Project

 We were asked to model a production-ready hard surface and an organic character for the final assessment. 

For my character, I wanted to go with a female warrior concept and for my hard surface, I went for something more specific like a food stall, based on that, I started looking for references for the concept art on Artstation and Pinterest.

By

Anna Maystrenko

Artstation- https://www.artstation.com/lagunaya

I finalised this concept for my organic model. I chose to do this because I found it to be more challenging for it was non-human and even my Professor agreed. It has unique watercolour paint textures and also supported my previous theme of wanting to go with a female warrior character. I was especially curious about modelling the head which was non-human with the fins and the shape.

(Images taken from Google, Art Station and Pinterest)

I compiled different reference images to help with the accuracy and create something using them all as concept art. 

MODELLING

CHARACTER-

I poly-modelled the entire character from scratch in Autodesk Maya but instead of using the concept art, I first decided to use another reference image for modelling the body before I made it adapt to the concept.

I used the above to create a simple low poly base mesh and then added more details such as the hands, fingers, feet, etc. Then late came the head which I created by moulding and sculpting it from the base mesh to the character in the concept art. The fins on the head were a bit difficult to understand and get around especially with just the front view available however when I went back to the artist's Artstation page, I found a couple of images of the character from a different perspective. This helped me to model it more accurately. I decided not to add too many finer details as I wanted to bring them out and enhance them through texturing.

The above image is a clay render of the character using the aistandard surface

HARD SURFACE-

For the hard surface model, since I wasn't following a specific concept art, it was a bit more challenging but it also gave me more freedom to create something that was not confined to one single concept. However, for this project, I wanted to go for a miniature stylized theme with several different smaller props. But I had to keep in mind to keep it minimalistic and make it a prop and not an environment. Here, I noticed there was a very thin line between making it look like a prop and not an environment. To ensure that, I modelled the Ramen stall and added very few supporting smaller props and made the whole thing look like a prop. I wanted to just add enough small props to keep it from taking away from the model as a whole prop.

And just like for my character, I wanted to leave finer details out so that they can be better enhanced through texturing.

The above image is a clay render of the character using the aistandard surface

TEXTURING

CHARACTER-

For texturing the character, I used Substance Painter as required and for that, I first exported the character from Maya as an OBJ. When bringing it to Substance Painter, I made sure that I chose the PBR metallic roughness template and changed the document resolution to 2048. I also changed the Normal Map Format to OpenGL.

For the look of the character, just like I mentioned earlier, I went for the watercolour paint effect and manually hand-painted the highlights and shadows. I used the Curvature and Ambient Occlusion baked maps to help accurately enhance those highlights and shadows.

 

HARD SURFACE-

For texturing the Ramen stall, I first created my own wood smart material by using directional dirt, cloud brush and blur slope. The rest of the props didn't have many details because I wanted to keep them true to my initial idea of giving them a slightly weathered and scratchy stylized look.