NEW 3D ART OUT [PROCESS EXPLAINED]

It has been some time since my last upload to NEWGROUNDS. I have not forgotten about you, I promise. Lately I've been studying 3D and, luckily for me, also started to work as a 3D artist at my favourite VFX company Important Looking Pirates. This has taken up quite a bit of my free time, but the urge to create fun internet stuff is still there.

Image of the tortoise.
Final render of Tore. Y'know the tortoise?

The new 3D art the title tells about is of a tortoise. A tortoise named "Tore", more specifically. This has been a project to train some creature sculpting in Zbrush, and how a Zbrush to Mari workflow could work. I learned a lot.

Basically I started to block it out in Maya. At this stage it looks ugly, but is easy to handle due to the extreme "low-poly-ness" of it all. I can freely change the proportions without any hassle. This is then exported into Zbrush. Here the highpoly-tortoise is made. A lowpoly version is also created with nice UVs. By using polygroups and the built-in UV-creator in Zbrush this was a neat not too hairpulling process. If I'd try making the UVs in Maya, it would most likely not be slow... it would be super slow. At least it has been in the past when creating UVs for quite highpoly meshes. Note that this lowpoly tortoise is still a pretty heavy dude. Not the neatest for the machine.

After the low- and highpoly have been exported, xNormals was used to bake bump, AO, e.t.c. This since this beast of a program can handle being thown crazy highpoly objects. Cool. Now Mari comes into the picture. I didn't use any images for texturing, besides from alphas and brushes. This is a "hand painted" project in many ways. Well... besides the generated masks. Mari is a great program but sucks at generating interesting masks. Seeeegway to Substance Painter. A program increasingly more and more fitting for VFX-work. After some cool masks were generated this was all sent into C4D where it was lit and rendered with my favorite: Octane. Oh, octane. You can manage to render even the highpol stuff on a potato without every frame taking hours.

Turntable of tortoise.

It was a neat project to play around with. Since I might put this in a showreel at some point, I thought I should make a quick render of it as well. Static images do often not work that great in a showreel. At least that's my opinion.

If you have any questions just ask away in the comments below! Please check this artwork out on its "actual" page here at NEWGROUNDS (always looks cooler in caps) and give it a rating. Hopefully a good rating. Thank you and good bye!

https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/carr77/tore-the-tortoise

Comments

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Cyberdevil 2018-10-29 17:07:20

Does it look this great from all angles? This is really cool. Really detailed. Question: how much time does something like this really take? And: why Tore?

Turtles are cool and all but is there a story here?

Carr77 2018-10-29 17:07:20

Yeah, it looks pretty neat from all angles! Takes some time to cover everything, I mean it would be quicker to just focus on one angle. But I guess that ruins it a bit. It's always cool to get different angles when something is in 3D. Otherwise you could've just done it in 2D. The entire cool thing about 3D in my opinion is that you then can fly around with the camera and find different fun angles.

The exact time is a bit hard to say since I split it up and worked a little bit a few days here and there over a long period of time. But I'd maybe say... 10 min for blocking it out. Since I tried some new stuff the sculpt and that took a bit longer than it should've. Maybe 6-8 hours for the sculpt? It's hard to tell since this been a "background project" for quite some time. UV and baking 1-2 hours maybe. Texturing in Mari maybe 4 hours? Substance 30 min. Then putting the scene together and that 4-5 hours. That last step really shouldn't have taken that long, but I had a few technical problems, and my C drive on my computer started to freak out a lot which affected all the programs. It was hell xD But then it suddenly stopped, so I guess that's great. Next time it'll hopefully go quicker when it comes to the sculpt and render process.

Tore! I first thought of "Ture" which sounded good in Swedish but didn't really work that well in English imo. "Tore" worked better. And it fit with "tortoise".

Thank you for your comment :D

Cyberdevil 2018-10-30 07:03:43

For sure, though when the camera only pans from one side... you wonder. :) It'd be cool if there was an easy way of exporting a 3D model so everyone could move it around and see it from all sides, like you can do with 360 degree videos now. It shouldn't be that hard to do something similar for images should it?

Ah good thing the C drive calmed down! So all in all... ca 15 hours? That's pretty solid work. :O

Aha. XD Alright, can relate! Thought it might have something to do with Thor. :) Always fun to stumble upon a fellow Swede here.

Carr77 2018-10-30 07:03:43

Yeah, I didn't spend too much time rendering different angles since it was a test/first try. But there's a GIF in there with a turntable. I did render one extra image I never poster here as well, and it's from the other side:

https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/013/615/913/large/charlie-raud-otherside.jpg?1540410034

Technically I could set it up in a way so you could spin it as you talk about with Marmoset toolbag or Sketchfab. Then it would be rendered in real time (like a video game).The problem is that these work the best for game assets, and not VFX, since I do a lot of node based modifications to the materials in the render that simply wouldn't work in a real-time rendered environment. But the idea of rendering a 3D "snapshot" is interesting. I dunno, maybe that's something I could look into in the future. But for now it's mainly the turntable and that extra rendered image. :)

Yeah, I'd guess around 15 hours. But then I only count "active work". For an example, when xNormals is baking all the maps it can take quite some time. Same goes of course with render time when I render the images and animations from C4D. I didn't count that, since it's basically just waiting and not active work.

Haha, yes. Vi svenskar finns ju lite överallt ;)

Cyberdevil 2018-10-31 06:40:08

Indeed, good GIF, just wish: that format, you know?

Thanks for that! Solid work. Without the background it almost seems... more wholesome somehow... smooth.

Aha, so there are ways. Would that be exportable somehow? As a standalone executable maybe...? Yeah if you ever create such a format I think you'd be remembered. :) That'd be really cool. I have no idea where to even start with something like that. No know-how how.

All that time we spend waiting on them computers... when they speed up so much there's no pause time within the more monotone tasks though you almost miss it. :) Like opening Excel these days: it's too fast!!!! Also good to know!

Det gör vi ja! :D Där man minst anar det. Förresten, Charlie, är det kanske ett förengelskat namn det? Kalle, karl? Kom på att det var ju lite internationellt det.

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