FMP - Week 4

 

A hard week this week for the FMP! I’d moved on to texturing my High Priestess model in 3DCoat (+ Photoshop) so a lot of major visual decisions were made here.

 

I had my flat colours and AO bake from last week which gave me a good foundation moving forward but I still spent a lot of time thinking about the colours. I will be painting all the lights and shadows into the model as it is diffuse only and so the vast majority of the base I have will be covered up and more cleanly rendered by the end so I had to think of what colours I wanted to blend into the shadows and what could be contrasted in the lights. So I ended up doing a bit of colour correction to start with, changing the base hues subtly so that when I overlay colours on top it won’t become too dark in areas too drastically.

 

From this I started doing some base rendering, just to get me into the flow of painting. I started on the face as I found that easiest, giving three dimensionality to the figure and defining aspects like the nose and lips. I also did a base layer of rending on the hair to establish the direction the hair was tied in correctly. These weren’t final renders though so I’d go back and finalise details later down the line.

 

I then moved on to the model as a whole and started blocking in the base lighting and general colours I knew I’d be using in areas. For example, I loosely blocked in the shiny, light areas of the gold- these weren’t anything too specific but a general sense of how the lighting will flow on that material. I did similar for the dress and body, accentuating the shadows with a multiply layer and overlaying some light in. Once I did this though, it gave me all the information I needed to start deep diving into rendering.

 

I tackled the model in portions and typically tried to get each section to a near point of completion before moving onto the next. I will admit this was a bit of a struggle since painting gold for 2 days straight can only be so interesting so I did jump around the model at times. I did a lot of colour correction over the course of rendering by exporting the texture back into Photoshop and applying a gradient map to change base values. In my concept, the High Priestess was quite pale but the rendered model has much more flesh tones. I may adjust the hues later after getting some feedback but I think she still has ghostly vibes despite seeming more alive. Similarly with the gold, it was a lot more muted originally but ended up being more earthy and saturated. I think this works better with the bright cyan accents rather than the muted gold mainly because it feels less disjointed- the cyan felt too neon when the gold wasn’t as saturated.

 

I’d spent the whole week on rendering the priestess so I’ll have to get to the weapons next week but that should take far less time since they’re not as extensive. I still want to add some wear and tear to portions of the model but that’s not too hard to do so I’ll get to that with the weapons. But seeing all the major rendering done makes me feel like I’ve made good progress, I’m pleased with the results thus far!