November 9th 2021
I had the opportunity to create this piece for Adobe, using their newest set of tools - Adobe Substance 3D Painter and rendered in Adobe Substance 3D Stager, with final comp done in Photoshop.
Thanks to Gio Nakpil for inviting me, and giving me full liberty of expression.
I started this project with many different ideas in mind, sketching in paper and also Zbrush.
My main goal was to explore Stager in his full capability, and help the team debugging and developing it further.
So I wanted to do a project which would explore the full range of materials, from metals, skin and emissive.
Whenever I do personal projects, I like to look at my own body of work and pick themes that would help me develop my set of skills further.
I’m currently on this journey of trying to get away from my own personal templates/default forms, exploring the unknown, so doing this alien-ish queen and her pet sounded like a fun project to tackle, pushing form and shape language a bit further.
Stager was crucial since the beginning to render form, explore compositions and play with silhouettes.
It is super fast and easy to use, and the default clay render looks great right off the bat.
Later on, the integration between Painter and Stager makes it effortless as well, since it is a one click to jump between programs.
I really love the latest shading models additions to Painter, as well as some of the new smart masks.
The viewport rendering is awesome, and you can really push the forms and speed up the look dev process.
The following images are from the Substance 3D Painter realtime viewport, as I was painting it.
Stager was very easy to use, and has a super streamlined interface.
I really loved the environment presets that gives you full exposure of controls but maintains the setup super simple.
It comes with 3 point light setups under some of the presets, and it was basically how I render the critter.
She had a more delicate setup, with area lights manually placed around the scene.
The High poly was sculpted/modelled in Zbrush, as usual.
I had a lot of fun doing the skin details as well as the ornamental details in her outfit/armor.
