2. Next I did a very basic body sculpt in Zbrush(render from Maromset):

Picture
I knew I wanted to flesh out a lot of his details with cards and simple geo but I wasn't quite sure how I wanted his tail fin to look; should it be thick or long and flowy? I thought the spikes on his tail in the initial design was a little too much so I dropped them. I saved out this sculpt as a base, and then retopo'd it in zbrush, getting the base body down to about 3k polys.  I also didn't want this to get pushed too far into realism so I held back on a lot of the smaller details; I would fill those in via texture painting. This gave me a good base for the face details to generate a basic grayscale map from a baked normal map that I could use as a paintover guide. 
Picture
Various stages of modeling/retoping between zbrush and maya
3. Uving and building out decor detail geo

After I got the model where I wanted it to be geo-wise, I built out all the extra details and decorations.
 I cut the main body in half, and cut UV seams for how I wanted the geo laid out:

Picture
Geo mirrored, showing the texture seams cut in
4. Texturing
Once I had all the geo laid out I went ahead and started painting in the texture. I started with a flat color laid over the normal map I baked out from the original zbrush sculpt:


From start to finish this guy took me two weeks, working 2-3 hours a day. 

I feel like I'm leaving out a million in-between steps but these are the big chunks of process I used to create this guy. I ended up creating a full map set for him, for more professional renders outside of what was required for the Blizzard contest. The Blizzard version was only rendered out with a diffuse map. This version has a diffuse, spec, normal, and emissive map applied but the same polycount. 
Picture
Tools:
Zbrush 4R6
Maya 2014 student edition
Photoshop CC
Mental Ray
Marmoset 2

Happy Gaming!

Comments are closed.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    June 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013

    Categories

    All
    Baby Felpurr
    Blizzard Art Contest
    GDC
    General
    Goldie Nami
    Illo
    Meowmeow
    Modeling
    Pitch Jumper
    Process Post
    Site Update
    Sketch
    Space Jam
    Spitpaint
    Spitsculpt
    Traditional Sculpture
    Waspydrag
    Zbrush Sketch

Home
​​All Images Copyright © 2011-2016 Jennifer Leigh Melnick.
  • Jlog
  • Contact
  • Characters
  • Concepts
  • Projects
    • Meow Meow Space Force
    • Pitch Jumper
    • Pain In Your Highness