Game Production

Project Introduction & Planning

WEEK 1

At first we thought that parasite would be cool to do recreate because of the contrast between the modern rich family's home and the basment but as we started to look at just individual props and the characters we realised they would be quite bland and difficult to reproduce in an intriguing way unless we chose to go for hyperrealism. As for stranger things, there are a lot of interesting scenes such as the basement and iconic characters but we decided to go for A series of unfortunate events. Part of the group was quite keen on the marriage scene of the movie and the characters and outfits that it provides but we only unanimously agreed on A series of Unfortunate events once we came across the reptile room scene which has a wide collection of interesting props and character attire etc.

Sculpting

WEEK 1 - 3

HEAD & HAIR

l Started with a rough block out - like usual - and started with the face because it is the most important part to get right on a character. Since Klaus' hair makes up 70% of his head, I though it was wise to also add some placeholder hair strands so that I can see how it looks early on.

The forehead and eyes were super tricky to get right because the forehead is mostly covered in hair all the time and his eyes are extremely hooded so it makes it difficult to create the eye shape. I find hooded eyes quite difficut to sculpt because 

Clint Eastwood head - 3D model by Truneps (@Truneps) [ee27db5] 

Truneps - Sketchfab 

Used leather shoes - Download Free 3D model by Second Studio (@kayaaku) [ea3218a] 

Dishonored Fanart - Afroamerican - 3D model by caterina.zamai (@caterina.zamai) [7ab35af] 

Despite having soo many references, it's really difficult to tell what is sculpted and what is painted.The shadows are also really harsh and nowhere near the kind of lighting set up that Zbrush has by defult. Dishonored is known for it's arsh and angular styled facial features but this doesn't really help when sculpting a child. The cheekbones aren't as kigh as theirs and neither are their eyes as concaved or wrinkly.

I always thought eyes where much larger than what we saw but its actually far smaller!!! this was soooo interesting and helpful to know because I knew the eyes were looking really flat but I didn't realise it was the simple sphere eyeballs that were far too massive that it looked like planes on the head rather than eyeballs. this helped make it look more believable in all angles of the face.

I was still unhappy with the results so I looked at The Outsider and Emily Kaldwin from Dishonored to help with the face style. Its still quite dificult to do so because the Dishonored style utilises such a painterly approach to it's textures that it does a lot of the heavy lifting for it's character's faces - moreso in the first game.

Here I am comparing it next to another character artist in my group to see how well it matches and is it cohesive enough. and does it effectively match the Dishonored art style?

BODY & CLOTHES

Moving onto sculpting the body, Its rare to find a shot where you can see the entire character of Klaus so these low res screenshots are what I have to work with. Children are really odd to sculpt because their proportions can look a little silly. Especially Klaus who has such massive hair, it makes his head to body proportions look even more comical.

I created a blazer and wanted there to be a hemed boarder to give more interest to the clothing.

To create boarders around planes go to: 

Stroke > Curve Functions > (deselect Polygroups  & Creased Edges) select Border > Frame Mesh 

Use the CurveTube Brush and click on the outline

buttons in 3ds max using boolean to cut in the holes and used splines to add the strings. I didn't want the buttons to use much topology so I duplicated the button and collapsed the center face to encapsulate the threads when baking.

This was the first time I found out about Turbosmooth. I first tried it out after having cut the holes into the mesh. 3ds Max didn't like working with N-Gons so the result was undesirable - as you can see in the left image. So I tried again and used TurboSmooth before Boolean and this gave a better result.

Feedback from lecturer is to make the cloth folds effect the silhouette more harshly to fit the Dishonored art style more effectively. Make use of folds on the arms and torso to break up the figure as well.

Sculpting folds was a really difficult challenge. I watched this video: Cloth and Fold Anatomy  which was really insightful but I still struggled to make folds that looked interesting and believable when there isn't any movement going on.

......

hands...

PROPS

Moving onto the props, I thought about making a book and the 'traitor' snake as they would be cool for presentation but then I came across the Baudelaire eyeglass which is seen in the series. This eyeglass is quite a mistery in the movie and it is of great interest to Klaus specifically. I thought this eyeglass would be a more interesting prop to sculpt and I would learn more from it than the two props I had thought of previously so I decided to take on the challenge.

The main body of the eyeglass is just a simple cylindar but what makes it interesting are the cogs, intricate carvings, and the eyepiece case design. I used splines to draw out the outline I wanted. Then I added a shell to it that had only 4 sides - that way I can delete one ring of faces and then cap the face to make a plain which held the shape I drew out. From here it is just removing the unessessary verticies, and cutting into the big N-gon into smaller polys.

My lecturer advised that i chamfer the cogs so that they aren't soo pointy for a better bake and for a more realistic read. I'm still not used to working with highpolys which is unfortunate as it makes the models soo much better visually. As for the clocks that are built into the body of the eyeglass, this was a really big challenge. I tried to use boolean and I thought this would be ok but since it is a cylindar, it strugled to mantain a smooth transition along the body of it now that it has a lot of N-Gons to acomodate the circular ditches.

Substance Painter really didn't like baking the information down even though the lowpoly had no issues. My lecturer sugessted placing shapes over the cyclindar body instead and bake it down. This gave a better outcome but the bake still made the circles look squashed and deformed. The eyepiece also wasn't baking well because the lowpoly was too far from the highpoly to retain it's information.

Substance Painter really didn't like baking the information down even though the lowpoly had no issues. My lecturer sugessted placing shapes over the cyclindar body instead and bake it down. This gave a better outcome but the bake still made the circles look squashed and deformed. The eyepiece also wasn't baking well because the lowpoly was too far from the highpoly to retain it's information.

My lecturers helped me bake the details down using Marmoset toolbag instead of substance Painter and this worked loads better.

I then decided to sculpt a briefcase because it would be a large prop which would be more impactful on the final presentation. I sculpted the mainbody of the suitcase in ZBrush and then brought it into Max to add straps and a handle. I wanted to make the suitcase be sculpted on the inside aswell because then it could be used in game to hold things the player might collect but I unfortunatly didn't have enought time. 

I am still too slow at sculpting and modelling that it eats into textuing time but I had planned to add more straps, buckles, and locks to the sculpt - taking inspiration from these references. If I got into texturing I would have also loved to add K.B (his initials) on the suitcase. and add stitching.

Topology

WEEK 4 - Retopping

There wasn't anything new or different I did whilst retopping. It was the first time I was retopping the lower body and shoes but it was simple to do when referencing the Dishonored models on Artstation. The only thing I really had to change was the edgeflow of the knees. I wanted to unwrap the trousers by cutting along the seam of the trouser sculpt. I couldn't do this with the crocodile loop denting the seam so I just moved the loops so that the seam along the trouserleg was straight.

With the deadline looming, I didn't want to take to long to retop the suitcase. I tried to remove just one loop and it resulted in this horrific outcome because I had done it in ZBrush and the topology is always spiraled in ZBrush. I decided to TargetWeld the verticies instead but there were too many N-Gons left so I had to call it a task for another day and decided to focus on the character and the other prop instead.

Baking & Texturing

WEEK 5

Posing was my favourite part of this entire project because there were no errors I didn't know how to fix or extra steps and buttons I needed to use to get what I wanted. I just have to move things around

In Unreal I wanted to light the scene dramatically. Since I had to showcase the character I thought a shadow of Klaus in the background looming over himself could actually be quite cool. It would be more interesting if it was the shadow of Count Olaf behined him but this works with what I have currently.

Everything went wrong after hours..

My Unreal Scene crashed and my pendrive wa acting up soo badly that it refused to save textures or export them properly from Substance Painter. They refused to reimport because it claimed that the textures had the wrong dimensions so I got them into Photoshop and found that all of them had this horrific error on the top which caused the end result of my textures to go stripy.

I like the pose, I believe it looks natural and believable. I dislike the outcome of the textures simply because they look extremely flat and unrealistic.I wanted to make his hair using fibreshop but I didn't plan my time well enough to learn it. I attempted to capture Klaus' likeness whilst also veering towards the Dishonored art style. I'm unsure if I sucessfully did either. The majority of this projects was spent on the sculpting phase which ate into vital texturing time. The hardest part about sculpting was trying to get the clothing to look interesting and believable. I was also unsure how I would go about the hair and so I attempted to sculpt each individual strand which resulted in a very stylised outcome. The front view where the fringe is isn't too bad - it almost works especially matching the Dishonored concept art, but it looks far too noisy in the back. Sculpting Klaus' face was also very challenging. He ages in the film so in some references his face is longer and in others it is shorter so I was constantly shifting the proportions back and forth because it didn't look interesting enough for me. I learnt how to make collars which fold around a cylinder, I learnt how to boarder sculpts, and this was the first time I sculpted an ear! For my next project I will look into more toutorials and professional blogs so that I can learn how to make realistic hair, realistic eyes, and look into texturing in substance painted because this is yet another project which I feel it's textures let the project outcome down. I feel when sculpting I went into high polys too fast. I will make sure I stay low in budget for as long as possible in my future projects.

I'm personally unsatisfied with my project outcome because it isn't anywhere close to what I envisioned at the beginning of this project. if you overlook the I do see potential in what it could look like once I learn fibreshop and marmoset to make the hair and clothes look believable. The major problem is the texturing because it hides all of the details of the sculpt by going too dark in the clothing and then texturing the skin too simply to a level that doesn't make him look like he is alive. The likeness of his face could also be improved on a lot more.