Designing DC Universe HAWKMAN

[Music] what's going on everybody uh welcome to another video a lot of things are happening this weekend uh dc fandom's going down and i decided to do a little fan art one of my favorite characters hawkman and i decided to record it and uh share with you guys the process and talk over a little bit about um the creative decisions that i made some of the process this is going to be quite fast the video is about 15 minutes long and i kind of crunch the time i spent about four hours into this but i did want to show you guys some of the creative aspects and talk a little bit about some of the decisions that i made in some of the process so as usual i started from a sphere or or okay in this case i started from a base mesh and this mesh you can get on the website character workshop.com is one of the just a base human base mesh and here i'm quickly just kind of sketching out the helmet and i'm going to spend the most of the time on the helmet here because i think it's the most important part of this character and a lot of things that i'm doing are masking masking the details try to very quickly put in the the forms that i want early on so i can kind of massage it into place and start uh identify what i want to change and update on the design of this character right he has a very iconic uh helmet shape with kind of the hawk and the ego shape and i want to quickly drop those stuff in there very kind of comic accurate and the techniques are very simple here i'm masking it out moving it in place pretty much masking and moving and the clay brush inside of zbrush and really just trying to get the shape and you can see initially it was kind of all over the place and even here i'm just kind of drawing the feathers into place but i can quickly get the shape into uh something that feels a little more accurate to what i'm what i'm thinking and having the head inside of the head uh the helmet excuse me does help me or just try to keep things in proportion i don't want to sketch everything into just the one mesh because i want to make sure i have things inside so i'm starting with the a face kind of a base mesh that has some interesting proportions right to begin with and then as i like the sum of the forms as i get some of the forms kind of closer into the shape that i want then i'm extracting it and you can see me extracting the pieces of or either masking it and kind of split splitting hidden or just really like duplicating and deleting what i don't want from this and i know this uh quite fast for even if you if you're a beginner into zbrush this you know may seem confusing but make sure you go back and watch some of my other videos and you're going to kind of understand some of the process here i think this video is mostly the first to talk about the design and for you to see the process like a little faster just so you can kind of understand like where i'm spending my time on i don't want to be polishing one area you know until it's perfect because you know when you're designing in 3d you want to make sure you have as much as you can kind of represent it so you can just keep iterating on it like you don't want to spend a lot of time just polishing up uh you know the wings of the helmet because that might not even be the design that you want for your character or the design that's going to be the best for what this character needs so i'm kind of quickly just throwing all the shapes in there and then you know some of the things that i didn't like before it may be just fine you know like they maybe not be the center of the attention for the design so i'm not spending a lot of time on it and the same thing for details like details are not important uh when you're trying to design something uh details are mostly just how much time you spend on it and you see i think the difference from when you're sketching in 3d to try to get the forms try to understand the shapes and the final detail like polish level is just how much time you spend on it i can you know start splitting up the pieces into smaller pieces and and then you know refining it and of course it's going to take me days and weeks you know to get something to that quality over here i'm mostly focusing on the overall design and just trying to kind of identify the design and you see the techniques i'm using are very similar to what i said in the beginning a lot of masking a lot of just kind of damp standard to kind of cut out the design and then just refining with uh you know h polish or or something like that another thing that's interesting here that i often get questions about is just poly paint is throwing colors into the model i try to do it as soon as i can i like to work with colors because it just gives me gives me an understanding of how you know how the the design is working if this was all gray i'm purely looking at the scope the sculpting and it it just doesn't work like my eyes your eyes like you wouldn't see as as uh you know if you had color in it so that's why i try to throw it as fast as i can and you can see at this point here i was struggling a little bit with the design of the the top of the helmet and that's another thing for you to keep in mind to always keep it um you know kind of somewhat simple and uh messy in a way because i erased this top part at least three times and i did it again and that's why i'm trying to just throw quickly throw some of the designs in there so i can uh you know not not completely be completely married to anything so i can always go back and erase it and that's something that's very important uh especially when you are working in a production to not get attached to anything you need to be able to quickly sculpt something in there quickly design something in and uh and be fine with iterations be fine with different options you know not more more often with the first thing you've done it's not going to be the best you know that you can do so you know i go back and change it a lot i think the hawkman helmet is very iconic you know there's quite a couple different uh versions of of you know that have been done in the comics so i'm trying to make some of that into this and then as they uh get to a point you know that that's kind of further along i just stopped looking at reference and i just kind of go with with my uh kind of my taste in a way like i i just try to redesign things i go with like forms that are working i start looking into shapes that are interesting on the helmet flows that i can kind of change then i'll stop looking at reference and i think that's when i think my own take would start to come in and i'll come up with something new so that's a little technique that i use for when i'm redesigning characters like this so moving on to the body like i knew i didn't want to spend a lot of time on the body here but the technique is the same like i'm masking things out i'm you know kind of extracting pieces i'm doing all that kind of stuff to try to quickly get you know something in there um i was looking at this point i was looking a lot of the uh like just aquaman the take that dc did on the aquaman costume like i knew that i want to make something that you know will kind of fit on that you know fit with that excuse me so i was looking at some of the early aquaman uh gear that he had and the kind of treatment that they did i think dc has been doing a lot of kind of a different take on a treatment for the for the armors in their in their movies so it's interesting to see and that's where this arm kind of uh you know kind of style comes from there's a lot of this kind of wrapping it's a little more random rapping in my opinion but it kind of works for what they did with the uh you know the mamoa's uh aquaman design so i was trying to replicate some of that and then of course looking at some other you know comic his comic iconic gear and see how much i wanna i could bring that into the design so i think the end result here was a mix of uh you know both of those things and then like i said uh after a certain point i just started just stop looking at reference and uh you know i just start kind of going with the flow here just trying to design something new with uh what i would like to see on the character and i think the the result is uh quite cool like like all my other projects i don't think uh you know any of the final designs i'm like completely happy with it i think it's just one more take on something like this you know i love to go back and kind of do what i what i do professionally where i just do a lot of different options um until we pick something that feels nice and then i'll spend the time really getting it to polish like even pieces like this i could have you know dozens of pieces to add add to it like right now it's just the simple primary shapes just to get the design working but i could easily go in there and spend the time to like polish it up extract different pieces the same thing here i'm just throwing some details in there and uh you know in in a production or if i would spend more time on this i'll go back and and just create an alpha for something like that but in this case i just wanted some information in there so i just kind of drew some kind of pattern and again looking at some of the aquaman stuff they had some of the stuff in there so just try to replicate but i was following a little bit more of a falcon shape if you look at some of the uh the hawkman comics like they do kind of that falcon wing design in some some uh some design element so i just try to do similar to the aquaman but like taking his um icon into consideration so i think the result was kind of interesting and again in the final shader with the render it was supposed to be very very dark metal so i didn't want to spend too much time on that and that goes back to what we talked about just where do you spend the time so just kind of keep keep in mind i'm always thinking about that so i can finish up some of these projects like sketches or or concept concept sketches and uh you know a little quicker so i can do more of them and in the production i'll do probably you know a few a few different takes and then when we pick something i'll go and start refining it um another thing i forgot to talk about it's also like you see when i did the arm and uh kind of the wrappings they're all uh clay tubes and the best way to do that in here would be to just kind of like start extracting those those uh kind of straps as a separate meshes but in here again i just wanted something quickly to to demonstrate that so i just use the clay tubes and then with the inflate brush i went in the edges and kind of uh pushed and pushed out the edges for those uh those wraps and i think the result is kind of quite cool i it wouldn't work for a production i think i mean i would have to go in and start just polish it up more and kind of refine it but it gives a very nice result here in terms of anatomy i i'm using my base mesh so the anatomy is quite in place if you haven't seen the tutorial where i create this from scratch uh go in the my website and check it out but in here i'm just doing or redoing it the kind of final final polish passes on that like i'm using them standard and kind of drawing or drawing the muscles a little better like trying to get that stuff in place uh trying to get something that you know just feel polished but the anatomy was already there for the scars i'm just using uh inflate getting the little scars in there very quickly and then i'll start texturing you know for texture here one of the techniques that i usually use for my projects is you know a lot of poly paint and i use a couple alphas to get some break up so you can see here i'm using like a very uh contrasted alpha to get some interesting patterns and uh mixing that with masks so i'll mask by cavity and i'll use that cavity to like drive some of the kind of green details on the skin uh in the metal you know i'll use that cavity to just kind of pop the some of the details off the metal and then i'll decimate everything and i'll bring it into 3ds max and in this case i i've used uh brought in with poly paint so i can kind of drive that texture information with the vertex color and then we talked about this before it's very kind of straightforward technique it gives me a quick a quick result in the max and it's the same technique that you know you could use on keyshot or any other software i i like to use max in this case arnold because i have a little more understanding into how the shaders work in max so it's more of a preference preference but it's the same thing you could use keyshot you know you could use vray or you could use um you know any any software that would take you know poly pin information you could bring it in in here it's a very simple setup with uh in hdr um and then just some key lights to create some some interesting um kind of lighting scenarios but in this case it's very simple it's just the one one key light uh in a couple backlights but they're very very soft so now going back into zbrush one thing i forgot or or not forgot but i kind of jumped ahead just to try the the render was the the wings um and the one thing i want to just mention is just be careful with the rendering because that could take a lot of time if you're just not paying attention right into what you're doing we can talk about this on you know in some other videos but you know i i came back to zbrush and i wanted to show you guys how i was going to create the the wings so initially i made a quick um block out for just the shape of the wing very very rough just to kind of try to get the scale and position and then i went into another little scene and uh started making some feathers and the feathers are very straightforward i wanted a couple different variations of uh you know what they they could be so i made three different ones a little small one a medium and a large and then i decimated them just so they're kind of light into the scene and then i start placing them around again i'm doing this just for this shot just for this angle if i were to do this for a kind of production t-pose whatever it is i will use the same techniques but uh you know just spend more time and do it in a different pose in this case um you know i'm using it on the same uh that kind of just the pose just because i knew that this was going to be the you know the what i would use for the final shot so same technique just um i guess different target here so i'm quickly duplicating it around using control like control click control move i'll create another just another object and then i can easily just kind of rotate them in place kind of create some interesting shapes and then very quickly i can build a kind of wing shape you know with the with the pieces that i had now you know it is very clear that this is kind of a little more of a destructive workflow or if i wanted to go back and oh let's you know change the shape of a feather i would have to go back and just redo it right because they're not instances i'm just literally just duplicating in in shape duplicating it into the the shape of the wing so here again i'm just kind of sketching into that one main topology main main geometry that i had just so i know where where to place the the feathers and this is this goes really fast like i think i spend you know probably 30 minutes into this and the the results quite nice so you know after i did that it is just a matter of then kind of decimating it you know the rest of it i'm gonna mirror it to the other side and again the back view is completely broken right like you guys have seen i'm not working on worrying about the back view at all i'm always kind of rotating it just to make sure it works it's working on all the angles because you know of course lighting is going to react to this so i need to go back and make sure it's working but you know i exported it to max did another render now it's time to then bring it all into photoshop to do the final composition and you can kind of quickly see here i'm going to go through the layers and just talk about them um i did some just some value tweaks just to kind of bring the darkness a little down into the lower part of the wings and then using masks i extracted you know kind of skin shader and then i just started to do some final polish on that in photoshop you can see here just kind of knocking down some of the specular and then with the spec map i'm bringing that back in and having more control knocking down some of the metal popping out the eyes adding the background very very straightforward and then you know the final thing is just kind of final touches on the on the model and final touches is literally just kind of going in going in there adding some highlights you know adding some noise going in popping out some of the hard edges that didn't come through you know as i wanted and then final kind of tweaks color correction small stuff just to try to get everything to pop and i'll do another video in the future just talking about some of the techniques for color correction uh and things that we could do to make it to kind of enhance the final product all right guys i hope you guys liked it uh you know check out the other videos i'm gonna do more of these in the future uh and i'll see you guys soon take care you

Channel: Raf Grassetti

Views: 111,080

Rating: 4.9729853 out of 5

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Id: KANnOcSzIc8

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020