Thursday, May 15, 2014

Fauntastical Creature Workflow







Took a while to get this post together, but it's finally here. Thank you for your patience if you've been waiting.

The faun is a character I came up with while I was sculpting in Zbrush to learn more techniques and workflows in the creature concept pipeline. A class I took from the Gnomon Master Classes also inspired this quick project. I had no idea what I wanted to make, I just knew I wanted to focus on making a bust (head to shoulders) of a creature. Pretty soon at one point, it started to go in a certain direction where it was starting to look more like a cat or a deer. Then I wanted horns. So it eventually turned into a faun!




Gathering reference of goats. I also looked up the faun character from Pan's Labyrinth and other artists' interpretations for inspiration.


Gathering more reference of skin patterns for painting the skin.
I painted the skin with Polypaint.

And more reference gathering for the horns.

Testing out the skin texture with different materials. I liked this one too because I was able to really see the surface detail. 
Eye reference gathering. And always SAVE your work!

Masking for posing. Learned this technique from Neville Page's Master Class.
When posing, I used layers so that way I could turn off the pose if and when I needed to. I could also revert back to the default pose instead of Undoing it. When masking, it helps to be on your lowest Subdivision because you can get a smoother transition at the bend points, then upresing after the posing. I didn't have my lowest subdiv any more so I had to play with the mask a bit more to get a nice falloff in the neck area where I was rotating the head. I really wanted to be picky with this because I didn't want to have to clean up the neck area later. I mean, have you ever seen someone turn their head to the right to sport a jagged piece of their neck jutting out? No. Yeah, I didn't want that.

Test pose!
 So I did all that masking work when in the end I went with a pose that was very subtle. Just something that took it out of digital symmetry worked for me.
Testing the lighting.


Rendered out numerous amounts of passes to have more control when I later composite them together in Photoshop.





I built upon layers and layers to achieve an intricate pattern for the eye since it was just going to be driven by the colors only and no sculpted detail.






Zbrush Timelapse



The Making of the Faun - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNv-wkbW1H8&list=UULWlWRytzPTq-hye2SqKDZw


It's possible that I will add more to this post in the future.