4/14/2023:
This week I worked on the hall illustration and then worked on the hair for the character sculpt. While working on the hair sculpt I created a quick little diagram of what the characters hair looks like from different angles in the two main styles.
On the character sculpt I started with the messier long hair version. In case we decide to start jumping into the more creature-y Mothman design I thought that having the shapes of the shaggier hair would help inform choices made on the transformed look. I've mostly worked on the shape of the pieces in the front and I'm working on filling in the back.
4/20/2023:
This evening I started work on building a procedural brush stroke material to serve as the base layer for texturing assets. I researched how to build painterly brush stroke materials in Substance Designer with tile generators. While our group could hand paint each object I think it would be much more cohesive if everyone who textures an object has an easily programable base that gives every object the same general pattern. Within the node graph so far there are inputs for brush stroke alphas, stroke length/width, stroke warp, overall brush stroke flow/direction and warp by noise generators, color variation, color gradient. All of these can be exposed to be adjusted on the fly with Substance Painter per each asset.
Here is a basic test version of the material application on a table asset modeled by Carl Kinyon. I hope to be able to add additional layers on to the base material that could adjust the color of the brush strokes and make them darker with an AO map, or add stylized edge wear by adding lighter brush strokes along geometry edges by curvature and determine brush stroke length/width by normal tangents maybe? I'm not sure how I would do that in practice but I can conceptualize it in my mind. Another thing that could be adjusted by specific asset could be brush stroke direction. I imagine being able to input an image of wood grain into the Substance Painter file under an exposed parameter for brush stroke direction and being able to emulate wood grain but in a painted way. This could be changed based on what the material of the asset is supposed to be (wood, metal, paint, etc.)
This is an ideation sketch layer I've manually drawn myself in Substance Painter on top of the material but I imagine the adjustable parameters for edge wear, ambient occlusion controlled darker brush stroke shadows, and directional inputs for things like wood grain looking like this: (hopefully less janky and nicer looking than my 2 minute doodle)
I made this quick demo video showing off the basic functionality of the brush stroke tiling tool I found on the Adobe Designer tips website which I have tweaked a bit and hopefully can continue to refine to match our desired aesthetic.
I'm trying to figure out how to make adjustable parameters that we can easily iterate on to find a unique look influenced by our style direction. Over the course of the semester and last semester in Pre-Production I worked on saving a lot of art direction materials for texturing which I've been referencing for the general look. The stylized direction of Arcane, Puss in Boots, and The Tall Grass are big influences from recent media, but I think that for a *unique* approach that is special to our specific story we could look more at painting styles from art history. I think having some cool texturing combined with some post-processing work could create something really special and new in terms of a visual style.
I made an abbreviated version of some of the best examples off of our Miro inspo board for the sake of the production pass to demonstrate the difference between the texturing on hero objects/characters and background sets, compared with the quick R&D I've done for
For the texturing on hero objects I tried applying the concept art image directly on to some geometry for the paint palette but I feel like it could use a lot of work to make it feel like it has more wonk and dimension to it rather than being flat. I'm not sure if this is a viable option for every hero object in the short through because that requires hand painted concept art for each object or entirely hand painting in Substance and I'm not sure if that is something that is the most time efficient. My biggest concern is finding a way to texture that can be consistently applied by anyone on my team interested in doing asset texturing regardless of Substance Painter/Designer skill level.
4/20/2023:
Today I worked more on the character sculpt. I separated all the hair pieces into polypainted sections so that I could more easily see what is going on with each piece. I imagine when the model is finished it will be supplemented with hair cards for little wispy pieces and the hair pieces will have nice geometry so they can be rigged so it isn't just a stationary helmet of hair. Our group decided that if none of us is particularly interested in being a character fx artist that we might steer clear of hair sims but I guess we will see how that turns out. I personally believe geometry hair can look nice if done right but I'm just really trying to feel things out at the moment. I
I previously got notes on the face profile and trying to spice it up some more but I'm not really sure how. There's a lot of things I still am working towards checking off my list to address but the thing that jumps out at me the most at the moment is that the front of the collar is too far forward but when I push it back it doesn't line up with the concept art as well which kinda plays with the scale/shape of things. I need to figure out how to address that.
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