I made a selection of tools: Two scalpels, scissors, forceps and a bone saw. I started with the scalpel, creating a basic shape and then using turbosmooth. I then adjusted things like the width of the loops.

I sharpened the end manually using soft slection and bringing the verts together.

I made the forceps using symmetry, and edited the silhouetted using chamfered edges.

I made a slightly clawed end as I saw in my reference.

These are the two scalpels and forceps so far. The second scalpel was made simply using symmetry to achieve a different shape.

The bonesaw was the most difficult and complex shape to make so far out of the tools. I started with a cylinder that I extruded different edges from.

I then used turbosmooth, and placed in a rectangle to act as a blade, which I edited.

I created scissors using a combo of the last two methods.

I elongated the tip of the scissors and added turbosmooth. I had to go back in to chamfer the edges along the inside of the curve.

I made a quick tray table to display the tools alongside the autopsy table, using the spare set of legs I had from earlier and making a quick tray.

The making of the autopsy table details will be documented in this blog post. I will start with the creation of the mixer tap underneath the table. I had some great reference for this that I worked from. I began by crafting an oval shape from a box and used chamfer and opensubdiv to smooth the shape.

I then added a turbosmooth and extruded parts of the model to make a more complex shape.
  

This is what I have so far.

I then made a cylinder and created this complex mixer tap shape by extruding faces and using smoothing groups with turbosmooth
  

I softened the edges slightly using a shamfer and opensubdiv

This is what the final tap looks like.

I added two brackets onto the back using the symmetry modifier. This will attach to the module underneath the tabletop.

  I crafted the hose using a cylinder for the handle, using swift loops pulled out into a widened shape and then a turbosmooth on top. To creat the section with the hole, I inset the faces and brought the edges towards the top of the object. I then bridged the inside, and used opensubdiv.

It created a smooth hole, which had better topology than if I had used booleans.

For the trigger I created an L-shape from a rectangle and made some grips using loops.

The final thing I added was a spring onto the trigger.

I made a quick hook to hang the hose from.

  I also made a button box so that the height of the table can be changed.

I made some simple square button shapes and then used turbosmooth, using smoothing groups and chamfer in the appropriate places.
  

The hose pipe was made using a spline and extruding along it.
  

  I made a couple of drains quickly to desice what shape I wanted. This larger drain is more functional.

However, I did try out a more decorative finer drain, but I didn't like this as much.

  I placed it onto the table, making a deeper area. Once retopped I will be able to back the drain and drainhole into the surface.

 This is the final completed table. I found hardsurface harder to work with than organic surfaces, but I am happy with the work I have made so far. Next I will talk about the tools.
  

I began my hardsurface modelling process in 3DsMax, using a basic angular shape before experimenting with smoothing groups ready for turbosmooth and opensubdiv. 

I started by making the object entirely one mesh. This created problems further down the line for me, however. I wanted to create a panelled area in the section underneath the tabletop, but I experienced an inability to keep these edges defined after placing an open subdiv or turbosmooth onto the object. I experimented with the chamfer modifier but this did not help as the edges became too packed together. 

I think my panel shape eventually became too complex for this entire object.  

Therefore I attempted a different method, by separating the table top from the underneath section.

I Created a gentle curved shape according to my reference, and a sloping gradient that would go towards the drain. 

I used smoothing groups and turbosmooth to create a more complex shape.

The underneath was resolved by collapsing the edges to create a closed object.

  This is what the shape looked like before and after being turbosmoothed.

The design of the  bottom of the table was difficult for me to decide on as I had no specific concept to work off of. I didn't want something overcomplicated but I wanted something that could imply a more futuristing setting through shape and form. I used a lot of reference, and from this point I experimented with a variety of different quick shape designs.

The first was this table design with leg. I didn't like how flimsy they looked, but I did like the bars underneath.

I then tried out this solid rotating platform, that to me seemed the most practical as you could spin the table and adjust the height.
  

I tried the legs again but moved the position. I still didn't like how thin they were in comparison to the bulkiness of the rest of the table.
  

I tried the original box shape again, bit felt that I could do something more interesting.

In the end I came back to this design, but edited it slightly. I added in the adjustable components and adjusted the thickness of the module underneath the table so that I got a sleeker design that would not take too much attention away from the character.

  I am happy with how the table is going so far, but I still have a lot of details to add onto it to sell it as an autopsy table, as well as the tools.

This post will be about adding more torso detail and hands and feet. I added in some stomach definition and nipples, as well as the navel and some hip definition.

I then used a combination of the inflate and move tool to drag out some basic finger shapes. Right now they are a bit clawed but I fix this as I continue.

Using masking, I splayed the fingers out better so that I could sculpt between them more efficiently. I will add fingernails later on in the process.

I then moved onto the feet. Using anatomical reference I started by dragging ou the shapes of the toes using inflate and move.

The underneath of the toes have a very distinct shape, that almost curve inwards. There are some defined creases here also.

I added in the tendons and webbing of the feet. Once I used dynamesh, it stuck some of the toes together, but this didn't matter too much as the toes won't be splayed out like the fingers will be.

I made sure I used reference of the feet from the side to get the distinct shape and the arch of the soles.

My project is coming together a lot better now that there are hands and feet. I can definitely see the bigger picture better at this point.

I sculpted in the ears using anatomical reference, as well as some reference of elven-type creatures for correct shape.

I then sculpted a set of teeth, using the same method as my last project. This entailed sculpting the gums and teeth seperately, and separating them into appropriate polygroups. I then imported them as a separate subtool and positioned the lower and upper jaw into the mouth.

I noticed that there's a large noticeable seam, and I needed to put a tongue into the mouth anyway, so I saw this as a perfect oportunity to cover this seam.

I created a soft cylinder shape and placed it into the correct position in the mouth. I then looked up some reference of how the tongue relaxes when a person is dead or unconscious, and found that it flops to the side of the mouth and backwards, blocking the airways.

I turned on transparency mode to place it properly into the mouth.

I did this position of the tongue but pushed it back more.

Welcome back to my blog, this time I am starting a new project brief given to us by Rocksteady. The project consists of creating a humanoid body on an autopsy table, with a few tools and the table itself. There will be a lot of focus on correct anatomy and materials.

I gathered some reference for the sort of thing I want to make. I'd like to create some sort of Vampire-Nosferatu-type character with bioluminescent skin, that highlights the veins. I will be using emissives and subsurface scattering. The table is quite standard as it needs to be recogniseable universally as an autopsy table, and this is something my mentor told me would help to draw the focus onto the character, rather than the table.

The first stage was to block out the character. I used Zspheres to create a basic frame for the body. I spoke to my mentor about how I can best sculpt this character. He told me that as it is a cinematic prop rather than an animated character, there is very little need to rig the character. I would be better off posing the limbs into the correct position I want after sculpting the details. My character is stuck in a dramatic rigor mortis position, before being autopsied. With this in mind, I bent the spine to this dramatic shape so that every muscle and distortion of the torso would look correct in this position. I did this rather than sculpt it in a relaxed position and rig it, then regret it later, as the forms would be wrong.

Enjoy these pics of me posing like a wacko

It is bizarre and I have never made a character like this, so this process will be interesting. This is the sort of pose I am aiming for (give or take a few areas of dodgy posing for now):

But I will start by using Zspheres to make a basic shape. The arms are SO long so I'm gonna need to fix that.

Skinning the Zspheres to sculpt on.

I went about correcting the glaringly incorrect anatomy. For a lot of my reference, I am using male contortionists with the same body type I want to convey.

I then separated the face from the body using polygroups, and started blocking out the face. I had to increase the resolution slightly to create some more accurate muscle and skin fold blockouts.
  

I used my 'Anatomy for 3D Artists' book once again, and looked at the hinge of the jaw and nostril positions. I will need to come back later on to edit the anatomy further.

I added in eyeballs to craft the eyelids over the top.

I started by creating a thin layer of skin over the top, whilst trying to maintin a slightly hollowed eye area.

I used this particular reference to help me.

I then came back to the body, and a this stage I decided to delete the arms and legs so that I could work out the bend of the spine a bit better.

I took this opportunity to focus on the contours and planes of the torso, adding in rib and muscle definition.
  

  I thought about how the shoulders would be positioned. I later came back to them to change their position to make way for the elbows.

  I continued to add some more blockout details around the torso.

  I had some feedback from my mentor regarding the curve of the pose. He told me to reduce the harshness of the angle for now, and to get in the arms and legs. He also told me to focus mainly on the anatomy of the body first, and then the face later on. Therefore I used some more reference for the torso to refine the shapes.

I did this using masking and softening the mask to get a gentle bend.

I added some blocked in muscl and sinew around the legs. This will need a lot of refining later. I starfished the legs to make it easier to workon the inside of the leg.
  

  I blocked out some arms and hands also.

This is the model so far. There is still a very very long way to go on it, but I think that I have made a decent start so far.

The final thing I needed to do for this project was to place it into Unreal to demonstrate that my character is game ready. I edited the sky sphere and added the cubemap I used for my marmoset render for a similar atmosphere.

Using a tutorial on how to make snow-like particle effects, I created a lit and unlit material using the same alpha.

I then created a particle effect and opened up the editor. I adjusted the speed, rotation, lifetime and sizes of the particles, and duplicated them, adding both my lit and unlit variations. The result was a wide area of falling ash flakes. 

I liked it but there were too many, it looked more like a blizzard rather than ash.

I reduced the amount and the speed that they would fall.

I was happy with the final result, especially with the lighting.

One final thing I experimented with was cape physics. I was able to use cloth painting on the cape but the alphas were not affected, and so they ended up staying in place. When I painted them they fell completely as they were not technically attached to the cape yet. I want to figure this out properly in the future, but for now I am happy with where my work is.

Thank you for following my character process for this project. If you would like to see the finished work, please check out my artstation portfolio. There you can see a full breakdown and turntable of the character. Thanks again to Jakub Bazyluk for letting me use your fantastic concept, and my mentor for the help so far.

I am now onto the final stages of the project! This post is a quick overview of how I rendered my character.

I started by importing the model and materials for a first draft of the lighting into Marmoset Toolbag 3. I made sure that the packed textures were plugged into the correct colour channel, e.g. R for Ambient Occlusion, G for roughness and B for metalness, according to how textures are packed for Unreal when exporting from Substance Painter.

I also added in a shadow catcher plane and later I experimented with atmospheric fog.

Roughness in the wrong channel on import.

With incorrect metalness mapping the face paint looked very shiny and metallic.

The correct colour channel for the roughness map. The clothes and face paint are now not too shiny.

The boots and the mud are the correct roughness and there is a nice contrast between the smooth shoes and mud, and the rough clothing.

One thing I didn't want to do was to make the back too bright. But I did want a good rim light and perhaps some volumetric light shafts when using atmospheric fog.

I made a quick base object that I can use as a plinth and unwrapped it ready for texturing. I wanted a wet mud texture that would match the mud on her boots, as if she has walked through a battlefield.

I centered her to the plinth.

Then I used substance designer to craft a mud material. I created shiny puddles using height and roughness masking.

To make the mud in Substance Designer I primarily combined a variety of different grunges, and made the deeper areas darker using a gradient map.

I took the finished mud into substance painter and increased the size so that the large puddle was around the middle where she would be stepping. I also adjusted the mask to create different layers and depths.

This is how the untextured plinth looks in marmoset.

This is the plinth now with the mud texture.

It matches up with the mud on her shoes well.

I went back into 3ds Max to adjust small things, like the angles of the shoulder tassels.

I also elongated the blade of the sword as it wasn't quite proportional to the size of the character.

The cloak needed to be adjusted so that the corners attached to the underside of the epaulettes rather than just clip through the shoulders.

The fingers of the glove also needed to be widened as after rigging they were a bit distorted and thinner than they should be.I also fixed the tagliatelle fingers using the relax tool.

The cloak looks a lot more dynamic after adjusting the position of the verts.

I also added subsurface scattering to the alphas, so that light would travel through the cloth.

I then added a HDRI to create a better reflective lighting scenario. I chose to experiment with a couple that could reflect a dull battlefield, or perhaps a darkened sky with warmer tones.

I went with this one as it reflected a dark mud ground and also a warm toned night sky. It complimented the mystery of the character well also.

This is my final set up. From here I adjusted a few things like rim light colours and directional lighting colours. The final renders can be seen in my portfolio.

Rigging the model is the most dreaded part of the process for me. I can do it but it looks janky because I am not a rigging artist, so it is time to learn about how I made the model look decent. 

I started with the biped, and added in any extra bones, like the pony tails and the chains. I added in a few for the cape also.

I then used the weight solver tool which saved me a lot of time by automatically applying weights to the verts. From this point, I manually tweaked the weighting in areas that needed it most, particularly around the shoulders and fingers. 

These are the bones I used for the cape. I only needed a simple system as it is a short cape that wouldn't move much due to the thickness of the fabric.

I used a series of bones for the chains. I didn't create a bone for every link as that would be excessive, I kept it simple enough so that it would be easier to rig.

This is what the pose looked like so far. There is a lot of weird distortion in the cape as you can see, but this is fixed later on.

I placed the sword in the hand so that I can prepare the fingers for flexion.

I posed the chain using the same type of  bones as the other chains.

I used a combination of the concept and photos of myself doing the pose to work on the accuracy of the position. From the photo below, you can see that I needed to work on the position of the legs and the hips for a more natural curved pose.

I positioned the chains by the waist and also worked on the weighting of the face to prevent strange distortion of the facial features.

I weighted the head, hat and earring onto the same bone to prevent any weird distortion. The hair was weighted to the hair bones,

I also went through some posing techniques for character artists with my industry mentor Del. He showed me how I can pose a model using the transform tool and masking in Zbrush. If I fade out the mask, the movements are a lot smoother.

I tried this out and was successful with the head, but I think that the rest of the body needed to be higher poly in order for the movements to be smoother.

Overall, the rigging process was really difficult and annoying, but I am happy with how she is posed now.

Last week I received an assigned industry mentor, Del, a Senior Character Artist who works at Rocksteady. I am very pleased to have him as my mentor, and as a result I have already gathered a lot of feedback to improve my character. I was told how to make the material quality of my clothing a lot better. Previously, the areas without folds resembled hard surface materials like metal or plastic due to their smoothness. I was told how I can improve the look of fabric, simply by using the standard brush in quick strokes, both Add and Sub.

I did the same for the rest of the clothing.

He also told me that the folds around the knees should not be as distinct in order to make way for bending and distorted geometry. This will help to make my models more game ready.

I then took my new high poly models back into max and re-exported them into substance to create another bake. I used the curvature map after this as my mask to create better edge wear on the creases. I didn't want them to appear too dramatic, but it certainly helped me to represent my material qualities better as the curvature map picked up the new crumpled fabric texture I had created.

I did the same for the shirt, and also adjusted the colours and contrasts for all of the clothing using the levels layer.

I tested out what it looked like in high contrast. The folds certainly stand out a lot better and look less flat.

The burlap was treated the same. The lighter curvature on the folds made the material appear older and more rough and crumpled.

 More feedback that I received was on the anatomy. I was told that the leg area looked good, but the chest needed to be lifted and not jut out too much, and the gap between the legs needed to be reduced.

The ears needed to be made longer in order to reach the eyes. Del told me to do more anatomical studies using Loomis exercises to help me in the future.

Finally I worked on the shape of the shoes. I lifted the toe area off the floor after comparing what I had to references of boots. The lifted area of the toes looked more realistic and closer to actual shoe anatomy.

I also needed to draw in the instep a bit and make the heel area thinner. This is what I had before, and the image beneath is the result after fixing this issue.

 This feedback helped me greatly to improve the quality of my model and my knowledge of the character modelling pipeline, as well as give me an insight on the type of criticism I would receive as a junior character artist in industry.
  

I plan to experiment with alphas in Photoshop and also Substance Painter.

ALPHA TEST 1 - PHOTOSHOP

I started with Photoshop as I know this process quite well so it would take a small amount of time. I used photobashing to create fabric strips that would cover most of the cape and wrap around the chains.

The eyelashes are good as they are very small and won't really be seen up close, so they do not need much detail.

ALPHA TEST 2 - SUBSTANCE PAINTER

I followed a brilliant tutorial by youtuber Han Solo on using opacity maps in Substance Painter. The process was actually very straightforward and simple.

I started with a simple sculpt of my cloth strips in Zbrush using the large plane to start with then shaping it from there. I used a combo of the ZModeller, move and clay buildup tools, along with pinch and ZRemesher to refine the torn edges.

I duplicated them and changed them slightly in shape and length.

For the epaulette trims I layered the pieces of fabric in a fanned shape so that they would connect from corner to corner well without a strange overlap.

I also used reference of moth-eaten cloth to create masked out holes in the strips.

These are the final high poly sculpts for the alphas. I then retopped them very simply in 3Ds Max using planes with two edges in the middle to bend them to shape. 

 

I then unwrapped them very simply on a 512 sheet, making sure I used the space as effectively as possible.

For the bake I had to experiment a lot with the settings to achieve the correct normal map. As you can see below, the cage was not big enough at first, and so I had to increase it until the plane took all of the details of the sculpts.

Once the cage was big enough I could see that the normals were correct. I then took the normal map into photoshop to create an alpha channel in black and white, and imported it back into substance.

I then changed my viewport settings to metallic and roughness alphas  This resulted in the opacity map being put into place. I had to also ensure that I added an opcaity channel in my layer settings in order for it to work.

 I then textured them using imported materials from my main substance painter file so that they matched well. They are supposed to be worn strips of burlap.

I added my alpha symbols onto the strips, and changed the blending options and used an eraser to create an uneven worn effect to imitate painted fabric.
  

I put the alphas into position using the High poly sculpts as a guide first.
  

I used 3 repeating cloth strips around the edges of the cloak.

The long alpha strip was wrapped around the shackle and the handle of the sword.

Finally, I added alpha strips to the chains to imitate the concept.

 Overall, my verdict is that the Substance Painted alphas are a lot more effective and match the rest of the character's textures much better than the photoshop alphas. They also come with a lot more maps rather than just the diffuse and opacity.