Red Skull - Sculpt Finished

I figure there's not a whole lot more to cover about this character so this blog post will just be a collection of quick snips from each subtool. Tomorrow I'm going to start retopologizing this guy and hopefully get some quick bakes done before the end of the day. The deadline for this project is the 4th of November so I guess I'm in okay shape to finish it before that date.

The boots. I'm going to make the laces using deformers in Maya.
The shoe sole is a separate subtool.

Jodhpurs; horse riding pantalons.
Belt and buckle are separate subtools.

Front view in perspective mode.
I'm still considering adding a tongue and teeth.

Arm. Center image is isometric.
For the hand I used my previous sculpt and made it skinnier; as if burned and then healed.

The face. Might still add a little more volume to the cheekbone and eyebrows.

The belt and buckle. Spent very little time on this.

The back muscles. I'm pretty proud of this area.
It took a lot of iterations to get some of those muscles right. Very undefined area.

Overal feel of the character.

Kind regards,
Pim

Red Skull - Face & Tweaks

Since my last update there's been a small holiday combined into a lot of work spent on my Houdini project and documentation; something I might upload in the near future but for now that stays under the radar. It's far from finished and it looks like nothing yet. This is one of those things that either looks awesome or doesn't look like something at all.

Overal feel of the character so far.

I finished the lower arms and interior of the upper arms together with some reworked on small details in the abdomen area. If I have time left after doing the final pass over the body and rework the details in that I will spend more time on the pants. Right now they just don't feel like actual floppy, puffy pants to me. Can't put my finger on it entirely. Perhaps the issue is fixed once I push the folds inside the boots.

Arms.

The wrists still look a little thin to me. They're lacking volume and some muscle definition. I'll add that once I'm happy with the face and head. Also, please notice I am not trying to go for hyper realism; something I showed in my first post about this character. It was done very well by 3D Total and I'm trying to move away from that.

Face front and side.

This is my progress for just today. I downloaded a regular skull from some website but found it to be anatomically inaccurate so I ended up using the 'averageman' skull from Zbrush. I was planning on using it anyways but I felt there were some inconsitencies about it. The eye holes seemed out of proportion compared to the zygomatic and the chin. Regardless, I used it as a placeholder to shape up my body mesh and continue sculpting from there. So far I've been able to add detail using only the subdivision levels I already instigated for the mesh body. Tomorrow I'll give it it's own layer and continue adding more details.

Head without flow into the body.

Will fix the flow of the skull and it's muscle-ly texture tomorrow. Will sleep first and look at it with fresh eyes.

Kind regards,

Pim

Red Skull - Pants & Boots

Simply updating my work on the Red Skull sculpt. I'm following two other pretty intensive courses so progress is much slower than I would like it to be. Regardless, I fixed most of the symmetry in the body. Right now I still need to fix the lower arms and the head. I'm thinking about using the basic skull featured in the default Zbrush sculpt "AverageMan". It has a great topology and it features no muscle structure whatsoever. Exactly what I need for my stylized version of Red Skull.

Felt like going for a different shader this time.

I've been working on the pants a lot which are almost finished. The folds are pretty much done, though they still need to fold into the boots which will cause more folds. Rinse and repeat.

Close up of the pants and boots.

The boots are a work in progress as the tongue doesn't make much sense yet. I found that Red Skull is illustrated with use of many different footwear. Either the illustrators or Red Skull himself must be very aware of trending boots ;). In any case, I didn't like many of the different shoe and boot designs he was drawn with so I figured I'd combine some of the concepts and work them into a boot I actually did like. Below are the three design I liked best. All three are pretty similar to boots that already exist though I think actually drawing them significantly helped me visualize them more accurately in 3D.

Three preferred boot designs.

As you can see from the first two I decided to make the last boot of the three. As for my reasoning; even though (Ultimate) Red Skull has taken the cloned body of Captain America in the comics I found the first boot too 'American' and too "in your face" for the passive aggressive style Red Skull applies to his tactics. The second boot looks too much like actual Nazi shoe wear; something I am actively trying to avoid. It's not that I don't like the Nazi boot; quite the opposite actually. It's just that 3D Total's rendition (to be found in an older blog post or simply Google it) features the same kind of boots and I want my version of Red Skull to be viewed and judged independently.

Kind regards,
Pim

Red Skull Character Sculpt

I picked up on the character sculpt from a little while ago. I believe it was the 6th of September when I touched Zbrush for the real first time and I've consistently felt more and more comfortable using it to the point where I'm right now (read; I feel very comfortable with my tablet).

Today I worked on getting my Dynamesh sculpt from the bulky mess it was to a well structured and well proportioned mesh in which I am using polygroups and various new materials I had the privilege of receiving from a fellow student.

My progress for the day.

The back has given me so much more trouble than I anticipated. For every muscle I blend in another feels awkwardly posed; continue this pattern until you find a compromise. Tomorrow should offer enough time to fix the back and get started on the legs. I'll be replacing the stumps at the end of each arm with an opened version of the hand I created earlier.

Also, after playing some pool I decided to snip some screens and paint over them using other reference than I've been using today so maybe I could figure out why some shapes were bothering me more than others. Results are below.

Kind regards,
Pim

Hand game model

Today I baked the normal, cavity and ambient occlusion map using Xnormal and fixed some of the losses of volume in the hand when I rebuilt it in Maya. After a visual comparison I decided the maps would do and I continued to polypaint my Zbrush model.

During polypainting I found that using the standard brush left me unsatisfied with how the skin looked. It resembled the material definition of a plastic bag pulled over -in this case- a hand. So I changed brush to the ClayTubes brush and started applying a 'van Gogh'-like way of texturing; continuously softly hitting my tablet. The results were way better.

Comparing volumes.
Left model: 1.8k tri's | Right model: 2,000k tri's

Results of polypainting.

I used different functionalities within Zbrush and various programs to export my polypaint to a texture map and found that using the GUV tool in the UV Map menu worked best and most stable. It creates a temporary UV set for the high resolution model which you can use to project the polypaint to. Then flip the vertical vector and export. After that add it to Xnormal and bake the base texture. Voilá.

Mental Ray render.

I'll be working with Houdini FX for the rest of this week.

Kind regards,

Pim

ps. Video made in Marmoset Toolbag to retain the 'game' aspect of the model.

The artifact is something I get when I record 1/1 using the Marmoset video recorder.

1/2 fixes it though, but the resolution is cut in half.

Hand sculpt finished

I finished up on the sculpt this afternoon and started playing around with Zremesher but found it frustrating to work with. The Zcurves are a wonderful thing but they produce a model with strangely circling edge loops that run across the entire length of a cylindrical object (like the fingers and wrist). Although I tried many times to add more Zcurves to get rid the spirals they persisted on even the lowest polycounts. It also gave me uneven rows on the front side of the fingers that ended up with ugly triangles causing light to bounce off at an unnatural angle.

Finished hand sculpt at around 1 million triangles.

Deciding which polycount would retain the silhouette best.
Left to right; 1.2k to 4k triangles.

So what I ended up doing was importing the high poly model at a few levels lower and constructed a mesh around it using Maya 2013. Below is the finished low poly model. It's around 1800 triangles; well within the polygonal limit for this assignment.

Kind regards,
Pim

ps. added picture for Zcurves (maybe I'm doing it wrong)

Sculpting a hand (continued)

Decided to continue working on the hand I presented in my previous blog post.

I was working with dynamesh but since  more control = more better, I decided to work with detail levels. So I ran the model through Zremesher (also to clean up some of the triangles; they were giving me a hard time). Then sculpted over the entire surface to increase muscle tension, tendons and pointy bone structures. And finally cleaned it up.

Right now I'm still not entirely satisfied with how the proximus phalanx of the thumb connects with (close to) the wrist in the fourth picture. The bone seems to have a weird angle there. Will fix soon.

I haven't made any progress on the big guy but as soon as I finished this one I'll continue with that.

Kind regards,
Pim