Hello everyone, long time no see.

For this post I'll be making a full run-through of my dog character since I haven't had the time to activelly work on writting the blog, I have a very fun project that will be soon be released on kickstarter and I will be posting about it very very soon as long as updates on my fmp brief that's left.

Returning to the matters at hands, as you can tell this character its different... because it's not a character, its a creature! HAZZAH! After some interesting feedbacks I received I was aware that we could actually include creatures in the FMP and I esthoic, live was good yadda yadda, finally a chance to do my creepy crawlies, except they couldnt be too crazy, so I ended up inspiring myself in something grounded, like a zombie dog, and conviniently Resident Evil 2: Remake had just come out and it was a source of great inspiration with those savage puppies running around jumping for your neck, but in order to be different I made sure to choose a different breed of dog as well as changing the design and making some original decisions.

And so it began, a jorney of studying canine anatomy before I could even start sculpting, making sure not to misinterprete anything as I went, as you can see in the image bellow I made sure to exagerate every muscle to get a feeling for the proportions and shape of the breed (Rottweiler).

After having finalized the very basic sketch I proceeded to make a base with some of the details that would be present in the final sculpt and fix the proportions while smoothing the muscles going for a more realistic mood.  

When that was done I added the final steps of the smoothing for the base as well as fixing the head anatomy, which was somewhat tricky to achieve, my method for working around an animal's head is layering it as you would in real life, starting with a very basic bone structure and adding the teeth and eyes, to which I will add levels of muscle and skin after, paying close attention to each individual bit, the challenge being that I need to make sure that each part makes sense and connects to each other properly, the hard part in the design I made was to make the destroyed tissue looked realistic enough and trying to get a reference without going "Oh no, poor doggie..." was surprisingly hard, but that's part of the job and it had to be done.

There are a number of good skinning and bone washing videos on youtube and you'd be surprised on the amount of reference they provide.  

The final step of the sculpt was to polish, ad some unique details and show where each texture would be placed, there were some bits and bobs that could have been better sculpted but since they would be covered by textures in the "game readying process" I decided to not pay too much attention to them, this step is still important as it can help showcase your work and sculpting skills.

 One of the things I made as a extra goal for this brief was to experiment with fibermesh and try to bake it onto the creature, if it is something that I've learned was that less is more, a high density fibermesh will look amazing when rendered but it is not optimal for baking as you're going to have a huge number of lighting errors and the overall look will be too noisy, but after fiddling with it I found a good safe amount and the results were interesting.

Here are some renders of the final sculpt.  

After the sculpt the rest of the process was pretty standard. In the picture bellow you can see the final result with the topology and the textures.  

Overall it was a really interesting project and a breath of fresh air since it's something I am passionate about and would like to work with in the industry, one step closer to my goals.

As always, if there are any questions about the process I am always happy to answer in the PMs.

Sam over and out.

The FMP season has started on full steam, the proposals have been sent and mostly approved, finally this is the beginning of the end.
As a first project, I chose a concept done by the wonderful Naranbataar Ganbold, who very kindly gave me permission to use his artwork as a base.

I started the project by preparing the anatomy, making sure I could get it as close to a mix between a realism and slight stylization of the forms and shapes, in the picture below you can see a quick WIP of the character as I am currently working on the final sculpt that'll be shown (hopefully) very soon.

The sculpt tends to be the part of the project that I enjoy the most and, although there are still some parts I am not happy with, there is much more to boast about (imo). It was the first time that I used Zmodeler for example, and I am happy with the result so far, there are some armor pieces that I need to rework on, but the more I work towards "perfection" the more delayed I get on my schedule.

Zmodeler is an amazing tool and I suggest it deeply to anyone that is as stubborn as I am about using other modeling software to go and learn it out, it helped me immensely to block out all of the armor and cloth pieces in the character, it's simple and easy to use.

The next step of the project (after finishing the sculpt will be to lay out the alpha cards around the hair and fur area of the character, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

There is a lot of tweaking to do still and time is of the essence.

Sam Over and Out.

PS: Please check Naranbaatar's work if you haven't already, he is a great artist. (https://www.artstation.com/naranbaatars)

This post is overdue but better late than never.

It has been a really busy last three weeks, and it is safe to say that this projects had many ups and a whole lot of downs. The weeks were well structured and I followed the plan as closely as possible, but during the final stretch of it, there were some technical difficulties that hindered the speed of its completion.

The second week was focused on creating the retopology and unwrapping the character. it was a quite straightforward workflow and I didn't find anything hard in particular, the result was clean and functional as you'll be able to see in the marmoset player at the end of this post. Although it is far from perfect, I have learned a lot and many of the problems I encountered had to do with issues on the high-polies.

After completing the unwrap, my next step and what would be related to my third week of the plan that was to create materials in substance designer, something I wasn't too familiar with so I made sure to take enough time to learn and get acquainted it. I ended up creating five different textures which I am happy with overall, with the exception of one, the sugar material.

The sugar material was the first one I decided to tackle, the idea was to simulate a sugar cube, the biggest issue I had with it was trying to replicate the feel of shiny sugar grains along the shape and give a sparkly look to the character's main body as long as helping understand the hardness of it, eventually as I went with the project I decided to make a one-eighty and figured a different approach and used a different kind of material for the body.

The second material I decided to work on was a burnt crusty marshmallow so I could make some accents in the character and give the feeling of "burning rage" to him. This one was tricky, trying to get the flaky shape and the weird lumps and colors seemed like a big challenge, after some thought I remember a tutorial that made a material resembling intestines and studied it, the basics of Substance Designer started to seep into me and I understood what I had to do to get certain shapes and effects, I do have a long road to go still, but I like to think of this as a beginning of a fun relationship with the software.

After finishing the burnt marshmallow I needed to create an actual marshmallow, this one was quite easy compared to the burnt one, no tricky shapes, just needed to look at a marshmallow and try to mimic the feel of it, I think I nailed it, but like everything I do, I know that it will only get better with time.

The final two materials that I had left to work with went as the marshmallow, the fondant material (the purple one) was the simplest one, basically a color with a matte-ish material. The melted lollipop material was a little bit trickier as I had to work with opacities and glossiness and whatnot, the lollipop material ended up looking as good as I could make with the time I allocated to it, it might not be the best looking melted lollipop, but it is far from the worst.

After completing the materials, came the time to texture the character. I wasn't so happy with the design of it anymore and failed to see how it would relate to anger after a while, so I made sure that before I got into the workflow I would get some solid critique from the tutors. In doing so I realized after that, indeed, my design had some weird choices, as you can see below.

The mustache, although comical enough, had no purpose and the idea of melting sugar wasn't present except in some specific places, after a paint-over done by one of my tutors, I felt like the art juices got unclogged and I went back to the sculpting part and retweaked some parts, and I was a lot happier with the result.

Here you can see the final result:

  As always, if my dear readers find anything interesting and would like to know more about anything, feel free to contact me.

I will be diving in my next project very soon and hopefully one I will have even more fun than this one, until then.

Sam over and out.

So, as the days went by I was trying to speed-sculpt and improvise the look I was going to give to my geisha, I really had no base and was grasping for ideas here and there, which ended up giving me the following look.

I felt it was very weak and it had some anatomy problems as well as the general idea just not functioning, at first the "hair" would be a fish bowl with biomechanic koi fishes swimming in and the outfit (which I hadn't even started to model) was just too ambicious for the short time we had to model. I had no guidelines of material, shapes or whatever, which after some feedback I recognized as my first mistake.

After taking a hard look at it and swallowing a big chunk of pride I started to focus on gathering solid reference and concepting. I had to re-think every aspect of the project. I began by choosing a style I could identify this design in and have materials in consideration, I remembered the interesting designs Warframe has and how it actually could fit the aesthetic, the material was an easy part, I instantly imagined the difference between the soft and hard parts, comparing it to a beetle and how they have this pearlescent look to their carapace and a mix of gold and traditional blue silk, the picture started to form in my head thanks to these quick reference gatherings.

The next step was make a quick easy to read concept, I started by taking some screenshots of the character in and ortografic sequence and thought about the parts that would be important to concept so I could spend as little time as possible.

The drawing was easy, and even though it is not the greatest of concepts, it gave me a huge lift in motivation and inspiration and allowed me to improve greatly the quality of my sculpt. 

For the sake of continuing the blog and keeping some suspense (even though people might not be reading) I'll hold on to the new sculpt until it is slightly more finished, in which I will make a comparison of the sculpts side by side.

Hopefully by the end of this first project, these sequences will also help some people who might be stuck the same way I was.

Sam over and out.