Meet Meat
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Meet Meat
Meet Mat 4
by mashroomash on 1 Oct 2024 for Meet Mat 4 - The 3D Digital Painting Contest - Open Category
Hi, I am Mary and this is my first time entering this contest. I've been using Substance Painter for about a month now, mostly to do stylized textures. Before I used only texture nodes in Blender. So I want to learn and try something new for this contest.
Update - 1 Oct 2024
Hi, I am Mary and this is my first time entering this contest.
I've been using Substance Painter for about a month now, mostly to do stylized textures. Before I used only texture nodes in Blender, so I am not really good at it. So I want to learn and try something new for this contest.
The Idea
Oh, it’s the fun part:
As I haven’t really worked much with displacement (only used maps from ZBrush before), this was my first idea. I’ve made a little sketch and gathered all the references for sculpting. Because I wanted to make a high-res version in ZBrush, use the displacement, and bake all the maps from there to the original mesh.
But then, after reading about it a little, I realized that it can’t be more than a 90º angle. And I think it was quite fun cause, of course it can’t be more than 90º, it would’ve been impossible to display such a thing on a 2D image you use as a map.
Or maybe I am wrong, then sorry, and please correct me! Because even so I’ve done some tests, I wouldn’t say I fully understand how it works.
So, after that, I planned to make just a sea-diver without the tentacles, but I wasn't fully happy with the idea.
And then, I was lucky to come up with a new one, that I really like - some kind of a ribcaged heart.
The Concept
I wanted to make him look like meat and bones, but so he still be cute and not gross. So I decided to make the body fully from bones and the head is a mix of a brain and a heart caged in ribs.
I gathered the references and made a sketch again.
For the texture references I've added some meat paintings, again, to not make him look gross.
Update - 10 Oct 2024
Displacement
At first, I wanted to try to make everything using just Substance Painter but soon realized that I wouldn't be able to create a proper heart shape for the displacement as I can't even make a smooth sphere.
So I decided to sculpt it in ZBrush (it's just a draft because I wanted to test it first) and project the depth map from the front face render to the Mat. But even after tweaking levels and increasing the height strength it remained too flat.
Maybe I could have fixed it by increasing the contrast in Photoshop, but I decided to try baking the height map from the sculpt.
The main reason I haven't done it earlier is that I didn't know that you can do it, as I have never used that map during the baking process before.
The result is not perfect, I need to fix those seem lines (updated: I couldn't fix them), but except them, I really like how it is turning out.
So, now I'm going to sculpt all the other parts and the details for baking.
Update - 14 Oct 2024
I still don't know how to fix those seem lines.
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High-poly
I've sculpted the high-poly version in ZBrush except for the brain part which I did with the Substance Painter path tool because I wanted to be able to adjust it easily.
Texture bakes
As the ribs and arms interacted with the body, I had to separate them during the baking process. Then I combined the separated texture maps in Photoshop and used them as bake maps for the original mesh.
I've made two versions of the head because I didn't know which one was better.
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Then I started the head texturing.
And I still don't know how to fix those seem lines.
Update - 21 Oct 2024
The final renders
Some more renders
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Just for fun
I couldn't help making this little animation. Because when you have a heart how can you not make it beats? And I was tired of all the texturing failures I had during this project.
I know that for the contest you can't modify the mesh, so this is just for fun.
Mostly I've changed only the displacement strength. And separated the head and the base for the last part.
- [8] Meet Mat Animation
Textures
The hardest part (not counting the displacement) was to match colors of the body, ribs and their tips.
Albedo, normals, roughness, SSS and height
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I ended up not using the coat.
Displacement again
Even though I used the same displacement map for both methods, with the texture displacement, I had those overlapping parts and strange holes. However, these issues were easy to fix just by changing the method from the texture displacement to the displacement modifier.
Conclusions:
- Displacement is hard and I need to better figure it out as well as texture baking. Also I still don't know how to make cage files.
- I like animation more than texturing even though texturing is really fun too.
- I need to have a better file organization system because I had some problems because of that.
- I need to try adding more details and colors to my textures (and make them higher quality so I can make close-up shots) to make them more realistic. Because my Mat still looks less realistic than I wanted him to.
Not 3D related:
Also, I wanted to say that I really enjoy reading (or watching) different 3D project breakdowns and presentations, with all the screenshots, notes, etc. So I wanted to make my updates somewhat like that. And I've literally never made any sort of presentations, so I couldn't even think that it could be that hard (or maybe it isn't hard and it's just that I am a noob). I still think that I could've added a lot more text, but during this project, I had so many back-and-forth adjustments that I already can't really tell what and why I've done in the right order. So for my next project I will be shure to take notes on everything to be able to make a kind of presentation I'd like to read myself. And maybe I need to improve my graphic design skills too.