ArkOfDarkness - Art Bloggin’ From My Noggin

"DeadBeat" - Face Practice

A bit of Face/Hard Surface practice in ZBrush from this past week.
I might actually give this guy a body at some point - I like the concept behind him.
Sorta like a half-dead guy kept alive by a Sound-Weaponizing Exo-suit.

Technical Specs:

A bit more Head Sculpting/Retopo/Texturing Practice.
Sculpting in the wrinkles was pretty fun.

Really pleased with how this one turned out - you can never really go wrong with a creepy clown. (And on a shameless personal promotion sidenote: if you're ever working on a horror game or general spooky project and need a Creature Modeler, hit me up - I live for this stuff!)

This one was also literally painful to make - from base sculpt to retopology to UV's to texturing to rendering, all in the span of a single day.
It was a really fun day, though.

I'm also noticing that I have a bit of a tendency to display exposed esophagi/tracheas in some of the last few models (or at least some form of emphasis on them). So that's a thing I've learned about myself over the past month.

Another new model to add to the heap.
Basically hammered this one out over the last two days. (I'm trying to push productivity to crank out something new each week. Hopefully it'll yield some improvements to speed and quality.)

Polycount: 3,382 Tris
Textures: 2048 x 2048 (Albedo, Normals, Roughness, Metallic, Emissive Maps)

(You ever stop, look at something you've made, and think 'wow. That looks way too good for me to have possibly made it.'? Because that's kind of how I feel when looking at this ZBrush Sculpt Render.)

Alright, so I should probably take a break from the creepy stuff, and work on an actual human character. (Just in ZBrush so far - I haven't started Retopology/UVs/Texturing)

A bit of relevant info to share thus far:

1) They say that you should learn something new with every project.
I have learned that Polygroup By Normals and Polish By Groups are a very powerful combination for getting strong, clean meshes to work off of.

2) Working on creepy faces is far, FAR easier than trying to make a normal or attractive face.
At least with something creepy, the uncanny valley becomes your friend - for a normal human, you have to actively fight against it at practically every step.

3) ZBrush can be very useful for blocking out Basic Colors, but since my focus is on Game/Animation-usable assets, I probably shouldn't try to use ZBrush for much more beyond that - with time, I could probably figure out how to maximize Materials and Rendering in ZBrush, but that time would probably be better spent using a more comprehensive Texture Workflow in Substance Painter, or Rendering in Marmoset Toolbag/Unity/Unreal.
Especially since Material information (Metallic/Roughness/Transparency) can't really be passed out of ZBrush.

So this is basically what 2 days of Sculpting (with breaks and downtime) can get me at the moment.
- I've figured out what it is that bugs me about the face: the Eyes. They're very harsh/piercing. I should be able to fix that during Texturing; soften them up a bit. The neutral/blank expression probably isn't helping much either; that may resolve when the character actually emotes.
- I've also finally found a decent workflow for making Collars/Lapels; Basically, you just use the CurveStrapSnap Brush, Polygroup by Normals to get nice groups, Polish by Groups until you get a clean base and edges, and then you can manipulate the straps into the desired shape.

I also included the concept art. I am definitely not a concept artist.
It is also several years old. (Like 3-4 years old).

And so I finally have it Retopologized, UV'd, and gotten the Texturing to a stage I can be somewhat happy with.
But, I've also been feeling that showing a character model in T-Pose or A-Frame just isn't all that interesting (a basic thing that almost any portfolio critique will mention, but one of the things that is also super easy to overlook or forget)

A full Rig may be a bit unnecessary (although, making a basic human rig would probably be useful for posing additional characters down the line, as well as some animation snippets), so I guess it's back into ZBrush at some point for posing and facial expressions.

ART DUMP TIME
Just a few weapon models that have been lurking in the background for whenever I've had a bit of "I don't want to work on the current project, but I still want to work on something" time.

Another piece of Weapon Practice (I've been hashing out a new Hardsurface Weapon Workflow in ZBrush over the past week, which looks to be much faster and efficient)

Extra example - this one took about 5 - 10 minutes at most. I'll never claim to be super fast, but it's a fair bit more speedy than the previous workflow.

Alright, so it's been a while since I posted more stuff here (almost a month, it looks like) - and I've been using that time to work on a few different projects.

I've gotten what should be most of the bugs worked out of my new Blade Production Workflow, and decided to take the opportunity to try to push my sculpt details to make something fancy.

I'm sort of hitting a bit of conflict as to what should be prioritized next:
I've got a handful of in-progress Characters in various states of "not-done", and literally dozens more that I still want to make.

At the same time, there are also several Prop Model ideas that I've filed away to make in the future, although I know I'll be thinking about the Characters I could be making while working on those.

It's literally like trying to choose between your own children.