Meet The Rogue Frog Mat

Meet The Rogue Frog Mat!

Mat happens to be a frog and a rogue. This mysterious little fellow travels far to find treasure and claim bounties in faraway kingdoms.

Rendered using Nvidia Iray in Adobe Substance Painter.

Additional workflow breakdowns can be found below in previous updates.

‘Render Cam Front’ and ‘Render Cam Perspective’ Renders

2024/01/15 - More feedback application from the previous live feedback session.

Here's an enumerated list of changes:
● The subsurface scattering colour of the frog's skin was tweaked.
● Desaturated the gold accents.
● Tweaked the roughness of the golden accents.
● Increased the scale of the stitching on the hoodie.
● Extended the teal leather to the fingertips.
● The dagger's handle got a more apparent cast iron material.
● Redone some scratches on the armour.
● More wear on belt edges and belt holes.
● More substantial displacement on the leather patch.
● Balanced values and saturation in the base colour.
● Adjusted the HDR.
● Adjusted the ground's base color, roughness, and displacement.

Additional Renders

Slide the slider to see the effect of subsurface scattering on the frog's skin!

"The Swampland Bounty Hunters" leather patch emblem.

Closeups

An optical illusion attempts to convey the feeling that the eyes of the frog are always staring towards the viewer.

Individual channel breakdown previews.

Latest progress process view.

Previous Breakdowns

Concept and References

‘Render Cam Front’ and ‘Render Cam Perspective’ Renders

2024/01/04 - I focused on applying feedback from the judge's live review session on January 2nd and improving the general feel of the materials. I also remade the ground with a more fitting theme.

Additional Renders

‘Render Cam Front’ and ‘Render Cam Perspective’ Renders

2023/12/30 - My general focus was to fake the illusion of depth in the displaced elements so they do not feel as flat as my previous iteration. I polished my textures this time by applying feedback and doing things in hindsight.

Additional Renders

Stage 05: Presentation

2023/12/26 - I rendered a custom HDRi in Blender for the Iray render. I also made additional adjustments to get higher fidelity with the texture in the final render.

Stage 04: Material Finalization

2023/12/24 - I baked and imported the separate parts and made some manual adjustments to make the displacement details feel as natural as possible. I began incorporating the materials into the displacement maps. The material received an additional polishing pass.

Stage 03: Production (Sculpted Details)

2023/12/18 - Since we got confirmation that we can sculpt and bake maps for this contest, I decided to sculpt the face, the clothing, and the pouch in ZBrush.

Individual map channels.

Stage 03: Production Week 02 (Upper belts, armor, and base clothing)

2023/12/04 - I continued adapting my initial concept in 3D. This week, I tackled the upper belts and armour. I also started on the clothing. The clothing still needs a bit of wear and a few passes of roughness and colour variation. I will look into improving the visuals of clothing once key elements with higher priority are implemented, such as the face of the character and the hood surrounding it.

The ground under the Meet Mat character improved slightly with additional random height variation per brick. The gold coins on the ground also blend better with the environment.

Full/Raw renders of the current progress

Stage 03: Production (Boots and Ground)

2023/11/27 - I started with leather boots. I created them as non-destructively as possible to have as much control as possible and apply any possible feedback as conveniently as possible. To achieve maximum maintainability, I extensively used tools, such as paths, during production. Once satisfied with the displacement, I used anchoring as much as possible when texturing my model. I made some alphas in Substance Designer to assist me in creating these textures.

Full/Raw renders of the current progress

Stage 02: Blockout

2023/11/26 - I first had to block out all the details from the 2D concept on the Meet Mat model. Making displacement on Meet Mat was quite challenging as I'm more used to baking high poly meshes on a low poly. I will look into drawing the displacement of the character's face closer to the end. The most important part was to nail the positions and proportions of the concept.

Stage 01: Concepting

2023/11/22 - Meet The Rogue Frog Mat! Mat happens to be a frog and a rogue. This mysterious little fellow travels far to find treasure and claim bounties in faraway kingdoms.

At the current moment, I'm at the concept stage. I initially sketched different clothing configurations and then tested out different faces. After that, I looked into the color palette I would use for my character. Despite the illustration presenting itself in a very stylized way, I will attempt to convert this to a more realistic style: stylized realism. I will look into exaggerating some proportions on the character's body and implementing realistically made materials.

I am looking forward to the following stages! I can't wait to start working on the "blockout" in Adobe Substance Painter.