FMP: Lady of the sword - Retopology

The next step in my process was retopologising the high poly mesh. The whole process of retopology+UVs took me 6 days, since I tend to either retopologise subtools at an early stage inside Zbrush or start from a low poly mesh in 3ds Max.
The hair and the wing were probably the trickiest parts I had to figure out. The hair was made out of individual strands, made with a curve insert brush in Zbrush. They all had subdivision histoy, but even at the lowest level the mesh was a bit too high. So I proceeded to retop it manually,  with extra care for the hair strands that were detaching from the mesh.
Since the wing was supposed to have some thickness, I could not use an alpha for it - I needed actual geometry. I used the same approach and in the end I managed to get rid of most of the triangles.

FMP: Lady of the sword - Sculpture

The first project that I chose to tackle was the stylized one. (concept by Taras Susak) I started with a reference sheet and a rough sketch drawn over the original concept, to gain a better understanding of how I could solve some of the areas that were not clear enough or not visible.

I tried to stay true to the concept as much as possible and add/remove/replace elements without changing the overall silhouette too much. One of the main issues were the baggy pants the character is wearing. At first I was not aware of the problem, but one of my tutors pointed out how they would cause clipping when  animating the character. Instead, I made the pants a little tighter around the thighs and added an extra piece of armour in the front to keep the general shape.
An issue I did not manage to solve completely was the positioning of the wing/shield. In the concept, the wing would not allow the character to move her right arm. In an attempt to solve that, I decided to make the inner part (where the wing connects) end just above the elbow. Even though it was a decision that made perfect sense to me, it resulted in a series of problems. It changed the positioning of the shield a little. Consequently, I could not make the cape connect to the wing in the same way and I decided to get rid of it completely.
The sculpting process took me around one week to complete, with an additional 2-3 days to polish, name and organize the subtools accordingly.

Helmet Character

Unfortunately, I could not change the textures much, since I have an older version of Substance Painter. Instead, I painted an additional roughness breakup layer in Photoshop.
I had an attempt at making the cape shorter, but I could not make the UVs fit the UVs of the long version of the cape. I felt like doing a high and low poly shorter cape, baking it, texturing it and then combining the texture maps in Photoshop would be a little too much for me right now.
I also tweaked the setting a bit and this is the final result!

SoT Props Brief - finalizing

I wanted to separate the props and put each one on an individual texture sheet, but I realized that means I should rebake and retexture them. Instead, I spent some time refining the existing textures.

I tried to break the the continuous lines and make the edges look as interesting as I could and I also tried to erase the artifacts caused by the curvature generator. For example, on the back of the hurdy gurdy, the small red spots are caused by the fact that I decimated the high poly asset too low, and the curvature didn't bake correctly. Now I know for sure I won't repeat this mistake!
I didn't change the final shot too much. Here it is:

Sunset Overdrive Character Brief - hair and final tweaks

 Here is the final outcome of the project! It was an exciting process. I enjoyed it very much and I feel like I learnt a lot.

During the first week of the winter break I worked on the hair. It took me quite a bit to learn how to use Xgen. At first, it seemed unachievable since I had never even opened Maya before, and every tutorial I tried following discouraged me even more.

At some point, I found a very useful tutorial (link). I managed to generate a hair strand and render the albedo and alpha maps. Also, this article helped me a lot with generating the rest of the maps, as well as creating the hair material in Marmoset. (link)
Everything else was pretty straight forward. I arranged all the hair cards manually in 3ds Max, making use of the freeform tools.

1. AO  2. Albedo  3.Direction  4.Normal  5. Specular  6. Opacity

After the character was finished, I went on to create the prop. I decided it would be a guitar, as in the original concept and I opted for a BC Rich Warlock, since it has a really cool design. I modelled it in max, baked and textured it in Substance.

I  tried posing my model differently (as in the concept), but the pose looked unnatural and it didn't really fit the plain expression of her face. So I went for something basic.
i found it hard to decide on the lighting scenario. In the beginning, I went for something resembling studio lighting, but I experimented quite a lot with it and came up with some stage-like lighting.
Overall, I am pretty happy with the way this project came out.