This is the last Roman Blog. Sadly I have been meaning to do this for a month, but I came down with Covid, and other things took priority.
Anyway here we are! To begin, in the last blog we were left with a t posed model fully textured.
The next step is to prep it for presentation.
Usually unless I need to rig it, for my own portfolio, in Zbrush I will use transpose master, masking, and layers to pose the model. In this case, before hand, I took a video of myself in the various poses. Just to see the best places for where the feet, legs and arms would position naturally. Grabbed stills from the videos, and used them as reference while I slowly posed the model.
I showed this in more detail in my Jinx video tutorial recently, but when posing I usually move a few elements, take it out of transpose, then repeat the process for the next part to move. This is since if you move far too much sometimes the transpose wont transpose due to errors.
With layers to control the movements in transpose, if an element, such as a belt, gets mashed up in the pose, you can turn off a layer or too, till its correct again, and even use a morph and repose.
The final step was to transfer the smoothing info in maya from the t pose to the new posed model since the smoothing is lost in zbrush. Its a bit time consuming, but prevents any odd smoothing after the bake.
After this, I sent the final models into marmoset toolbag in this case, to check the pose at all angles, and test some lighting setups. I then produced some assets to lend weight to the scene. When I had the idea of posing with sitting on a log and holding a torch, I blocked out cylinders to show these elements, but at this stage I modelled them up also and textured them. Since I wasn’t concerned about if the assets had adequate topo, the main focus was the character, I also zremeshed and occasionally decimated to get the low poly meshes I needed for the camp fire and torch.
The only really difficult element, was something I hadn’t tried before. The fire. In the end I textured planes first, checking reference, and then placed them, testing it in marmoset. The flames still weren’t appearing as realistic as I wanted, but what really pushed the fire was twisting and bending the fire elements, so that at all angles there was something pleasing to see, dropping it out of the flat plane look.
The camp fire itself used a emissive I created from the ao, so in cracks and deep shadowy areas of the camp fire the embers would burn, and this jelled well with the fire itself. Making the scene work well together.
Final lighting for all poses, the camp fire, the torch and the standing, I created in separate scenes, using a slight ambience lighting from the sky light, a key, rim etc. and a light or two dotted around the fire itself to give that glow.
Again sorry for the wait for this last part, I became pretty ill (even though it was mild covid) so when out of bed, I just plodded on with modelling, since any real thought, and even composing a blog, was just too much for my wee brain at the time.
you can see the final scenes here -
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/18WkVL
All the best everyone and stay safe, I hope this blog was useful!
Thank you