Additional Accessories

This week, I mainly focused on creating more of and adjusting Laudna’s existing accessories. I tweaked the size of her belt pouch after doing a side-by-side reality check of my model next to the concept art; this was frustrating in that scaling required me to re-simulate the entire pouch, which I had carefully forced into place previously. I then built her belt buckle using nearly all the same techniques I had done for her pair of scissors: sculpting in ZBrush with the same filigree nanomesh design, and textured in Substance Painter.

She has a wooden spool holding some sort of fabric on her belt, which I sculpted quickly in ZBrush. However, because I wanted a good layout for the woodgrain texture, it was time to figure out manual UVing in Maya. This was a good starter project for the subject, as it only had a few seams. I was then able to pull it into Substance Painter, apply a woodgrain texture, and export the height map as a displacement map back into ZBrush; this is going to be extremely useful for applying fine details physically onto my sculpts, a necessity for 3D printing where the texture can’t do any of the work.

With a quick texture created in Substance, I pulled my accessories back into Marvelous so that I could simulate fabric interacting with them. I wrapped strips of fabric around the spool and created a ‘holder’ for the scissors. This is going to be an extremely useful thing to know in future if I ever need custom avatars or even want to sculpt solid supports for garments.

Finally, I went into Photoshop and actually sat down to create a texture for the embroidery design on the front of her shirt. This involved a lot of back-and-forth between Marvelous and PS, but I’ve managed to make a fairly accurate design that I can hopefully use to create raised embroidery with.

Putting it all together

Here’s where I’m at from this week! I’ve made major improvements to the overall silhouette and the piece is really starting to come together now that I can see the basic fabric textures.

Bibliography

Friederichs, H. (2021). Laudna Character Portrait – Critical Role. [Image]. Available at: https://critrole.com/hype-check-out-our-official-campaign-3-character-art-by-hannah-friederichs-and-jrusar-art-by-clara-daly [Accessed: 4 November 2021].