Vine Great Sword - CGMA Mentorship

    This is the result of a 10 week mentorship provided by Weston Reid through CGMA. This character art course kicked my ass. This was shortly after I graduated from my bachelor's program. I, having just graduated, thought I was ready to start and industry job. I was not. The sheer amount of technical issues that my first shipped model had were staggeringly bad. However, mamma didn't raise a quitter, so I took it on the chin and really pushed to get my topology in order. I learned a lot about edge flow and retopology during this course.

4K maps. The face and flowers are grouped together so they can bot have Sub Surface Scattering.

 

 

 

 I modeled everything in ZBrush with ZModeler before retopology. 

 

 

    The hair shader is fully unlit. I followed and modified this tutorial for the effect. You'll notice its in French. This was a bit of a problem, as I don't speak French, but I wanted the effect bad enough to fight through it.

The Original Concept by Tian Kou.

 

 

    Reflecting on this, this mentorship was mostly a failure. The materials are kinda whack, especially in the tree roots on the sword, and the topology still isn't production level. However, I gained a sense of direction from this project. We were supposed to render in Marmoset Toolbag, but had an option to use that sexy new Unreal Engine 5 if we wanted. I, knowing absolutely nothing about the engine, of course took the chance to render there. Learning the engine was a giant time sink that significantly impacted the time I spent actually doing the art side of this art mentorship. But I was also introduced Material Graph, which was a revelation. Suddenly all of the coding concepts my instructors tired to impart to me made sense now that I could see the math laid out in front of me. This led me experimenting in Material Graph to building my own blueprints, then to learning python, and all of a sudden I'm in a graduate game design program as a technical artist. Not sure if Weston was trying to make tech artists in his course, but he did!

Hi Res on ArtStation.