This week I have done lots of work on detailing as well as reworked the hand I did last week. I plan to finish this high poly over the break, as well as this hand. So while I haven't finished the hand, I have deleted and laid out some new plans to start over on the hand as I am not happy with how it turned out. Everything else is pretty much ready to go, as it just needs some additional damage and detailing.
I also started using a new retopology technique this week. While I haven't tried it on this current project, I actually tested my retopology on an entirely different project for a class. I consider this research for this project. I wanted to start this technique somewhere else so I could learn a bit about the workflow and how it is done. More details on that will be shared later.
This first section covers how I am restarting this hand piece. I am breaking up the fingers into different elements. The finger segments are split up from their segments, where before I mostly duplicated them which didn't achieve a very cohesive look that resembles the concept art.
The pieces are now broken into the first digit, which includes the knuckle. I now realize these are part of the same structure, so I made that part resemble the concept art more. This will have a housing inside of the hand, which I also plan to redo, as I'd like to achieve a more spherical shape and then extrude for the armor plating. The other digits are laid out, housed in their knuckles, and them shaped with the move, dam standard, and HPolish brushes. I will do this separately for each finger as each finger has a different length and shape. There are three fingers total. The workflow I originally did was counter intuitive as it was hard to place and iterate on fingers once they were placed. This was mostly due to the fact that ZBrush's local symmetry systems are not very reliable. I am trying my best to maintain poseable and translatable symmetry, however I am not using a workflow that isolates a finger, places it in the world center for symmetry, and then I combine with polygroups for an easier placement. This way I can separate joints out later if I need to. I plan to finish this process over break as working on the hand is going to take a lot of focus.
I spent most of my work this week detailing and cleaning up what I had for my finished pieces. I moved down from the core into the hip and leg region. There was some cohesivity problems in the hip, as well as some new pieces I didn't realize I would need to be added. Area's like the hip joints needed more definition and detail to describe the mechanisms, which wasn't described in the concept art, so much of this was thought up by me.
The photo above to the left really shows this well. There are joints and connections being made by the fibrous muscles of the thigh to the hip joints, that all shares and carries forms and shapes into each other so that these forms actually look nice with each other. This process was slow due to me overlooking it earlier, however I like the result I achieved.
The same can be said for the back of the hips, as now it is finished and ready to be explored and looked at by viewers. Before this was rough and undefined, so things were vague and hard to see how this robot functioned. Now however there is a lot of definition that brings a really clear understanding to the shapes. Lots of the connections between pieces required housings and indents to be built so that things didn't look like they simply intersected each other.
Next I moved down the leg, where plenty of detailing was added. I added some stylized and simply fibrous textures to the muscle of the leg, as well as some cool metallic implants that are shown through the reference. I am really happy with how the thigh is now housed in the knee joint.
It's also worth noting that I revisited the core to add even more detail. Things that intersect with each other have dents and spaces carved out for each other so things look seamless and more realistic.
This project is really wrapping up to look great. All I now need to do is finish the hand, as well as clean up, detail, and add damage to the arms, chest, neck, back, and head. There is also one final piece I would like to add to the back to bring more cohesivity to the design. Then I will be ready to quickly retopologies, pose, and texture.
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