The first thing I did was take a look back at my prop textures.
I wanted to take a look at other types of leather to see if they looked better. I knew I wanted the leather texture as in Hotel Transylvania they do use nice bumpy textures and it adds to the interesting texture of the statue as a whole. I liked the different leather textures together, but I wasn’t sure that having three different textures was the right idea, since simplicity is key for this style.
I went and asked other what they thought, and the majority agreed that having variety worked best an so, the next question I asked myself was, how do I make this fit better into the Hotel Transylvania style and I know that what I ended up with isn’t perfect but I did go through a lot of experimentation before settling on this idea. I had tried a lot of different approaches, like putting my base colours through a filter to change the stylisation or blurring them out and these didn’t fit right. So, I ended up using the lizard scale texture on my red book to only come through the height, and used a separate layer to make the texture itself. I came across this as a solution when looking at reference images from the movies and seeing the variety of items in the background, in particular the roof tiles inspired this as they had the height of slate but not the intricate texture. Then to reduce the noise of the blue book I just removed the materials effect on height, doing this also helped how the texture looked laying on the sides. While this still doesn’t look exactly like it would fit in the movie it does look better than my initial version.
With these textures all done I went back to finalise my Mothman. I went and reduced the metallic quality of the jumper because it was coming out too strong. I then went ahead and added my baked lighting on him as well to create some nice subtle shadows and highlights, and I paired this with some shadows I painted on using the blur filter to diffuse them and I had to use the 2D view to paint these in the harder to reach areas.
I also made the inside of the shoes black here, since before it had a too obvious cut off with the leg into the foot.
Then I went back into Blender and went to finalise my posing by using the grab tool to adjust any warping that happened and give some exaggerated facial expression to my character. I brought one eyebrow up and one way down adjusting the eyelids to match. I also grabbed the moustache up a bit but looking back at this now I could have really over emphasised this.
I then adjusted the wings, as they were clipping into the crossed arms. The height difference on the back was unintentional but I actually kind of like it because they eyes mirror a similar posing to the Mothman’s face. I also adjusted the neck fur after to plump it out again after some adjustment to the wings shifted it.
I then also did some minor adjustments to the arms and sleeves.
With this the posing was complete. Looking back at it now I do really think I could have pushed this a lot further, but I am still proud of how how he looks.
I did one last pass on the Prop texture by adding some page texture to the writing book, just to break up the plain colour, I adjusted the sides individually using a triplaner project and rotating so it lay correctly. I did try to paint in the lines of these and they weren’t coming out how I wanted, so the page texture and a low opacity worked fine.
SKETCHFAB
I could have kept adjusting this over and over, but I wanted to stop criticise over every small detail and decided to upload it to Sketchfab.
When I had initially brought my texture maps in I realised that I went a bit overboard with the opacity on my wings, so I had to increase the amount this had. I am happy that the opacity map worked in Sketchfab and am excited to use this website to post more work in future.
With this sorted, I went to set up some lighting. I was impressed with the presets for this but I went ahead and made my own lighting, since I knew I wanted this statue to be warmly lit from the back. I had a lot of fun trying to get these lights to what I had imagined.
I noticed after sorting out my post processing I had these lines going over my model. I went and checked over my texture maps and I couldn’t see anything wrong with them, it actually took me a while to find out that it was my shadow bias that had caused it so I went and turned this off since the shadows fit nicely without adjusting it.
Then after a while of thinking over if it was good enough I just decided to publish it. I can quite confidently say I put my all into this and am happy with the final result. There are obviously some issues with the model, like with the textures and the sculpting, there are definitely a lot of improvements I could make but I really enjoyed my time making him and I think that I was able to improve on my critiques from my first assignment. I could definitely have brought both of these into substance painter together as an FBX and texture them that way but this is something to keep in mind for the future.
