JaySuS Sketchbook of Love

[jaysus]

working on a new armor suit for Fallout 3 by bethesda softworks now, this time its an adaption of Masane Amaha's Armor from the anime Witchblade

i importet a body for that game, "quadified" it in max and then simply painted the armor ontop of it, i used layer and claytubes to create outlines, then filled those with clay to create mass and finally used flatten, flattenfinish and smooth to polish them until i achieved those hard edges

boots, gloves and several details are still missing

[jaysus]

im still working on that witchblade adaption, here comes a progress shot:



am still kinda clueless tho how i'll get those high heels in the game, they are not supported by the vanilla skeleton rig nor animations -.-, arrr, we'll see :P

[perpetual1969]

Nice work.

Groetjes Michael

[ABriglia]

Is a cool project. I did a model like this and modeling the volume of the suit was very funny and challenging. I have at home one of the resin statue of this character and help me a lot. If you don't have one you can find a good reference at

http://centurysendsavior.com/blog2/

In the old files. Good job and I hope to see more soon.

Alessandro
http://ziopredy.deviantart.com/gallery/
http://ziopredy.blogspot.com/

[jaysus]

thanks,
btw michael, are you the guy im making the rifle texture for atm? funny you found me here

@ABriglia
i actually didnt even know of that anime till this project started :/
watched some episodes now and its not that bad actually.
Its really a pleasure working on it to be honest, i kinda like working on the female form i guess
thanks for the link, however thats the same one i used as reference so far yet :P
sadly some parts are covered by her hair and i had to improvise alot on the back.

anyway,
im done modelling now and to my horror i had to realize that im not able to do much with it now. -.-
decimation master creates tris and needs perfectly clean geometry, mine is sculpted however and hence not perfect and thus DM doesnt create the edgeloops i need for the uv mapping which in turn i do need to seperate the elements to color them,
therefore im about to restart all over and use the mesh extraction method to generate subtools from the start and get much cleaner edges which DM cant mess up.
its a pity since it means many lost creditzzzz for the time i worked on it so far but i also learned alot once again and therefore think it was not all in vain.

here is a youtube turntable of the model which sadly is useless for my purpose of using it as a game asset without retopologizing it in max instead of zbrush and hence spending about the same amount of time i spend yet just to get it right, looks neat tho i think :P:

>>Turntable Video<<

[jaysus]

well extract mesh didnt work the way i wanted and hence i swapped over to the retopo tool... just finished reworking the geometry, however this tool must have been invented by some really cruel and mean person

-no edgeloop/ring, bridge or anything along those lines which would easen the workflow,
-vertices vanish quite regulary and the model needs to get rotated for them to reappear,
-why do i have to use ctrl all the time when i cross an intersection? now its only useful for people who like to create massive poles but not for clean quading
-clicking outside of the borders to rotate or move the model places a vertice, however clicking there with ctrl to mark a starting vertex does zip
-the output model changes size, position and its origin making it kinda hard to fit it back on a body again if one creates an armor piece or anythign else that needs to be aligned to another model that wasnt retopoed, that is probably due to the parent zsphere we need to create to retopo something but why do we have to rig it to a zsphere in the first place just to retopo it anyway?

i guess this part of zrbush could really need improvement, right now it simply takes too much time and is quite a hazzle... love it tho :P

[jaysus]

witchblade ingame screenshot (seems as if zbrush central doesnt like linked images):
http://fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/...1277264482.jpg

i finally got the witchblade armor finished and its ingame
(thats obviously a very ugly character i just quickly made for testing purposes , i hope to get some nice screenshots from the client soon)

in the end we decided to scrap the idea of a very clean surface and i added some wear and tear, also added purple glowing veins to give the whole thing a bit more "interestingness"

im working a lil on some sideprojects atm one of which is the following gun, i just finished the low poly stuff and am about to prepare it for export into zbrush, there are still some areas which need to be checked for ngons and stuff and i need to "equalize" the surface area for better sculpting results:

[jaysus]

upon popular demand () ill show a lil of the in-process screens from the witchblade,

this first one is a final shot of what i worked on for the final surface detail after i retopologized the base sculpt posted earlier in this thread:


assembled in 3dmax, ready for export into fallout3 it looked like that, you can also see the edgeflow here:


basicly i did the following:
-import an ingame body,
-sculpt the armor ontop of it,
-retopo cutting the non armor parts out
-uv mapping,
-sculpting final detail,
-creating the textures
-reassembling the whole thing (legs and arms are mirrored for example)

now back to my new rifle, i uvmapped it now and added the necessary edgeloops for zbrush to have a homogenous sculpting surface (of course the chamfered edges are annoying in this step but i simply hope that they wont screw up the total polycount to sculpt nicely on the main parts)

the rifle was divided into 3 parts, one for each texture i want to use (could also have gone with 2 or just 1)



now on to sculpting it

[jaysus]

after some first sculpting tests i came up with this, i guess the shape also looks good in 1st person view, not sure about color and so on tho, and yes the bipod looks unfunctional :P, feels wicked nevertheless

[jaysus]

allright, sadly i have to start over with the sculpting process due to the usual distortions zbrush likes to make, however i finally found the solution to my archenemy,
the mighty SUV button...

i still dont really understand what it does but in the end textures look right on the original low poly model and not the one zbrush wants to force on you if that button is activated before the first subdivision...

-----------------

what i still dont know how to solve is another strange problem, the handle of the rifle has the same poly layout on both sides (left and right), the uvmap is also totally the same, just mirrored, however, i wanted to add a structure to it and used the transform symetry thing to do both sides at once, the problem now is that one side is perfectly fine whilst the other is awkwardly distorted for some reason... how could that be if both sides are equal :? (i turned on backface masking for the brush i used just to be sure)

[jaysus]

so, finally i have the rifle ingame, ill prolly redo the textures tho, they are kinda plain imo... i also still need to improve my 1st person gun modelling i guess, its ok but not yet as nice as id like it to be or as it could possibly be...
fallout3 and the gamebryo engione also have a bunch of restrictions probably due to the nature of console game developement, for example is it utterly annoying to spend just as much time assembling the ingame model as texturing takes just to get the animations right... arrr... well... ill stop complaining just now :P

[jaysus]

created a new suit for Fallout:New Vegas, this time a Ninja Suit of some kind

used polygroups through masking (the layer brush somehow behaves wonky in polypaint for me) to establish the basic shape ontop of a modified for my needs vanilla body, retopologized it, added the spikes in 3dmax and uvmapped it there then started adding detail and polypaint in ZBrush again







an ingame screenshot at the nexus

[jaysus]

just a little doodle that i did during a boring trainride

[jaysus]

another commission for Fallout New Vegas, modelled in 3DMax, detailed in ZBrush, maps adjusted in Photoshop, rendered in 3DMax scanline, prepared for ingame use with nifskope
the reference was basicly only one photo of a small miniature pvc model the size of a pinhead hence left lots of room for details, also needed to get adjusted to fit ingame animations hence for example the forgrip which aint in any reference

[jaysus]

just a lil doodle to try out shadowbox and dynamesh... lovely