The Pirate Part 3 + More

 Since my last post, I've been working on and off on two things that will eventually come together as one experiment for realism and stylised texturing. I have finalized the stylised pirate head, which I intend to texture with realism and render with realistic lighting, and have also finished a realistic looking head which I intend to hand paint and use cartoon shaders to give a unique approach.

The pirate is finished with hair and eyebrows added in Maya, I will be texturing this guy in Substance Painter, as I feel as though I can get a nice looking realistic render from the software, over texturing it by hand. The hair will probably be the most difficult to get right, as I have purposely modeled it in a stylistic way in order to carry out the experiment I wish to do. 

I believe that a realistic render of this head will yield some strange looking results, yet also work quite well, as stylised realism is becoming very popular in modern gaming and animation.

Here is the high poly version of the head I'm going to render in a stylistic manner, a low poly version has been made and is ready to be baked onto. To create this head I used reference from my character from Red Dead Redemption 2 Online, and had front and side angles to capture the proportions correctly. The head needs to be baked as the final high poly model is roughly 25 million tris, while the low poly model sits around 17k.

I feel as though this will be a very interesting experiment, allowing me to truly see how much of a difference hand painting a realism can be with a character, rather than on a simple small object.

The Pirate Part 2

 During these last few days I've been cracking on with my essay, however every bit of free time I gave myself, I went back to the pirate to get the proportions more spot on. I've spent a good few hours just on those insanely triangular cheekbones alone just to get them right.

Since the last post, I've removed the eyebrows from the sculpt in order to do them separately or as a texture, I felt this would be the best way to get the shape of the head perfect without being overlooked by the eyebrows. There are definitely areas that still need some doing such as the the crease coming from the nose down the cheek, the nose tip, and defining the chin a tad more. Overall however I feel as though this is much closer to the character than it was in the previous post.

From the side too, the nose needs to be a bit more rounded up at the bottom. I did actually have this done however Zbrush crashed and reverted to a slightly older save, and I hadn't noticed the nose again. The jawline also needs to be brought down and made more angular to fit the character's profile better, but overall I'm happy with how this sculpt is turning out. This has taken me a lot longer than I anticipated when sculpting him, so this will be one of the final models for this semester if not the final model.

The Pirate Part 1

 This week I have really pushed myself further into Zbrush, and attempted to sculpt my pirate from Sea Of Thieves. Each pirate is randomly generated from a few set faces with varying factors in what is known as the infinite pirate generator. Each character is very stylised and fits perfectly into the world no matter what your pirate looks like. 

I spent a long time trying to get the proportions of the character right, with the extreme angle of the cheek bones being the most difficult area to get looking good. I chose to keep the mouth closed for my sculpt also, as I felt it would be easier for one of my first times sculpting a character.

There are still areas I could improve on for accuracy on the sculpt, as I've only spent one 7 hour session on him without coming back to it. I noticed when doing the skulls that coming back after being away from a sculpt helps you notice things you missed initially, such as the nose on the profile shot being out further on the character in game, and the jawline being straighter and higher up slightly. All of this will be sorted in the next session I do, and I can't wait to finish him to see how he looks. Usually my pirate in game wears face paint, tattoos and has a mohawk, however I took all of this off so that I can see how he looks plain and simple, and so I could get an accurate depiction of his head to model. Once the head is finished, I shall sculpt the hair as well.

Character in game