Paddy’s Day 2016…
Remember this guy? Also seen here?
To recap, the original sculpt was done over a few lunch breaks for a weekly art challenge on Facebook, that was 3 years ago. Although I returned to the model a few times to work it up, the rushed nature of it’s construction prohibited me from doing very much with it , the topology was too stretched in places, like around the mouth and lips, to allow further detailing. The facial hair had been baked to geometry, so further styling was impossible. So last week, I bit the bullet and retopologised, redid the UV layout and baked the original textures. Since then I’ve added further skin fold detail around the eyes and lips, I’ve started experimenting with a new hat (don’t particularly want to go the old top hat and buckle route) and switched renderers from Mental Ray to V-Ray. Here are some of the test renders from V-Ray, the increased detail is partly through bump and normal maps but mostly from actual geometry. Click on each image for the high res version.
A comparison of the original vs the updated work in progress model:
Ignore the hair as it stands, I’ll be redoing that from scratch. The next step is to take the raw geometry into Toolbag 2 and see how the textures hold up in a real-time PBR based setup, I’ll update the blog when I take a few screenshots.
Pete Mc Nally's Blog 
Nice update! A dreadful caricature of Oirish, of course, pandering to Mrs. Brown’s Boys and Fr. Ted’s weird self-denigrating audience, but so is a lot of comedy in any country, I suppose. Incidentally, have you tried Allegorithmic’s Substance Design and Substance Painter? I wrote a couple of articles about them a while ago, for cgsociety.org, and I thought it looked pretty interesting and getting more so, particularly the particle brushes, the PBR materials and the UDims, though you’d be the one to judge if any of these are either different to V-Ray (also wrote about that) or an improvement, but worth a try, I think.
Hi Rory, yes I’ve tried both apps and they certainly have their place at the table, they open up many possibilities for real-time and pre-rendered art. Big time savers!
I thought you would have. I’d be interested to see something you do with them one of these days. They’re working on realtime moving particle paints soon, that would be great in any moving scenario, movies to VR games, and you can already set up a kind of procedural app to the particle brushes, a half-way house while they figure out the live version.
[…] are some real-time renders of the model from my last post , this time in Toolbag 2. It is missing some of the textures used in the offline render but I just […]