The Confectionery

The Confectionery

This project comprised making a zero to hero asset, my first zero to hero asset in fact, in this specific case of a photo realistic style of a real life photo, using only Maya and ZBrush for the modeling and Substance 3D for the texturing.

All around it took the good part of 3 Weeks to complete this project and prepare the final renders of it.

As with every project, it all started with reference gathering, first I was able to locate other photos taken on the same set of the same objects, but not at the same time or in the same configuration, making them a lot less useful to complete the other angles my main reference was missing.

After that I did a complete research on all objects present in the picture, taking references for them both for the form, texture and material to start the modeling process and have them ready later for texturing.

In the end I was able to find the original picture on a photography site, and the author had added all info about the photo itself, from the lens that was used to the camera used, this helped a lot to speed up the process of preparing the camera before the work could start.

The modeling process went by pretty quickly, almost the entirety of the objects were modeled in Maya, with only some exported and worked on ZBrush to use later for other reasons, I did some revisions of volumes for certain objects at the end of the modeling process just to be sure to match the references as much as possible.

After the modeling was done, it was the time to move to the UV, cutting the UVs was pretty easy for 98% of the objects, a couple of the models gave me some problems as they were very elaborate objects and I spent a few nights to make good UVs that I could use and didn't deform the textures once I moved to Texturing.

In the end, I ended up using only 3 UV squares in Multy Udim mode, and the proportions of the UVs were perfect for the quality I needed to obtain at the end of the project.

I never had any experience in texturing before this project, but I must say that I grew accustomed to the software and the process itself very quickly, it still took some time to achieve all the results I wanted for the entirety of the model, I used just 3 materials in total: Food - Not Food - High Poly Models.

I had to separate the high poly models as I used the process of Baking to transfer the details from the super high poly versions I had extracted and reworked on ZBrush, this is the use for the high poly models I mentioned earlier, in this way I could still keep all details I had worked on the high poly ones, and transfer them to the low poly versions without destroying the topology of the models, and keep them simple.

After all the texturing and baking of details was done, I extracted all the textures and recompiled them into materials in Maya, I had to recompile a lot of them for single objects, as many objects had different levels of Sub Surface Scattering that I had to account for and work on, other than that, I just used some nodes to manipulate a couple of levels of roughness and colours slightly, but the recompiling of the materials was pretty standard overall.

For the lighting, it was pretty simple, I had the suspect the pictures I used as reference were not taken in a real location but in a studio, so, I took the HDRI of a photography studio and obtained pretty much the Global Illumination I needed, after that I added a single light that I oriented and tweaked to reproduce at the best of my actual capacity the shadows that I could see in the photo, and added a grey wall, invisible in the final render, to have some of the photons jump back from it and lighten some of the shadows on the left side of the render, as they were of a deep dark black while in the photo they were a lither shade of black.

In the end, this is the final render in compositing, showing maps of Refraction Glossiness, Reflect,  Diffuse, Lighting and the final render (Not edited in photoshop) that I would go on to cut in the exact dimensions of the original reference, and tweak a bit on photoshop for the final version that you saw at the beginning of the post.

All and all, this project was pretty fun to work on, it made me approach new softwares and new pipelines of work for the first time from when I started studying 3D modeling a couple of months ago, it made me learn a lot of new things, and even if I still have the entire sea of knowledge to learn, I am satisfied with the result, and I hope to only do better from here.

Giangiorgio: The Ferocious Shark

This project was my first ever approach to 3D modeling in any shape or form, it is entirely done in 3D sculpting using ZBrush from the beginning to end, and like all other projects it started with the collecting of references for all parts of the creature and for the lighting I wanted to give it at the end.

The main reference was not that detailed, unfortunately, so I had to take inspiration from scars that real sharks have on their bodies normally to try and make the design of it a bit more interesting and a lot less plane.

The collection of reference was pretty simple as almost all parts of the original creatures this one is based upon are recognizeable, and the lighting too was simple to choose, as I wanted to give it an effect of light going into an abyss of water and hitting the shark from above.

The sculpting process started from some ZSpheres, and I worked from there first on the body, then on the wings if we can call them like that, then I moved to smaller parts like the teeths, and then finally to the final version with all detailing of the body and the pose for the final renders.

Not the easiest or fastest of processes, and not without a few mistakes here and there, but it was satisfying to see my first creation take form from nothing.

In the end, as I said before, I decided to go with a "Deep Sea" style of lighting, I used 3 camers in total and used different lights going from above, behind, and in front of his face especially to obtain the effect of lighting I wanted while keeping visible all details I could on his body.

The three renders at the beginning of the post are the result of that.

These are the raw renders without the photoshop effects I added after to give a bit of a blue colour to everything, this too was a very satisfying project to work on, and for being my first one ever, I am happy of how it came out, I only learned more from then, but I am still happy of how it turned out.