My Idea: 8/06/2020

To create a conceptualized dragon, set in crystallized cave.

To achieve this I want to explore more complex modelling with Z Brush.

I decided that rather than my original idea of making a gold chest, I would make this dragons den a quartz cave. As I find quartz a really interesting form.

-Below is my attempt at making quartz and duplicating it on my models mesh.

My process for completing my first asset/Milestone:

-Built base mesh in Maya

-Brought mesh to ZBrush, sculpted desired shape

-Retopologized mesh in Maya, with Quad-draw

-Added textures and lighting with hyper-shade in Maya

-Finished model ready for final scene

Thoughts on outcome and how I can improve for second Milestone (Dragon Model)

Overall I'm quite happy with the shape of my chest, but I felt like I rushed my texturing a bit. As I struggled to bring wood textures and alter them properly on my mesh. So when I combine this model in my final scene I want to unwrap my UV's and specifically focus on texturing the wood.

I am happy with how the quartz turned out but I felt like I did this process the most difficult way. If I have time I would like to redo duplicating my quartz, to add more depth.

Concept Sketches that a friend of mine did to help visualize what sort of dragon I want to create.

First initial stages of modelling my dragon model.

Moving forward with my project, I am aiming to learn more about ZBrush with focus on Re meshing and UV unwrapping my dragon head sculpt. Initially to bring straight into substance painter. As I have never used this program and I need to gain as much knowledge as I can. I will Unwrap the individual sub-tools (Top and Jaw) separate as this was how I modeled my head.

Overall very happy with how my head sculpt came out!

For the continuation of my second Milestone, I was determined to finish my dragons body sculpt to really challenge myself and learn new skills and techniques.

Modelling all the parts separately.

As I want to texture in substance painter, I have to retopologize my mesh to create a UV Map for texturing. I started out this process with the re-mesh in ZBrush. Which I had a bit of trouble grasping my head around. I watched some tutorials. But the end result was not what I was after. I ended up moving my original mesh from ZBrush to find another method of retopologizing in Maya. As I am more familiar with quad draw, however I am still at the beginner stage so I wanted to challenge myself with this re-mesh. 

So moving forward I have decided to retopologize in Maya and then create UV Maps in Maya to transfer into Substance painter.

For the rest of the topology I looked into Z brushes topology system as I wanted to spend more time of texturing in substance. So for this I duplicated all individual pieces, re-meshed them, then projected the original mesh onto the new low poly mesh. Once I was happy with the detail, I created UV's for the new mesh. Once I had created new low poly meshes and UV's for all of my pieces, I wanted to combine them together to make it easier to paint in substance.

Once I got used to the process, and successfully got it to work with my mesh, I decided just to go ahead with only the ZBrush re-mesh. But I'm glad I was able to try different methods of re-topology to see how each works best for texturing. 

To transfer my model into substance painter, I decimated my now retopologized mesh, with the connecting UV's in ZBrush.

UV unwrapping was done in Zbrush with then exporting the bump, normal's, metal and base colour maps through substance, in TIFF form to transfer them onto my mesh in MAYA, for the composition stage.

Importing them into Maya, I wanted to test the render with the textures from substance to see how they turned out. As I want to finalize the normal maps, emission, metalness and shine.

For the environment, I just wanted to create something easy and simple as I just want all the focus to be on the dragon in the final rendering.

Overall I'm so happy I managed to get to this point, as I've had to try different methods. Some of them were not that successful. But going forward I am confident I will be able to achieve my desired result. 

My next steps will be to simply rig the dragon in order to pose it.

Then to create a quick environment/lighting scene for the final render.

If I have time I want to create a quick sequence showing off my dragon and its detail.

I am so happy with how this turned out. And am super proud from what I have learned from using ZBrush and Substance painter. From being my first time using both software's, I still have much more to learn but with this project done I am way more confident in approaching new sculpts with these software's.