Creative Portfolio Development

Dishonored Bust - Final Touches I made some finishing touches to my Dishonored style bust before I went on to rendering.    Firstly I added some extra details to the outfit, giving it some buttons and straps etc as I felt it looked too empty before.   Secondly, I added the eyebrows to the face, just by sculpting directly onto his head. I also modeled in the pupil and iris to the eyes as this helped give the character a stern gaze. Here is the final sculpt rendered in ZBrush.

Dishonored Bust - Creating the Outfit From the busts I researched, all the clothing was really chunky and basic. I felt this clean, crisp clothing style really fit well with a clay render and was the look that I wanted to go for. Dave Whitaker                           James W Cain Adam Fisher The above images are from 3 different artists, each with their own interpretation of a Dishonored bust. I used images such as these and also in-game screenshots of clothing to base my sculpt off of. I experimented with a couple of ideas for the outfit and decided to keep it really simple and basic. After playing around with some rough concepts I came up with the combination shown below. I liked the high collars as they complemented the slender face of my character.

Dishonored Bust - Refining the Hair The hairstyle is important as it can totally change the look of the overall character. I made sure to not change the base shape drastically and frequently used reference of the hair I was going for.  The style I was going for was a mixture of these two images. I wanted to keep the original concept of Chris Pratt in the hairstyle but stylise. The two screenshots below are early stages of the haircut. I noticed that the strands were too uniform and didn't stray off enough. I added more variation in direction and sharpened the edges more for the final hair which gave me the outcome shown below.

Dishonored Bust - Sharpening the Features Below is a comparison of the face before and after I chiseled the features. I added more forehead creases to make the character look tougher and angrier. I also thinned down the hair at the sides to make his head thinner as it looked too chunky before. The next stage will be to go in and refine the hair and sculpt in the hair clumps.

Cyborg Alien Bust - Final Textures Above are the final rendered shots of my cyborg alien bust rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.

Dishonored Bust - Refining the Style After I had blocked out the main landmarks of the head I moved onto changing the proportions and exaggerating the facial  features  more to get closer to the Dishonored look. I also made a start on the hair as this really changes the look of a character would need to look right to fit in with the bust.                                                                                                                         

Dishonored Bust - More Sculpting As I continued sculpting, I constantly used my chosen reference to get the main features of the face in.  I decided to start the sculpt fairly realistic, and then change the proportions and stylise it more to fit dishonored later on when I had the base anatomy blocked in.     

Cyborg Alien - Details I wanted the alien to look rough and aged so I made his skin dry and cracked. To achieve the look I wanted it was just a case of layering up multiple layers of different skin textures. For the eyes, because I had previously modeled in the cornea separately to the eyeball, I could give the cornea it's own reflective texture so that it resembled a more realistic eye.

Cyborg Alien - Beginning the Texturing I started off with the texturing by layering up the skin tones using separate layers for the reds, yellows and blues that are found in human skin, known as the 'colour zones'. I continued this technique throughout the body. I also exported all of the textures I had at this point into Marmoset Toolbag as seen below. It was important to do this early on so that I could test the textures out in real-time and make sure everything was looking right.

Dishonored Bust - Sculpt Start To make my second piece of CPD work more efficient, I started the sculpt from a base mesh which I had made previously. This allowed me to concentrate purely on the design of the characters face, rather than having to spend time blocking out a new head. Above is a timelapse of the initial sculpting stages. 

Cyborg Alien - UVs After finishing the unwrapping, I packed the UVs for each texture set. Below are the packed UV maps alongside the corresponding texture sets they're assigned to on the model. For the eyeball, I just unwrapped one and then mirrored so that they shared the save UVs to save on texel space.

Dishonored Bust - Moodboard I chose to use Chris Pratt as the celebrity to use as a guide when creating my bust as I thought he would look good in the style of Dishonored as I could accentuate his features. For the bust, I decided to create a clean, clay render sculpt as after researching and finding other Dishonored sculpts, I thought these really stood out and looked great. I collated many images referencing both Dishonored 1 and 2 cahracters, other artist's bust renders and Chris Pratt images and put the most used ones into their own moodboard so I could make a good start.   I had plenty more reference images which I used along the way, this is just a moodboard of the most frequently used images.

Unwrapping When it came to unwrapping the alien bust, I decided to split the textures up into 4 UV sets. I first unwrapped the whole model and then created a texture set for the head, the body, the armour and the eyes. In order for these texture sets to be recognised in Substance Painter, I had to give each texture set it's own material so that Painter would know it had a separate UV. Above is the UV checker pattern used to check the UVs weren't stretched and to help maintain even texel density across the mesh. Below is the retopologised mesh with the four texture sets split up by material.

Dishonored Style Bust For the second part of my Creative Portfolio Development piece I will be creating a high poly bust of a character in the style of Dishonored. For the character reference, I want to create a more unique face rather than directly using a previous model or concept art from the Dishonored franchise.  I started off by using a celebrity that I could find multiple pictures of to use as a good starting point and then tweak features and change proportions to break away from the likeness and make the sculpt feel like it could belong in the Dishonored universe.