Rebel Hill

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So I decided to have a lil bash at knocking out some creature type thing..... dunno why really, just got the idea in my head to do so, boredom probably.

Anyhow, so here we have the start, as with most of my character meshes these days, we have a mesh imported from makehuman, adn this is the base mesh as it first comes into LW. Ive messed around as best I can to get something near to a beginning for where Im trying, or thinking of heading to, though MH is pretty..... restrictive.

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So heres the result after some tuggin about in LW, bit of dragnet, bit of pole, etc. starting to knock the shape away from uhman and more over to creature. Also theres some spinning of edges, and some bandgluing of point and poly loops to address certain areas of flow for later on.

Gettin well lumpy though by this point, guh.

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Finally got round to getting it into ZBrush and givin a lil love. Smoothness, and much more shaping, gettin the lil fella more towards what I had in mind at the start. Next step, back into LW, and some further mesh work, bandgluing and sawing, and a healthy dose of FIs Wrinkle methinks.

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A bit further along after some more detailing and smoothin of the flow in LW. Think Im just needing a band or two more round the eyeids to define that area, then detail out the lips some, and the base model should more or less be ready, then its onto all the other fun stuff.

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Couldnt resist slapping a quick skin shader on him just to see how its playing out so far. I often get bored, or maybe too used to looking at the same OGL view of a model whilst working on it, so I find it helpful to cobble together a quick surface and do a couple renders to get a better idea of how the model is gonna look towards the end of the process.

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So done with the modeling, heres onto laying out the UVs for it. As you can see, reasonably clean, a bit of distortion here n there, mainly noticable on the shoulders, but overall no biggie.... I think it should play just fine given the limited use Im gonna be puttin this fella too.

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And heres the result after some preliminary work in ZB, getting a lot more rugged and so on now, and starting to take on a lot of detail.... some may say its overdone in some places, and this might well be true... However, my tendancy with ZB is to overdo things just a lil on the displacement... and then later modulate it in LW with weightmaps... I find this gives me a greater freedom with getting the displacement just so.

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And heres part way through th finer detailing in ZB... doo, de, doo, dum, dum.

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So there I was, ZBing away quite happily... getting almost done, when I thought to myself, "better pull it back to LW to make sure its all playin nice"... and only then did I realise that due to my unrivalled genius, Id managed to cock up my UVs somewhere in my obj export/import thing.

So I had to go back, re-export the main mesh, and start ZBing again. Luckily this time I got it right, and, tbh, I was kinda glad of the second chance to do the sculpting, and think I got a better final result.

So heres the final sculpted displacement mesh for normal and displacement map generation. Im gonna add some finer detais in later with a bit of bump using good ol PS, and then final details with some procedurals, and there we go.

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Seeing as I'm just working on this as pretty much a single purpose image/mesh, I tend to get things set up in parallel to one another, so at the same time as Im working on detailing and texturing the character, Im also working on the set, the lighting, and test rendering as I go.

So here is the basic setup of the scene, with a basic pose put in, just mushing the mesh about with a few simple bones. Since theres no animation, theres no full on rig, and the finer points of deformation will be ironed out in modeler toward the end.

On show also is the basic lighting, and surfacing... no radiosity, no special shaders (SSS and the like), my basic philosophy being, get it looking as good as u can with just the basics... then when u add all the bells and whistles, it should really sing.