Vendula Gresova - 3D Artist

Hi all! This is my personal progress diary where I post my WIPs, finished work and tips for you!

[artofvendy]

Old Man Sculpt WIP

Hi everyone! I am doing an anatomy study. I started with this idea that I had while falling asleep one night “his face was so skinny, it almost looked like a skull.” It’s still so far from my original idea, but I am not super skilled in sculpting, so I am practicing still. I am lying in anatomy books all the time, trying to get stuff right. I started this sculpt from a classic sphere and pulled and pushed to make this sculpt. 

Here are some WIPs in timely order:

I was using sir Ian McKellen as a reference for the basis, as I find it easier to just get a lot of pictures of someone who exists and the alter. The last picture is when I realised that I got some proportions wrong and had to pull them around with the Move brush. 

I still have him set up as a reference in case I need guidance.

At some point I had this idea. Well, basically the mouth looked weird. So I thought: “well, he doesn’t need a mouth.” I know, cheating. But I will get back to it, I just had to finish my idea before I loose it.

The side and back view still needs a lot of work...

I really liked this stage, so I had a bit of fun with it, as you do....

Will keep you posted on more updates! I am also learning Houdini at the moment, so hopefully will have something cool from that soon too! And finish this guy hopefully too! 

Thanks for reading! 

[artofvendy]

Holographic Clothes Quick Study

Hey guys! So I had a holographic shirt today and just thought “hmm, how do I do this?” So I made something! It’s a real quick project, but I enjoyed it! 

First of all I made the chair and then took it into Marvelous Designer and simulated some nice clothes on it.

I took this into Substance Painter.

Baked the the high poly clothes to lower poly ones. Didn’t spend time on retopo as it was a really quick project.

I tried to do the holographic effect in Substance and then used a bit of the aiThinFilm node in Maya. I watched this video to check out how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSsEHFA4bqk

I used the Gdansk Courtyard HDRI from Substance and a three point light set up to lit my scene. 

[artofvendy]

Sculpt Excercise 01

Hi everyone! Long time no see! So I decided I want to up my sculpting game! 

This just an excercise, it’s not even done thing and I am not really planning on finishing. I am watching Zbrush Masters Vol.2 with Maarten Verhoeven, if you want to check it out, click the link below.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v1DrzD

It’s a nice video of Maarten sculpting his Shinigami character. I don’t like to follow tutorials literally, I like to think about it and take inspiration and just sculpt something where I use the knowledge learnt, works best for me. :) So this sculpt is more of a test subject, not to get the same result as the original artist did. 

I have to say I kinda like, how it turned out, altough the back is much more weaker than the front. Less defined, so definitely, I need to focus on. Keeping up the consistency.

Thanks for reading!

[artofvendy]

Stranger Things Radio Scene - Finished!

Hi guys! So I finally finished the radio scene! It was quite a challenge, especially the lighting and comp, but I am very happy with the result! 

Don’t forget to check out my Arstation https://www.artstation.com/wendie

Unfortunately, the original plan was a short video, but the scene is too heavy for my poor laptop to be able to render at least a 100 frames, so I had to get settled on two still images. 

This is the original reference from Stranger Things, that I tried to remake. I did few changes as the scene is quite dark and I wanted to do it a bit different. 

Hope you like it! 

These are some videos, that really helped me during the lighting stage, by the amazing Arvid Schneider.

[artofvendy]

Radio Update

Hi! This is my update on the radio scene. It’s just a first lighting try, still needs a lot of work. I am using the atmosphere for the first time and trying to really make the feeling of the scene similar to the reference. 

Hopefully will post more updates soon! 

[artofvendy]

Hey guys! I went ahead and finished the materials on the radio! It was actually really enjoyable part, as it’s all very logical and I had a lot of good reference. I might revisit the textures when I am doing the light, depending on the visibility of the details as there is a lot of small scratches, indents and dirt spots, that are more dense in places where the radio would be touched more - buttons, around buttons, the walkie talkie, or corners and inner edges where the dirt would collect. I tried to place the radio into my little blockout scene I set up earlier. Altought it is is quite visible now, I might cheat a little later, cause the lighting will be much more different than it is now.

These are closer renders from Iray in Substance Painter.

My next step is to model and texture the rest of the scene, so I have it all set up for the most challenging part - the lighting.

Thanks for reading!

[artofvendy]

Stranger Things Scene - Radio Model Done + Starting Textures

Hi everyone! So I finished the radio model, it was quite challenging at times as I was using smoothing in Maya and that really needs a nice topology, which I sometimes struggled with. Also the cable was quite tricky, as the Curve Wrap tool didn’t want to work as I wanted it to, I ended up using soft selection, which hopefully gave a good result, too!

I applied basic materials in Maya, to get an idea of which material will be applied where. This helped me with sorting the project in Substance.

I picked and applied some basic materials to get an idea of the final result. This will be refined a lot, of course, just a blockout for now. 

My next step will be creating masks for the front panel, where there are some writings and shapes around the buttons.

Hopefully post an update soon, thanks for reading! 

[artofvendy]

New Project - Replicating Stranger Things 2 Scene

Hi guys! So the other day, I was watching Stranger Things 2 (again) and I really like one scene. It might seem like an odd choice of a scene to fall in love with, but it is this simple scene of a radio in the hut.

So first of all, I want to do the radio as a separate asset with everything, including the back piece. I would like this to be a smaller piece of work that I will work on into detail. It will be a nice modelling and texturing excercise. When I am happy with the radio, I will continue modelling the scene (including the TV), but this will be more efficient depending on what can be seen and what cannot.

I have already started modelling the radio.

First I had to find out what kind of a radio this is. After some research, I found the name -  Cobra 139 AM/SSB CB Radio.

I collected as much reference as possible, including screenshots from Netflix,

This is my progress so far. The front board is mostly done, just need some topological tweaking and three more holes fore the sliders.

The biggest issue so far were the circular holes. The small ones were very easy, just using a square, which works perfecty...so I thought, well why wouldn’t it work on the big ones either? Big mistake! 

The shapes did not look great at all, not very circular. Zou can see above, that I simply put 8-sided circle and composed it into the geometry, works perfectly well again! 

Thank you for reading, hoepfully will be back soon, with some more progress! 

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor’s Outfit - Final Render

Hi everyone! I finally finished my project of Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor! It was very challenging, especially the folds and the textures. I am very satisfied in the end! 

I originally did this render, but after showing it to my colleagues, I decided to fix few things. The normal map was somehow wrong and I didn’t notice at first, but then I realised that the red channel is flipped, which created weird soft folds. I fixed this and also changed the lighting quite a bit, to get much better contrast. The original render had very boring lighting, so I used the three-point lighting (which I should’ve begin with, really) and placed a stronger blue light behind the character, made the key light much more intense, to get more contrast and then used a very soft fill light to finish the feel.

Thank you for reading! 

[artofvendy]

Hi! So I finally finished the sculpt of the 13th Doctor’s outfit! I wish I could put more into the coat, but as I need it to be double sided and I do not know how I would deal with that in Zbrush, I extruded it in Maya and will add details in Substance Painter. The big folds are done, so having the smaller ones only in normal map shouldn’t be an issue! 

It was very hard and I am sure there could be many improvements made, but I am gonna move on now and take the experience for another project! 

I have just started with the materials, this is just a quick try in Arnold. Hopefully will be done soon!

Thanks for reading! 

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor - Shirt Sculpt and Texture Test

Hi everyone! I did a first draft of the shirt sculpt (without the braces). It was quite the challenge to get some nice folds, I watched a lot of videos and just studied folds and they are still not perfect, but I think I am getting there! 

Just to see my progress in few days, these were the previous folds I made.  Thez were just a few and did not really make too much sense as they were very isolated. The new folds might be a bit exagerated, but I really wanted them to be more pronounced, so they can be readable.

I wanted to do a veiry quick texture test, to see, how the folds look like with a more fabric looking texture and diferent light. The white bottom shirt might be too much, but I will left this for later fixes, as I am not entirely sure, how much they will be seen yet.

Thank you for reading! 

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor - Retopology

Hi everyone! So the character work is taking me a little bit longer as I am slowly finding out, that my Zbrush skill is really not as good as I thought. It is an amazing experience tho, I am learning a lot of new things I didn’t know about before! 

The first big challenge was the retopology, as I obviously didn’t want to do it manually (I mean, who wouldn’t want to avoid that if possible, right?).

The Marvelous Designer topology is just not great. Especially when you want to go really into details.

It has a lot of these little “dead ends” as I like to call them, that just mess up your smoothing. Even when you subdivide, they are still there, waiting for you to make your life worse. I did try to go around them, but really, it’s easier to retopo.

To get this nice topology, I had to fail a lot. I used the ZRemesher tool, but that one destroys your UVs, which wouldn’t be such a problem, if it also didn’t get rid of the seam lines, you’ll probably need later for sculpting detail/texturing. 

To avoid loosing the seems, you have to polygroup each UV island separately and then make sure, you have “KeepGroups” selected. And boom! Works like magic! 

Just be careful to press “KeepGroups” and not “Freeze Groups”! The Freeze groups will leave some weirds stuff and it will annoy you later (trust me, I know). Because of this I tried to solve the issues by hand, and it was just so much extra work!

Here are some video tutorials, that can help you, they did to me! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/z4qB6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RDCj8sJu1E

Thanks for reading! 

[artofvendy]

13 Doctor - New Pose

Hi everyone! I had been adviced to put the clothes into a pose, which also led to the decision of keeping the avatar visible to get more dynamic sense. I had quite some trouble with this as I am not very good at posing characters, but in the end I am happy with the result. A book that helped quite a bit was Figural Drawing by Andrew Loomis! I still have the hands to take care of, but they’re not too important for now. The coat will be repositioned a little bit in Zbrush, as the simulation in Marvelous did not go the way I wanted.

The render was made using Maya and Arnold with the help of Flipped Normals’ Lighting Scenes.

Thank you for reading! 

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor outfit - Finished Model in Marvelous

Hi! I made a test render of the outfit and I can’t be happier about the result! Can’t wait to start texturing! :) 

Here a version with no coat on, there are some imperfections on the trousers that MD wasn’t to happy to let go, so I am just gonna fix them in Zbrush!

I used the Flipped Normals’ Lighting Scenes, for the quick render.

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor Outfit - Marvelous WIP

Hi! I finished the sewing of Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor costume! 

This phase was quite nice, just the coat was a bit tricky! The hood was very messy work as the simulation kept on going crazy, but in the end, it was just patience to get there, the pattern is not too hard! The waist is thinner and then the coat goes wide, making nice folds, this was interesting to solve, but I did extra cuts on the back (as I also saw on the actual costume from DW) and made middle part of the back much thinner, so it pulls the rest of the coat in. This works quite nice, it is just not much visible right now.

Here is the sewing pattern if anyone is interested in seeing it. It is sorted by colour, so it should be easy for anyone to grab.

The next phase is to getting the simulation as nice as possible in Marvelous Designer (which can be hard at time, honestly). Then I would like to take the result into Zbrush and add some nice extra detail. The final touch will be Substance Painter for textures.

Thank you for reading!

[artofvendy]

13th Doctor Outfit - New Project

(Image souce)

Hi! I recently decided to catch up with Doctor Who and fell completely in love with Jodie Whittaker’s outfit as the 13th Doctor, mainly the coat. And as I have recently learned how to use Marvelous Designer, I decided to give it a go and make it! 

So far, I made the basic mesh of the shirts and trousers, trying to figure out hot to make the braces nice. The pockets were also a bit tricky, as they kept on popping out, but this was fixed by being patient and very careful with layering patterns. Hopefully will have another update soon! 

[artofvendy]

JapaneseTrading Wagon Finished

Hi! So I finally finished my project of a Japanese Trading Wagon! I was experimenting with a lighting a little to get more contrast and a little bit more interesting light. Here is my project on Artstation.

Once more, I would like to give credit for the design to  Lloyd Drake-Brockman.

Although I know many things could’ve been made better, this project gave me a lot, including a new experience with Nuke, which I have never used before and also using Megascans and Quixel Mixer to get the mud texture.

The daylight lighting setup shows more details of the wagon.

I made a little turnaround as well. 

Hope you like it!