I’ve been trying out making some stylized models lately (mostly a few handpainted weapons that I never posted as they just weren’t up to snuff IMO). Anyways I figured I’d try making a stylized asset utilizing sculpts and PBR as that is closer to what I usually do (somewhat realistic weaponry and vehicles).
So I decided to base the model on a concept by the ever so popular Artyom Vlaskin and here is what it looks like right now (latest progress attached below in the post):
The polycount lies at 3855 tris (for each sword) and it’s using a set of 512*1024 textures. The render is from Marmoset Toolbag 2.
I’ve still got a bunch of stuff to do like adding more grunge and wear but overall I’m liking where it’s going. So far I’ve mostly worked on the blade but the other parts will get some love soon as well. I’ll probably end up resculpting the skulls teeth to be more pronounced as the texture resolution wasn’t quite high enough to capture details that small.
I haven’t done much stylized work before so any critique and comments regarding that would be appreciated (any and all other critique would of course also be appreciated as well).
What is your workflow for the PBR textures? How are you rendering it? (I’m assuming Marmoset?)
I’ve been trying to learn the process for creating PBR, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. It’d be great to hear about that from a fellow blender user!
Thanks, as mentioned above I am indeed using Marmoset Toolbag 2.
To be honest there is not all that much of a difference with using PBR from the older pre-PBR methods. I’m using the metalness workflow which means you don’t need fiddle around with energy conservation which you’d need to do if you were to use a dedicated specular map. You should also separate the baked textures a lot more (i.e don’t overlay cavity/occlusion over you albedo/diffuse). Other than that there isn’t all that much to talk about specifically about the PBR side (feel free to be more specific if you want to know more).
I sent a PM already, but could someone please move this thread to Focused Critique as that is where I originally wanted to add this thread? I had multiple tabs open which lead to me accidentally hitting the add new thread button in the wrong section. Sorry about the hassle.
Hello Nosslak. I d like to add a bit to this discussion. The weapon is very good. Watching it I want to take it and to… sort of… play with it, or pierce a sack of corn. Looks realistic to me. Only thing i d do is the blood thing… I think you might mix up some sort of clots to it - or could you somehow express the dissimilar density. Otherwise it doesnt look quite like blood.
Thanks a lot! I agree that the blood does need some more work and I might change the splatter pattern a bit as well. By clots I assume you mean something like the bubbles in this, but I am not sure what you mean about the density thing. Do you mean that the blood should smooth out the underlying surface as it is quite thick? If so I did consider blurring the normalmap underneath the blood but then forgot all about it. I could also make the normal effect of the blood stronger so it looks like it’s thicker.
Yes, you are almost there… I can remember my thoughts when I saw one cg bloody sword. The blood looked quite like a rust. I think its is the matter of time and is due to blood ability to curdle. thats why i thought of nonsimilar phase liquid. never mind.
I tried adding some clots to the blood but I couldn’t seem to get it to work well with the stylization I’ve got going on so I ended up skipping those. I did however do a full remake of the blood where I changed the shape of it, the color, the normal depth and pretty much everything else. Tell me what you think:
I also rebaked all the textures which fixed the few, somewhat hidden, baking errors I had along with the skulls non-existing mouth.
I’m not sure there’s a lot more to actually improve upon, so if no one has any more feedback I might just call this done.
Bloody sword! ! ! Maa.a.A.nn, this is stuckin bloody sword! Yeah this looks like blood, though, maybe a few tweaks were done to it, but these were decisive for the succes. Im totally buying it now.
