I'm kind of a shy person so I haven't shared any of my work online yet (except for cgc exercises and an unrelated model) but I've started to think it might be productive to share my humble models, textures and some 2d art.
Update time! I started putting even more hours into my work. I can finally say that I'm out of the slump :D Still not working at the level I was during my last project but I'll get there soon.
Different from my first body, I'm emphasizing the muscles more. It looks like a regular body with outlined muscles (No person has glutes this big :D) I'll go over what I've sculpted so far and finish the forearms and the legs tomorrow, get into the feet and the hands the next and then I'll smooth things over.
And time to reveal my side project. It's going to be a hand painted stylized polearm.
I sketched over 30 different polearms (really simple thumbnails) selected a couple of them, sketched variations with more detail, repeated this once again with a smaller sample size and ended with a somewhat disappointing polearm. I kinda threw it away and sketched a new one on top of it. However, this wouldn't be possible without sketching all t he previuos ones :D
I wasn't able to put in everything I want to do (because I suck at drawing) but it's a good first step.
@drgnclw Oh yeah? You haven seen my glutes! Kidding aside, that's a very respectable female anatomy study. Good work. Your polearm is nice design, too. Looking forward to seeing it in 3D!
@drgnclw Your polearm looks great as a concept, I'm also looking forward to seeing it come to life in 3D!
Some more screenshot. I added the rest of the muscles the next day after my last update. I also modeled a base mesh for the polearm and looked into hair particles a bit. Haven't started on the hands or the feet yet.
Muscles on the forearm and the lower leg are kinda weird to sculpt but fortunately, you can't see most of them :D,
Smooth version (Warning! Here be nipples)
And lastly, the polearm. Slightly thinned the shaft. I'll export this out to ZBrush and do the sculpting.
Working on two separate projects and learning a new thing at the same time is kinda exhausting :D
@drgnclw dude, your progress with characters is amazing! I know nothing about anatomy so can't give detailed feedback, but as a noob I think it looks awesome!!
And I love your weapon btw :)
ssmurfmier1985 Thanks!
silentheart00 beefkeef Thank you guys too! I was gonna reply that day but kinda slipped my mind.
It's been a while again. I haven't worked on both my projects since my last post except finishing the hands and the feet of the female body. Instead, I watched Art of Sculpting course because I wanted to take my sculpting a bit further before doing the rest of the character. I didn't want the course to take too much time so I did everything as fast as I could. The skin modifier didn't play along with the hand pose I wanted sculpt so I skipped it (I'll come back to sculpting hands in the future to be more comfortable with them) and I didn't fully finish sculpting a rock because it's just doing the same over and over.
Sculpting hair was kinda tough. I could have done a better job by spending more time on them. The female's eyes are very large. I realized it a bit late and it's a real hassle to scale things in Blender. She's angry at not you but me because I didn't do my best :(
You might have seen that I partly participated in 30 days of modeling with a couple of weapons. I'm gonna be honest I expected a sword day. I even had a picture of a sword I wanted to model for some time. Here's what I've done.
I'm planning on finishing it in a couple of days. It's shadow is upside down because I rotated the image 90 degrees counter-clockwise so that it takes up less vertical space the post.
Now, the news.
A couple days ago someone left a comment under my Man At Arms project on The Rookies saying that he liked my model, he's developing a game with a team of people and he's looking for artists. I talked with him a couple of times and decided to work with them. Even thought it's a volunteer project, I feel like it's a nice opportunity to learn how to work with a team and gain experience in game development. I'll post even fewer posts at least in the near future but I'll try to share whatever I can.
Thanks for checking out my polybook and dropping comments and likes! Hopefully, I'll be back to this thread soon :D
Damn, it's been a long while :D Update time.
I'm not dead. However my vehicle project is. Between it and the game project, I felt like I was working on solving technical problems and doing very little art. So I just ditched to whole thing and decided to work on smaller project instead. At least for a while.
I went through the treasure chest course in a couple of days. Here's my result.
https://cgcookie.com/u/drgnclw/projects/treasure-chest-b77b4aa3-6857-4afc-a1aa-0da70cb4972f
I couldn't help myself and added a sword :D
Update time again. High poly of the first unit I'm doing for that game project I mentioned is done. I'm not immediately going to into low poly and texturing because I need to make a bunch of materials in Substance Designer first. After they're done, I might change around some things. Obviously, materials are placeholders.
9 months since my last post and checking out the forums. I guess it's time for an update. I've been working on that game project I mentioned in my last post and I have made 5 units in total plus some materials for it. I worked on some personal projects and studied anatomy as well during this time and I want to share some of it :D Long post ahead, I guess.
So the game I'm working on is called Fortune's Favor. It's still a volunteer project but we have made considerable progress towards finishing a short playable demo. Broadly, it's an RTS game with some grand strategy elements thrown in. However, it's not without its own twists.
I rendered some stuff quickly in Eevee and brought them together in PS. To keep going from where I left off, The Swordsman.
I used a height map to get some fine wrinkles on the fold but I failed to strike a balance between that and baked details. He's got a shield as well :)
The Cavalryman.
Also needed to sculpt a horse.
The Crossbowman.
Awkward position. No time to rig :D
The Spearman. Face and textures are improved in this one.
And lastly, The Leader. This was the first time I used Marvelous Designer. I ended up using it only for the tunic (manually touched up the sleeves) because of the hard surface elements. Need to get into it a lot more.
The horse was kinda rushed (and the ornate patterns on the fabrics. Didn't really have the time to design our own patterns but they will be designed in the future, though)
Overall, I made a lot of mistakes that kinda bother me but I also learned a ton of things. There's still a lot to try out, learn and do in the future. Currently, I'm overhauling the base mesh I made for the game. I'll share that once it's done. And some of my other work as well. I hope you guys enjoy this long post :D
Time to start catching up with some of my personal work. I got into sculpting stylized busts near the end of last year. I sculpted a bunch whenever I had some time for it. Some have more effort put into them and some less for different reasons but they all were done in a single day. They're just simple screencaps as they're not ready for rendering but that's obviously not the point of these busts :D
The very first one. What is this abomination, you might ask. This is kinda the one that started it all. I was studying facial anatomy back then but I kinda got bored with it. I just fired up ZBrush and sculpted this without any references, plans or caring for the proportions :D I focused on my brush strokes, forms and tried my best to apply what I learned from my studies.
Old man. This one had a bit more planning behind it.
The next day. Went for a rough and mean fighter dude.
A bit more recent. Fat dude.
First attempt at sculpting a stylized woman. Face could use some more curvature and the neck is waaaaay too long :D Excuse the crazy hair.
Tried another one the day after. More effort went into scultping the planes so no paint.
And lastly, my favorite, the merchant. The hat is a medieval hat that I stumbled upon and I really liked. I want to go back to this one and make it render ready :D
All in all, trying out stylized characters was a lot of fun. I'm planning on making a full stylized character this summer.
More or less caught up with my old work here but I should post something more recent :D
I mentioned overhauling the male base mesh for Fortune's Favor and it's finally done. It's not the best but I'm happy with my progress.
I did a very quick polypaint test to see how the face holds up. Nothing serious.
And this is the previous version of the base mesh. I'd say it's a nice upgrade :D I have some studies made before the overhaul. I'll share them next.
Did you purely sculpt the clothes or was some cloth simulation involved for the clothes' base mesh?
Wow. It's been a long time since I've posted anything here. I've been meaning to post some stuff like last month but I didn't. I've been checking out some of the threads here, though. The new human course looks amazing and lots of people working on it. Exciting to see.
A lot has happened since I last posted. The aforementioned game was shelved, unfortunately, due to a bunch reasons. I made around half a dozen more characters for it, though. It was a really fun experience and I learned a ton. I also worked on some personal stuff but I'll get to all of it, eventually.
For today, here's a project I've been working on for the latest ArtStation challenge. It's been a very long while since I finished a personal project of a game ready character :D
Still a few small things to tweak. I also have to prepare some presentation images.
Concept by Juan Caruso
Sorry for the extremely late answer :D Everything on these characters except the tunic of the last guy and quilted fabric wrinkles were sculpted by hand. The tunic was made in Marvelous Designer but the sleeves were heavily retouched due to me not knowing how to integrate hard surface into simulation. I still haven't learned how lol
And the quilted fabric materials were made in Substance Designer so the small wrinkles in those are procedural.
@drgnclw Thank you very much for your explanations 😀! I'm still fascinated by your work and I very much like historic clothing 😀! I've already heard about Marvelous Designer and Substance Designer and I'm wondering what these programs can do what Blender's cloth sims can't do or not as easily the other two programs?
When it comes to clothing it's mostly about ease of use. Cloth simulation is incredibly slow in Blender compared to Marvelous. It's fine for a piece of cloth or a pillow, sure but when you want to make a couple layers of overlapping clothing or something complex like a sci-fi jumpsuit of sorts, it really shows. And probably more importantly, since MD is a specialized software, you can easily measure, draw, adjust sewing patterns in 2d and sew them on your model. So the speed in iteration is not really comparable.
For materials, I have less experience in Blender and from what I've seen it's possible to do incredible looking materials in it like Substance Designer. But Blender has a steeper learning curve and compared to SD it doesn't have the same ease of use. There are also lots of built-in nodes in SD that are flexible and easy to use. Most of these are basically the bread and butter of material work.
To sum it up, MD and SD are specialized software so they are much more convenient for production and really for most artists.
@drgnclw Thank you very much for your explanations about the advantages of Morvelous Designer and Substance Designer compared to Blender 😀!