Toph
Here's my third project! Toph from Avatar. This is a rendition of her more of a late teen to young adult age. The armor look is meant to play with the idea of her coming into her own as a metal bender, eventually leading to the founding of Zaofu.
This took a bit longer than I wanted, 9 weeks, where Katara took a little less than 8. I definitely see miles of improvement here though, especially with textures. At about 140K quads across 7+ textures, I gotta focus more on optimizing.
I might take some time to do quicker process sculpts, rather than full pipeline work, just to build up actual sculpting skills. I am quite happy with the turnout on this one.
Cycles
Eevee
Cycles
Eevee
ZBrush Sculpt - Blocking
ZBrush Sculpt - Design Pass. A lot of this doesn't show in the final render, but it was good practice making different types of meshes. Initially used MicroPoly for the chainmail but found just using a texture worked a lot better.
Retopo in Blender. Still need to get better at spacing and not overdoing the poly amount, but overall feeling a lot more comfortable with the tools and workflow.
This was a lot of fun. Really dove into using different alphas, layering different noise values and such. Probably spent too much time here for what I ended up with but I learned a whole lot.
Studying skin was daunting at first, but once I got into it this might have been my second favorite step next to the alpha work. Really happy with the results in Substance.
Did a lot of tests with maps, but went too big at first. With 7+ texture sets and starting at 8K, I realize I gotta get it down to 1 or 3 sets and 4K would be more than fine.
I can use a lot more practice with hair shaders, but I wanted to make my own textures and found really good material from Ambience Lee on making them in Substance Designer. Needless to say I'll be try that method again!
