Under the Sea
Hey Guys, Over the past two weeks, I was offered the opportunity to work on an Art Test for the video company Automaton. For those unaware, they are a Video games company based in Cambridge who are known for their survival horror game 'Deciet'.
I had 2 weeks to model this Mermaid, from creation all the way through to lighting and rendering. We had to create the top half, but any attempt at the tail would be a bonus for us.
Plan
I began the project with a work plan of action to access how I was going to tackle this project, it was a short project in comparison to what I have been used to, so I need to make sure I stayed structured and prioritized the important elements.
Reference
Afterwards, I began collecting reference images to guide me through the project and paint a picture of what the character would look like as a finished project. The model Amira Ahmed was the best example and perhaps the closest to the concept. I felt her complexion and body shape was closest to the concept and so I used her as the base inspiration for the mermaid.
Modelling
With the references pinned down, I could start modelling and sculpting the character. This wasn't too difficult as I had high quality reference images taken from different angles. Most importantly I already had a base mesh to work from and this certainly hastened the process.
I will admit the scale vest was a challenging process, especially as I had to place each scale in position for it to give the same tiling illusion as the reference I was working from.
Hair
Now Hair, was one of the hardest aspects of the project to tackle., especially as I hadn't worked on hair before to this degree and it was very unforgiving.
There was a lot of back and forth of whether I should create the hair using fibermesh, sculpted caps or alpha cards. After watching the Uncharted 4 Summit, I knew that Alpha card placement was the best method for this project. and Hoorah it worked.
After watching these tutorials to work from and I was able to create hair from alpha cards.
This was great news as Hair was something I had feared attempting for a long time so it was great to overcome this challenge.
Attempt 1 (the sculpted cap)
Attempt 2 (fibremesh)
Attempt 3 ( 3rd time lucky)
Chain
The chain caused a great deal of stress, simply because of how many iterations I needed to make in order to get it too look right. I was trying to imitate this reference, and to do so I needed to create an insert mesh brush of a chain link.
Skirt
The skirt was the bane of my existence throughout the whole project.
I was able to get it to look decent, however never had I experienced so many program crashes in my life.
Retop & Unwrap
With the sculpt complete, I could move onto retopologizing and unwrapping. This was a fairly smooth process, especially as I had modeled nearly all of the meshes and thus could use the lowest sub division as my low poly meshes and bake down.
Unwrapping proved a bit of a challenge at first, since I was not sure whether to split my texture sheets up or not. After some contemplation I decided to keep it all on one texture sheet in order to sho off my skills more.
Baking & Texturing
Polishing and rendering
Baking went very smoothly for this project. I used Substance Painter. I made sure the suffix for the lower and high poly matched and they all baked accordingly. For the hair, I baked the hair strands that I modeled in zbrush onto a plain in 3ds max and used it as an alpha.
Texturing was slightly more challenging as for one skin is never easy and furthermore, I hadn't textured in quite sometime so I was rusty. However, I followed a number of processes.
After my first attempt I reviewed it with my fellow peers and they were able to tell me where I was going wrong. It seemed that I did't really understand makeup and Her skin was too dark and could do with some more lightening.
My peer told me too look at these references to help me make the necessary improvements to my character.
And Voila I give you a mermaid:
I've learned so much from this project and this has been a great success for me! This has given me such a confidence boost for future projects. Bring it on!
