Shrine Stone Fox
At the beginning of Element 2 I started by carving the stone fox that I had drawn, during the sculpting process I still needed to find some references of real stone foxes in order to complete the sculpting, which was an important part of my workflow, after feedback from my two tutors when I returned to school after the first holiday I realised myself that there was something strange about the stone fox’s face so I searched for some other feline stone statues and reference pictures of real foxes to modify them.
After adjusting the overall effect in this step I used the orb brush posted by my tutor on moodle to add some bumpy effects to the stones and then rewired the model to make the overall wiring as little as possible. I was originally torn between using the zremesher for auto-topology or manually doing the topology (quad draw) because the model will be a static model, so I ultimately chose to use the zremesher for the auto-topology and then do the adjustments manually since the model will be static.
As a 3D artist, I will refer to different photos to explore and realise more ideas during the production process, so I refer to the scarf in the very famous Inari Taisha Shrine’s stone statue of a fox in Japan, and I add some of my own creativity during the production process. Before making the scarf, the tutor taught us how to make fabric using marvelous designer during the class, so I was able to learn how to use this software to make the scarf, and also create a good foundation of experience in using the software for the character in the later stages of the project.
During the UV splitting step I cut the entire stone fox into several different parts before proceeding to the next step of cutting and splitting, this allowed me to get a better idea of how to unfold and line up the UVs, I also spent some time in this step adjusting the size and position of the UVs so that the UV utilisation was as high as possible.
Making materials is a very complex process for me, before FMP I had been adding materials by using smart material balls from the substance painter repository and tweaking the colours a bit, but during the course of the FMP project I spent a lot of time learning about materials, I would analyse the references I was looking for to see how the colours of the materials changed, the roughness changed, and how some of the complex effects were achieved by overlaying and tweaking each of the layers. I will not directly follow my ideas when making the material of the stone fox, especially when making realistic scenes, I will first analyse the stone fox should be a grey stone material, so my first step is to make sure that the base texture of the stone is made first, the stone fox should be the effect of weathering and rain erosion, so I will start to make the texture of the stone after taking these effects into consideration. Then considering the stone colour should not just be simple grey is enough, the stone mixed with other colours will look better, considering the whole scene is a bit old, so in the production of moss I will use a lot of substance comes with noise, dirty stains and so on the effect for many times to superimpose, because in the analysis of the reference picture I found that the moss is not just green enough, should add some yellow and cyan variations in order to add I should add some yellow and cyan variations to make the moss look more natural. When making the material for the stone fox scarf, I considered that there should not be any moss on the fabric, and the scarf would be cleaned regularly by the local management, so the overall material of the scarf is quite dirty, but not that old. Because it took a lot of time to make the material for this object, and because similar materials can be used for other objects, I made a reusable material sphere with the overall material effect I made, and included it in my own material repository.