I started my texturing process with the stainless steel tabletop. I used a combination of two steel textures as well as edgewear masking and adjusted the parameters for both. The second steel texture used a fractal sum colour which created better variation in the material and less flatness. I used the materials for the small tool table and the tools also.
  

For the table base I wanted to break up the steel materials by using a painted metal material. 

I added an edge wear using mask editor to create a specked effect.

So I needed to do another bake of this table as I found that the cable was baking onto the base of the table, and the handle of the hose was baking onto the nozzle. This was just a case of moving the objects in Max and then reimporting the models and rebaking them.

I added some leak grunge and edited the roughness and metalness values of the paint. I also added in a gradient mask.  

For the buttons I used green and red plastics and a band of metal paint around the edge.
I experimented with the materials on the table legs, I didn't really like the red paint but I liked the type of material.

So instead I toned down the colour of the legs.

I used height and a darker colour to texture the drain.

For the headrest I experimented with titanium, but I didn't like the brightness of it compared to other objects in the scene which were noticeably a lot darker.

 I instead used a dark steel texture with edge wear.

I added a similar wear to the metal painted handle of the hose and the grip areas of the scalpels for more visual interest.

I used a dark wood for the handle of the saw and added a bit of blood to one of the scalpels that would be used for a Y section.

To make the blood I layered filters like the blur and used a cloud grunge to create organic swirls in the tones. 

 I used a rubber material and edited the parameters to get the correct level of wear.

 These are my final table textures! Next I will be moving onto fixing my character.

At this point in the project, I was experiencing a lot of technical issues, particularly with the body. I was unable to work with the model as my softwares kept on crashing, and I was really struggling to make the deadline. As a result, I spoke to my tutors who gave me an extension for the project over christmas. I am pretty disappointed that I couldn't get it ready for the formative assesment, so I gave in what I had in the form of my 3ds max file. I will continue to work through these issues as well as I can becuase I'd like to deliver a great final outcome.

I unwrapped the body by main limbs, which was relatively straightforward.

I made sure to be as efficient as possible, and filled up the spaces around objects with the teeth and nails. I also put the stakes and tag into this sheet as I consider them part of the character.

Table sheet

The bake for the table was simple enough, I assigned thre materials to my scene: one for the character LP, one or the table material and one for the tools unwrap.

I needed to raise the objects on the table a bit more to prevent these AO issues from reoccuring.

Same goes for the hose.

So I went back into the scene and raised the tools and moved the hose object away from the table, then re-exported and rebaked.

I did a 4K bake with antialiasing 8x8.

So I went back into Zbrush and used polygroups split, deleted the extra version of the low poly, remerged, reimported into max and then re-exported it for a bake in FBX form. Then once I got to the bake, it had these black dots all over it. I thought it could be an issue with my unwrap, but nothing was unusual about it when I went back and checked. I did a mesh integrity check in Zbrush, which turned out no issues, and finally I added in a normals modifier and unified them to make sure that the high poly had correctly facing faces. I even reassigned smoothing groups to the High poly, alas it changed NOTHING.

I have another plan, where I intend on throwing the high poly model back into ZBrush, remeshing it, and projecting it onto the remesh. I will for now get on with texturing the table. All of these issues cost me days unfortunately. 

I started the character retop by attempting the face retop technique from the last project - using ZRemesher guides. However the resulpts were poor as there was an issue with exact symmetry, and the distortion of the mouth made it difficult to achieve good geometry.

Due to the sharp shape of the ear and to get a good silhouette I used several triangles. 

I used symmetry and edited the mirror line location by tilting it slightly.

To get the shape of the mouth I pulled an inner loop down and collapsed the verts. They will be hidden behind the tongue and teeth, but this allows me to create a closed mouth box.

I used quad remesher to retop the tongue, and deleted the back faces as they would not be seen. I also noticed at this point that the end of the nose needed work. I used reference given to me by my mentor for retop, which I used to help me fix this issue.

I added a couple of small triangles onto the tip of the nose and added in an extra couple of loops along the bridge of the nose. This fixed the silhouette dramatically.

This section is about how I retopped the eyes. I used my tutor's eye workflow tutorial, and made a lower and upper eyeball layer. The top one would be a gloss layer.

I also pulled out the cornea to get the true silhouette of the eye. The iris would be baked on, giving the illusion of depth behind the eye.

This is the thin upper layer I added on top.

I added in one more loop to imporve the silhouette as it was too pointed previously.

This is the face with the added eyes!

I remeshed the teeth using quad remesher.

I made sure to even out the loops as I went along, especially along the legs and arms.

I retopped the hands following topology reference and using step build. 

As the fingers were quite splayed, I had to make sure that there were enough loops to prevent stretching.

I connected the head and body using bridge and then added in loops. and edited the location of the verts afterwards.

For the knees I used inset.

The feet werepretty basic as there were no real gaps between the toes so I could create a block mesh.

Again, I used quad remesh for the nails. I considered baking the nails into the feet but as they are such a defined silhouette I thought it would be better to give them their own geometry. I did increase the efficiency of them as much as possible, however.

The tag will not be baked like this, but I wanted to position it for when the model would be ready for baking.

I retopped the stakes in the body, and removed the middle parts that would not be visible. I also increased the density of the stakes as it was far too low.

This is the final retop from the front and back.

Here is the body on the table! It still needs baking, texturing and posing.

I wanted to make some wooden stakes that would be found stabbed into my vampire character's body. To do this I started off with a very simple blocked out shape in 3DsMax then imported it into Zbrush.

Using reference I created some wooden grooves and splitting. I needed to ensure that it wasn't on the stylised side so that it matched my character, so I worked on them until the grooves and splitting were more realistic.

I did three different stakes for variation.

I positioned the stakes to where I wanted them. Two of them impale the body all the way through, but the one in the heart is staying embedded. I ensured that the composition was balanced.

Once they were positioned I created the wound around them. I used references of punture wounds to get an idea of shape and the tear of skin.

For the ears sticking out the back I made sure the wound was more raised in the direction that the stake was travelling in.

I had to edit the size of the wound after changing the size of the stake in the neck but this was a quick fix.

At first I retopped the stakes individually, but I later scrapped this and retopped them in the position that they were stuck in the body, as this would result in a more accurate bake. and save me time repositioning them. I could also delete the interior of the stakes as I would not need that geometry.

I spoke with my tutor and industry mentor about maintaining consistency of body type and using more references to achieve the body type I wanted. I did some more reference studying, particularly for the chest and legs this time. 

I wasn't happy with the hips so I had a closer look at male skeletal structure of the pelvic region.

I also looked at how the muscles wrap around the legs.

 I was advised to take another look at again at the serratus and oblique muscles.

At first my revisit of the serratus endedu p too tubular and defined, particularly for this body type. My mentor advised me to smooth them out a bit so that they did not interfere with the silhouette of the lats.

I also took a look at Christian Bale in 'The Machinist', who displays an extremely underweight male bodytype. The use of dramatic lighting in the cenes of the movie helped me to find the definition of the muscles and bones a lot better.

Using this I improved the position of the collar bones and the ribs across the pectorals. His pecs were too muscular in comparison to the rest of the body so I fixed this by moving them back and adding in the rib definition underneath.

  This is the body before and after these minor tweaks. I also moved the legs out to prevent strange AO from the bake later on.
  

  I did some more definition of the trapezius and vertebrae

 I added in some final pore and vein details.
  

 I think that these tweaks really allowed me to push the consistency of my character's bodytype and the accuracy of the anatomy.

Something else that my mentor recommended was to create a couple more tools for the table and a head rest. I needed to create a scalpel tray, and a curved pair of scissors for more variation.

My first attempt at the tray went a little wrong so I tried again using a cylinder object and shaped it to the kidney bean shape as I saw in my reference. 

I then shelled it and created a lip to the object.

I used a combo of opensubdiv and turbosmooth to remesh it and get a smooth shape.

I made the tray a lot more shallow and the base was made smaller.

The curved scissors were very simple to make, As I only had to copy the existing ones, elongate the blades and curve the tip.

This is my completed tool tray witht the added dish and scissors.

The headrest was more complex to make. I started with a cuboid and pulled in the edges.

I then extracted four peaks and straightened the bottom edges.

I used chamfer to get the correct shape.

I then used opensubdiv to remesh it and turbosmooth.

I positioned the head rest onto the table.

I retopped everything using quad remesher. This created a nice neat topology. Anything that was glaringly incorrect I corrected manually using the freeform tools.

I retopped the upper table surface using one big sheet that would cover the drain. The drain would be baked into the surface.

This is the table retop so far.

I then had another feedback session with my mentor, and was advised on how to make the retop more efficient. I was advised to delete a lot of loops along linear objects that would not affect the silhouette (which I should've done already).

With this in mind I adjusted all my objects and unwrapped them.

The scissors were quite hard to unwrap due to the complexity of their shapes. I ended up dividing them into more parts than I thought I would but the result is much tidier and the texture will be less distorted.

Some of the more complex shaped objects were harder to retop but I think I did a good job in maintaining the silhouette with a lower desnity of tris.

Making the underside of the table hollow made the unwrap much eaisier.

 I also created a simple tag and then reduced the density of the tris afterwards.
  

I made a realistic eyeball sculpt using a lecture recorded by my tutor. The eyeball will have more components to it, applied during the retop process.

I started by gathering appropriate reference of the iris and structure of the eyeball.

I created a sphere with a simple indentation in the centre, as I saw in the tutorial. The pupil is inset into the eye.

From this stage I added in a base of iris threads and created a rougher edge. I will neaten this up later on.

I added in more details using dam standard and pinch.

I inset the pupil much more as I thought it was far too shallow.

I then neatened up the edges, making them more rounded.

As per the video, I was shown that adding in small veins around the whites of the eyes could add a lot of realism and detail. As my autopsy project is meant to be very realistic, this is perfect for what I need.

Other components I worked on at this stage were the fingernails and toneails. I used masking and the extract function to create sharpened nails, and the inflate tool around the nail beds to create a realistic shape.

I pointed the nails to emphasise the vampiric aspect of the character.

I repeated this process with the toenails.

I also pointed the teeth, using less sterotypical vampire teeth as reference and going for all pointed Nosferatu-esq teeth.

I had another chat about anatomy. I received a useful free PDF about the skeletal structure and layers of muscle. Things I still needed to change about the body were the position of the ribs, the trapezius and the dip of the hips.

But this session was mainly about the head. I found some better reference for the screaming face this time, and annotated it with Del to show how the jaw length should be.

I edited my model at the same time. I neede to pull the head forwards so that the jaw could even distend like that.

I saw that the bottom lip was too low and the jawline needed to be longer. There was hardly any space for the chin.

I improved this using my feedback.

From the front it looked ridiculous still, so I used some more reference to adjust the features. I added in more fleshy scunched up areas around the eyes and nose, Before this,mthese areas were much too smooth.

After my bix fixes from last time, I reconvened with my mentor to discuss the changes and how I could push my project to the next level. The main issues he had with the model was the arm and the head anatomy. Using a screenshare again, Del went through anatomical reference and sculpting muscles in detail. The biggest offender was the deloids, which initially were sweeping over the entire pectoral incorrectly. He showed me how to correctly break up these groups.

The back was also an issue. I was showed how to sculpt the lats which would create the correct silhouette when viewed from the front, and the trapezius muscles. This helped me to boost my understanding of how the muscles interlock.

The triceps come out from underneath the deltoids, and the forearm muscles sweep upwards along the arm with no clear separation at the top. 

The forearm was also much too long so that needed to be fixed.

I also saw how the bicep is structured. The silhouette of the top part of the arm is actually created from the triceps, which jut out more. 

He also told me that I should sconsider resculpting the head to achieve better anatomy. 

The hack of the head was incorrectly positioned.

After all of this feedback, I tried these improvements out myself on my file. I started with the shoulders and then moved on to the biceps and triceps.

I also ensured that I decreased the length of the forearm.

I really payed attention this time to the shape and position of the muscles, like the start and stop position of the forearm muscles.

I also decreased the size of the waist, which has no bone around it to retain shape.

The lats needed to be remade, and I ensured that it created a correct silhouette from the front.

After these steps I checked in again with my mentor, to see if I had done ok. He told me to improve the shape of the deltoids on the back more. Previously they had been jutting out too much.

For the head improvements, I used a reference for the planes of the face to gain a better understanding of bone and flesh placement.

This anatomy feedback has helped me to push the model further, but I know I still need to work on it a lot more. Whilst the arms and back are looking a lot better, I am still not satisfied with the head sculpt. I think that this is the part that will need the most work.

So, I'll admit I've started this project using a very odd workflow. It was a big mistake, as it has led me to some very strange anatomical deformations. My industry mentor very graciously helped me to fix these glaring issues, mainly by remeshing and using subdivisions to firstly fix the pose that he is in. I was told that the pose is the main perpertrator for the bad anatomy. Where I thought it would help me to sculpt exaggerated limb positions and muscle deformations, it has instead encouraged me to create incorrect muscle formations. I should have started in a more neutral pose, so this blog will be about how I went about fixing this.

I started by  screensharing with Del, who was showing me how to create new subdivisions using the projection tool. I had to first duplicate my original model, then remesh the old one to a much lower resolution. I would then use project, add a subdivision, then repeat the process until I have around 4 or five subdivisions increasing in density and detail.

This is my lowest subdivision. With this, it was much easier to adjust the position of the limbs, head and spine.

Using the transform gizmo, Del demonstrated how I could reposition everything into a more neutral pose. Once the head was moved, I could see that I had made the neck far too long and the head itself was an odd shape.

I tried this all out on my file from scratch. 

This is my high density original model on top of my lowest subdivion version of the model, to show you the difference that the subdivisions make in detail and how much each one can retain.

I adjusted the position of the head first.

I then adjusted the arm and leg positions, and made the spine slightly less curved.

The legs were straightened and placed in a neutral position.

Once all of the body was repositioned, I was then able to start working on detailing the muscles, tendons and veins.

I started with the arms and legs, using anatomical reference from my book and online. I ensured that I payed attention to the break-up of the muscle groups and the tendons of the body, such as around the achilles heel and wrist area.

I added the tendons of the feet, and added veins on the higher subdivision levels.

I also detailed the navel and the veins around the stomach area.

I continued to detail the muscles, particularly around the back and shoulders.

I also added in elbow details and continued to work on the arm shape.

Del told me to make sure that the arm follows the structure of a chain - where each section is interlocking. I reworked the shape of it to try and achieve this.

This section is about how I repositioned and detailed the hands. I statred by adding fleshy areas, and adding defined creases. 

I then detailed the creases more, which I found helped me to achieve a better shape in some areas like inbetween the joints. 

I made sure to add in a broad skin texture on the palm and the creases around the wrist area. I used Rafael Souza's free Skin brushes for Zbrush.

I went about detailing the back of the hand using similar techniques, but ensuring I add in the tendons and the creases where the fingers are flexing.

Finally I added in some veins.

For the texure of the body, I added a noise filter using the Lightbox noise builder. I edited the noise by adjusting the height and size values. I wanted a subtle pore texture that wasnt too noisy.

I then added some more details around the body once this was done.

This is the torso so far. I think it looks a LOT better than before.

The head anatomy still needs a lot of work. I tried out changing the jaw position to see if it made sense. The jawline is far too short, which I noticed after hingeing the jaw using the transform gizmo.

The mouth is also far too distended. 

I tried out some quick adjustments of the mouth and jaw, making the chin a bit deeper and the mouth more rounded and less long.

I think that the reposition of the jaw has helped a bit, and I will revisit this part later on.

I thought that whilst this was better than before, the mouth is too short now! I continued to play around with the size of the mouth gape.

I also added in some creases around the brow line and nose bridge, using reference. This is a more accurate depiction of the muscles around the face and how they distort.

I added in some skin noise, using the skin alpha pack by Souza. I made sure to use the correct pore types for the different areas of the face.

I edited the tongue , adding in the veins underneath and repositioning the teeth and eyeballs.

The head was detailed with veins and creases in the appropriate places.

I added subtle ridges to the roof of the mouth.

This is how it is looking so far. The repositioning of the model was something that I desperately needed to do to fix it and it has helped me immensely.

It still needs a huge amount of work. My main areas of concern are the head anatomy, and the anatomy of the arms and back still which I think I will need to work on.

Nevertheless, It is looking a lot better and more anatomically correct.