#developingskills

[mihir-gosavi]

Developing Skills: Red VS Blue (Assignment 01)

October 13, 2025

Red vs Blue: Environment Update

After working on the individual assets for a while, I’ve started putting them together inside the main environment, and this is how it’s coming along so far. This render shows my current progress and how far along it has progressed.

The centre wall displays the theme Red Vs Blue symbolizing two contrasting sides. Right now, the lighting is still in progress. I’m experimenting with different moods to see what fits best with the theme. It’s not the final version yet. There’s still a lot of refining needed, especially in terms of adding more depth and atmosphere, but I think it’s starting to take shape.

This is just a quick update to show where the environment stands at the moment. I still need to polish the materials, adjust the lighting, and add a few more small props and characters to make it feel more alive. But overall, I’m happy with how red vs blue is progressing.

October 11, 2025

Red vs Blue: Texturing

For the past few days, I’ve been working on completing the texturing part of my Japanese-themed assets, and I finally made some decent progress. Initially, I had modelled only a few assets, mainly some swords, lanterns, and props but now I have added banners, torii gate and managed to texture and organize them properly. The project is slowly coming together, and I’m quite happy with how it’s starting to look.

Honestly, it took me a while to get the materials right because I wanted each weapon and object to have its own personality but still feel part of the same world. I’m still experimenting with the textures and plan to do some final renders soon, but this stage feels like a good checkpoint to share.

Overall, this is how red vs Blue is looking so far. Still a work in progress, but I’m excited to see how it evolves from here.

October 09, 2025

Red vs Blue: Modelling

After working for a couple of days on the initial ideas and sketches, I finally started modelling assets for my scene. Since I’m going with a Japanese environment theme, I thought it would be best to create some props that match the scene, things like katanas, weapons, ninja blades, and all sorts of traditional Japanese stuff. I wanted everything to fit the world I’m building but still look interesting and detailed.

All the assets are made from scratch. My main goal while modelling was to make them as appealing as possible but still keep the poly count low. So, most of what you see here uses instancing and kind of a shared base design approach. It saved me a lot of time and kept things optimized.

Overall, I’m happy with how it’s coming together. There’s still a lot to refine, especially with textures and lighting of the assets.

October 01, 2025

Red vs Blue: Sketches, Storyboard and Blocking

Here's my basic storyboard for this project. I’ll be honest my drawing skills aren’t exactly the best. I know the sketch I made doesn’t look super appealing, but for me, sketching is just about visualizing a rough idea as long as it captures the basic composition while giving a feel for how the scene might look in the future.

This sketch is part of my idea for the “Red vs. Blue” story. In this scene, both armies are sitting together inside a Japanese-style house. Instead of fighting, they’re exchanging gifts like swords, armour and technology as a sign of truce. I wanted this moment to show how two rivals can come together, stop seeing each other only as enemies, and work together.

This is the first blockout of the Red vs. Blue scene. It’s still very basic, but it gives me a clear idea of the space and how everything will be placed in the final artwork.

September 28, 2025

Red vs Blue: Initial Ideas and Research

Red vs Blue is probably one of the most common themes used in games and movies. For this project, I wanted to try something different, something that shows my vision clearly but also connects us to what’s happening in the world right now. I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese culture, their architecture, and of course their food, so I thought it would be cool to mix that idea with AI. Especially since there’s this rising concern everywhere about AI taking over jobs and people getting replaced by it.

My vision for the actual scene is pretty simple. I want to create two clans humans and robots (AI) gathering together to form a truce. Instead of fighting, they stand side by side to show the possibility of coexistence. Through this project, I wanted to share a simple message: we don’t need to fear AI, the key is learning how to work with it and moving forward together.

I’ve gathered a few reference images to get a clear idea and a strong vision about how my scene will look. All the reference pics are from Pinterest, which has been super helpful for collecting inspiration.

[ellie-bygrave]

Development Project 2: Arcade Machine

Final renders for my arcade machine project!

I'm super happy with the finished product. I'd like to get some input in my next class about the use of the normal maps on the metal base section as I'm not sure if they're high enough quality or if it would be better to just use actual geometry. I'm not 100% sure about polycount etc when making an asset like this so it may be better to look slightly less good but have reduced polycount, although some feedback I received on Polycount explained that recently low polycount is becoming less essential in making good game models.

I decided to do a couple of colour variations and use the different arcade games from Cyberpunk 2077 as well as the original Roach race that I used just to show some variability in my models. The same with the stickers on the machines.

[strodefad]

More charcoal action in the life class this week and a look at the structures of the hand.

[collegeboss]

Highschool Hack #2: 6 Reasons To Do Community Service During Holidays and Breaks.

Community service is a great way to help the public or an individual in need, while at the same time helping you to start making a mark on the world. Here are some of the benefits and perks that comes with community service as some persuasion:

1. SAVES TIME AND DECREASES STRESS- The school year is going to be more hectic and chaotic with assignments popping up randomly at the worst of times. Just do community service during the summer, seasonal breaks, and holidays, so that you can keep a float with your studies while at the same time being able to give community service projects your full focus, ready-for-this attitude, and 100%.

2. SCHOLARSHIPS- Some scholarships have a certain amount of community service hours as a requirement, having 100 hours on hand will work wonders with what you can be eligible to apply for.

3. DEVELOPING SKILLS- Community service projects and chapters are typically extremely welcoming towards newcomers to their line of work, and will allow hands on experience and a chance to develop different skill sets depending on the line of work. This is a fantastic opportunity to take advantage of, since it's basically an apprenticeship. Take Habitat For Humanity as an example, they allow their volunteers to develop construction working skills, and they don't even have to go through a rigorous job interview or sign a working contract to be able to get that hands on experience, and volunteers can be as young as 16 years old and only have to work for one day if they wanted to.

4. NETWORKING- The people in charge of community service programs are a great source for networking, since they are more likely to open up and talk about opportunities they have been hearing about and can provide letters of recommendation! These people are typically really enthusiastic about helping their volunteers, mainly because they start off with a high opinion of those who are willing to do free labor for the benefit of the community, in most cases at least. Keeping that in mind, don't wreck that image they made about you. Remember to keep to their time frames and arrive early to projects, maintain a professional and caring attitude, and overall, respect.

5. RESUME- Doing a variety of community service projects is basically creating a bank of experiences that can be picked and chosen from to beef up your resume based on the job you're applying for. 

6. PERSPECTIVE- Giving back to the community is just something everyone should do at least every once in a while, since it does open your perspective of the hard work others are willing to go through for the greater good of the community. It’s basically a ‘faith in humanity’ restorer. Plus, many volunteer projects are a great way to lift your spirits if you had been having a hard time, since many do give a real sense of accomplishment that you helped to improved someone else’s day or life. Plus, some people could really just use a bit of assistance to help stabilize their life, mostly through securing some of the most basics of necessities such as shelter, food, community, and health support.

Here are links to more spread out community service groups:

Habitat For Humanity

Feeding America

Ronald McDonald House Charities RMHC (helps families stay close to their children while they’re receiving care at a hospital)

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Funds UNICEF (one of their current goals is to help prevent childhood deaths through making immunizations more accessible)

[tanith-davies]

Practice 1: Developing Skills, Development Project 2, Post 4

Texturing

I imported my ambient occlusion, curvature and normal maps into Substance Painter from Marmoset, and then started to block out my base colours - primarily adding shading from the AO before moving onto hand painting details. I’m aiming for recreating Arcane’s painterly details with this model, and started by creating planular forms on the face.

Rendering

I wanted to move my model into Marmoset Toolbag early to see my textures in alternative lighting, and the desired pose. Once I had my base colours and started a rough layer of hand painting, I posed my model in Maya, without rigging her, and set up simple lighting of one directional main, a bounce and rim light, to give her some form. From this quick set up I most obviously noticed the shadows of her outfits causing issues, as well as stark AO lines on the clothing. 

A Closer Look at Texturing in Arcane

Fortiche's amazing artists finally shared a behind-the-scenes look at some of the models prepared for the Nextflix show. 

I came across another helpful article on creating textures in Arcane’s style, the turn table screenshots are really clear references for me.

I really enjoyed the direction this model was heading in though, and was very happy with the progress I had made so far. There are notable areas that need improving, and I barely got started with creating hand painted textures. I really look forward to finishing her off, and wish I had planned my time better to not spend so much time making small changes to my Development Project 1’s optimisation, and getting cracking on large changes to my Development Project 2.

References

Sergeev, A (2022) A Closer Look at Texturing in Arcane. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/a-closer-look-at-texturing-in-arcane (Accessed: 18 January 2026).

[tanith-davies]

Practice 1: Developing Skills, Development Project 2, Post 3

Baking

For this project I wanted to learn baking within Marmoset Toolbag 5, rather than using Substance Painter. Without the need for precise naming conventions it definitely saved me some time doing it this way, and I enjoyed learning a new skill of creating the maps separately before importing them into substance painter for texturing.The ambient occlusion results were softer then the standard for Substance Painter, and consequently this method is definitely something I’m interested in trying again.

There are a few baking issues present on my model at this stage, which I haven’t had time to fix: I need to separate the hair into different baking groups and improve the AO baked maps on this sculpt, but due to time constraints, I wanted to move onto texturing.

[tanith-davies]

Practice 1: Developing Skills, Development Project 2, Post 2

Retop

My last project took a considerable amount of time to retop everything by hand, so this time around I attempted to speed up the process by doing some of the retop in Zbrush. I Zremeshed some of the items, and used the lowest subdivision levels for others. When creating my sculpt I started with clean low poly topology, which definitely helped in my favour at this stage, when creating the lowpoly. I re-toped the hands and face by hand to get specific deformable topology, and the hat, since its unusual shape meant getting a Zremesh version that wasn’t spiraling was proving difficult. I then cleaned up the Zremeshes, adding extra loops to improve form, and optimising. 

For material allocation, I separated my model into face, hands, hair, eyes, and then two extra texture sheets for the clothing and accessories. I could have combined the face and hands onto one texture map, but I wanted more control over the face details staying sharp. I kept the strands of the hair separate to gain a cleaner bake, and improve the animation potential.

potential. 

[tanith-davies]

Practice 1: Developing Skills, Development Project 2, Post 1

Sculpting

In starting my second development project, unfortunately I hadn’t left myself with a great deal of time in comparison to my first project. I started off by improving my sculpt from assignment 6, competitions, in Zbrush to bring the bust I had so far to a more comprehensive level. With this project, I aimed to use Fortiche’s Netflix TV show, Arcane as reference, and heavily used their sculpts and textures as the goal for level of detail and form.

I spent a long time in the sculpting process trying to get the shape of the hat looking correct, and ended up splitting it up into several pieces to create the form I was after. I continued to use Zbrush for the clothes rather than marvelous designer, due to the stylistic, simple exaggerated forms I wanted to achieve. In terms of the clothing folds, Ladislas Gueros’ work on Arcane’s sculpts created subtle volumes, rather than simply indenting the area with the dam standard brush. I used her work as heavy reference when improving upon the clothing for my sculpt, and I feel I have a much stronger idea of how fabric deforms around a bod by studying her bust sculpts.

On finalising the model, I cut out the torn sections of the clothes, decimated and moved to Maya to prepare to retop

Research

While doing further research into Arcane’s texture, I came across some realtime characters by Pavel Marchankau. I hadn’t seen work like this done before, especially real time characters, and I was thrilled to see he’d created some 80Level articles about his workflow:

Game-Ready 3D Character Created in UE5 with a Focus on Texturing

Created using ZBrush, Substance 3D, and Unreal Engine 5.

Modeling an Assassin Using ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter & XGen

Pavel Marchankau shared the workflow behind the Assassin project, talked about the texturing process using the smudge effect, and showed the

The selection of characters were created for an indie project, Bagna, and feature a very effective smudge effect in his renders, which was what originally caught my attention. The skin texturing was what interested me the most about his characters, appearing like a Van Gough oil painting, and Marchankau’s exaggerated colours have provided me with inspiration for creating forms. He completed all his textures within Substance Painter, which made me very excited to try his approach, as opposed to several other artists I’d looked at who used 3D Coat. He frequently used the smudge brush to blend his fill layers of separate colours, which is something I am excited to try with this project. 

Hair

Spending most of my time analysing the arcane sculpt models at this stage, it took me a while to realise that they are simply blockouts for the hair, the final rendered characters use haircards. While I am worried I won’t have enough time to explore haircards for my model, it is definitely something I’m interested in improving.

Alternatively, Ulysse Soubiran creates a beautiful Arcane inspired bust sculpt, with hand painted sculpted hair, achieving a beautiful result. This is likely much more realistic to try to achieve with this project.I particularly like the effect of light on the hair, the impressionistic brush stroke feel with a square brush keeps a painterly vibe. 

Particularly noticeable aspects of this interview with JHill, was that Ulysse created this bust purely with Zbrush polypaint. He also makes use of subsurface scattering in the final render within Marmoset, which really softens the render shadows, which will be useful to experiment with myself at that stage.

References

Collins, E (2025) Check Out This Game-Ready Character with Complex Texturing. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/modeling-an-assassin-using-zbrush-substance-3d-painter-xgen (Accessed: 18 January 2026).

Marchankau, P (2023) Modeling an Assassin Using ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter & XGen. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/modeling-an-assassin-using-zbrush-substance-3d-painter-xgen (Accessed: 18 January 2026).

J Hill (2025) Arcane Style with ZBrush ft. Ulysse Soubiran | Pixel Peeps | Episode 17. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f58hYrRKBZw  (Accessed:15 January 2026).