3D - Finishing up

This is my last blog post for this course I've been taking. I'll talk about the creation of my wolf, how it turned out and some final thoughts. Last post I presented my character background and I will now show you what I've done and how it turned out. This was quite a challenge and a brand new experience seeing as it is my first time making an animal.

My first goal was to get the overall shape of the wolf right. I did this by modeling a low poly directly from the concept turnaround by placing it as a plane. The concept turnaround wasn't perfect since the wolf is in a walk cycle and some parts aren't properly lined up. Nonetheless it still is an awesome concept and there's no need to get picky. My main concern was getting the proportions right. When working with organic recognizable creatures such as humans, dogs or cats it's hard to get things right anatomically. Since everyone knows how these look, anatomical faults stands out more. When designing fantasy looking one often tends to exaggerate on certain parts. I had to make it look believeable and still retain the exaggerations of the concept.

The low poly turned out pretty okay for a rough prototype. I made the decision to make a hipoly model in zbrush to try and capture that feeling of authenticity. This was a very time consuming process because this also required me to retopo the model after I was done. I started by just sculpting around in Zbrush to try and find some nice shapes and just refine things.

After playing around for a while I decided it was time to start checking references. I put in a lot of time into the high poly and I constantly alt tabbed to check my references. I would look up things like: "Wolf muscle anatomy", "Wolf paw" and "Wolf profile". I had originally designed a moodboard but I found that my current moodboard was not enough so I googled search like a madman for the entirety of the high poly. One of the big challenges for this model was the fur which I will talk more about later on but when I modeled the high poly I did so with in mind that fur would come on later in the process. I basically modeled the high poly without fur which helped me in modeling the muscles. Since all the reference pictures I looked up were of wolves with thick fur it was hard to find what was underneath all that fur, I had to fill in a lot of empty spaces with my imagination.

Here's the final high poly with some basic poly paint applied to it.

Here's the moodboard of pictures I collected in the pre-production phase

Great, the high poly is completed and now it's time for retopo in 3Dcoat. This was also a time-consuming phase seeing as I wanted to get a good edge flow. I thought I could save time by relying on Zbrush's Zremesher or 3Dcoat's Autopo making the low poly for me but this was what took up the most time. I spent several hours just configuring and trying different things with both programs and I never got good results. I figured it wasn't working out for me so I started doing it manually in 3Dcoat using strokes which is f*cking awesome. You can really plan your edgeflow with 3Dcoat's strokes. So I did some retopoing and I ended up with a pretty neat edgeflow.

Here's how I worked with the strokes function in 3Dcoat, really liking it.

The finished low poly.

Although I liked the edge flow and the retopo I was shocked to find out that I was way over poly budget. Originally I had intented for roughly 2000 tris for the body and the rest on fur and eyeballs, the target was 3000 tris on the finished model. I was already having about 2600 tris on the main body, before the fur and eyeballs were added but there wasn't time enough to change anything so I decided to work with it. The UV mapping on the body went pretty smoothly and there's not much to say about that. I baked the poly paint, normal and lighting information from the high poly now which makes up for my texture.

Low poly, UV mapped and textured

Now for the thing that I struggled with the most, the fur. This was really, really difficult for me. The plan was to use lots of planes, alpha and a good texture to make the fur. I was already running out polys so I didn't really have much to work with. One thing I noticed was that doing fur is really hard. I experimented so much on the fur. Trying different planes from different angles with different textures. I just couldn't get it right and time just ran out. I had to send in an unfinished product which saddens me. I think I have a solid construction but I'm working towards a deadline and I must deliver on time even if it's not finished. So in the midst of all the fur experimenting I had to wrap up and settle on something. I'm dissatisfied with the end result and I know I have a lot more to offer than this. Not everything was shit though, the high poly and the edge flow of the low poly turned out good. I think I captured the organic feel I was going for, it doesn't look completely shit.

All in all I've learned invaluable lessons from these past two assignments. I need to adjust my scope and prioritize better. In these both assignments I've spent way too much time on the high poly when there's not much time available and that's something I will take into consideration for my next model.

So what about the course? This is probably the last post about this 3D I course and I want to talk a little about it. This course has been amazing, my teacher has been amazing and all my fellow classmates have been amazing. Some of my classmates have never used 3D prior to this course and they've worked really hard and produced amazing stuff. I believe everyone have supported eachother really well and the atmosphere has been great overall. As an aspiring 3D artist I have grown over these past 10 weeks and am now stronger than ever. This was all for this course and I hope you'll be reading my blog in the future.