Modelling!

 

First, we blocked out our creatures in blender then brought them over to Zbrush to sculpt them. This was incredibly daunting as I had never used Zbrush before, and learning a new software is hard! I moved and sculpted on to my creature to give it a better base shape, and started looking at the muscle structure of quadrupeds like dogs and large cats. I found some anatomical 3D models on Sketchfab and used these to plot out where my creature’s muscles would be. Looking at these muscle diagrams I added more shape to my creature, and then started trying to figure out how best to approach the back plates.

 

 

Initially, I masked the plates I already had from my blocking and tried to use some of Zbrush’s functions to fit them along the creature’s body, but I couldn’t make this work very well visually. I decided to smooth out the plates I had done in blocking and sculpt out a plan of where I wanted the new plates to go, then masked and extruded them via the mask. After some adjusting and some duplicating of some of the pieces that didn’t need as much variation, the creature was plated and looked good! I used this masking method for the nails and dots along the body as well.

 

 

While working, I watched a few videos of how people in the industry work, their process and how they bring their models to life. It was informative seeing how people who have been doing this much longer than I have do things. Seeing other peoples’ final models is always very inspiring too, I especially loved a polar bear model I found, and looking into the models from games I already play.

 

I kept on running into issues with holes appearing on my model in Zbrush, which I was using the most convoluted method to try and fix until I was shown the “patch holes” button in one of the menus. All part of familiarising yourself with a new program! I spent a lot of time at this stage just tweaking little bits, subdividing, remeshing etc until I was happy with the basics of the creature. I then added a few subdivisions and started on detailing. Wrinkles in the skin, scales and rough textures, defined eyes and nostrils, spikes and bumps on the plates as Henry suggested to make it look more natural. This stage took the most time as admittedly I was still struggling with the program and understanding what to do next. I had missed some classes due to my hospital visits and poor mental health this semester, which really impacted my understanding, but thankfully between the videos and guidance in class I had a high res and low-res model ready to export. I brought the models into blender, resized them and unwrapped the low-res model. I had used Zbrush’s automatic retopology which turned out to be flawed, and had I had more time I would have gone back and fixed it manually, but I was too worried about accidentally messing up the models or process that I used the low-res topology as it was.

 

Texturing!

 

 

I ran into an issue when texturing! After baking the high-res model onto the low res, I noticed the light wasn’t behaving correctly with the dots on the creature. After some looking around online, I found a YouTube video on how to manually paint a new ambient occlusion map. I followed the video, and it seemed to work, so I textured the rest of the creature. I used various recoloured stone textures and, in some instances, added a paint layer to add more variation and detail to places like around the edge of the plates and down the legs. I made sure to turn down the roughness in places like the eyes and inside of the mouth, as these places were wet and so needed to be shiny, and carefully painted a lighter colour around the fleshy front face of the nose. While painting, I used lower opacity brushstrokes to make the additional colours blend more smoothly into the colours around them, except for the scar on the first creature’s nose, which I kept as hard colour. This part was actually very fun, as I got to see my creature slowly come together, and painting these slight variations really made it seem less flat and boring compared to the original unpainted base colours.

 

 

When satisfied, I decided to try and bring the textures into Unreal rather than to blender, as I had textured in blender before and wanted to try something new. I loaded up an empty level in Unreal Engine and watched through the video on Blackboard about exporting from Substance to Unreal. It went very smoothly! I had to adjust the roughness by adding a Multiply when plugging in the texture maps, but I thought it looked good.

 

 

 

 

Posing!

I didn’t know if I could texture already posed models like this however, so I decided to do some experimenting. I had an idea for what I wanted my scene to be. Initially I had wanted to show the creature blocking off its den with its tail, but I was conscious of time and honestly, had no idea how to show that effectively. I might make it in blender once I have my assignments submitted, but I thought for the sake of our current task I would do a simpler scene instead. Two creatures, having a standoff over some fruit left abandoned by a bag at a mining site. Rocky desert mesa, a camp and some pickaxes, some left out food and two hungry territorial animals. So, to start posing them! I made three poses in total, two fighting stances and one of a creature leaning down to investigate the food, but I decided to stick with the first two.

The first creature is ducked, low, defensive, and ready to react if the new arrival tries to take the food it had found. The second, a smaller, younger animal, was rearing up slightly, trying to make itself look bigger and threatening, trying to gauge the situation and whether or not this fight is worth the risk. I decided to resize the models slightly to show that these two are different ages and to add more visual distinction between them. Now that the posing was done, I applied the pose and brought the smaller one into Unreal Engine to see if the texturing and posing could be done in this order, and it worked! So, knowing this, I went back to substance and tweaked the older creature’s colouration somewhat, adding darker colours around the plates and back legs, as well as some injuries from previous fights, and a cracked plate on its back. I brought them both into Unreal Engine and so it was time to start the environment!

Relevant Links-

https://skfb.ly/oCJTp

https://skfb.ly/oNuJV