Meet Mat the Rose

Final Submission

Here is my entry for Meet Mat 3 Competition. I had a lot of fun with this. Since I'm not a sculpter and have zero knowledge of Zbush, I have done most of the height maps in Substance, and used alphas I could fins online. I've also utilized Substace Sampler to create missing maps from textures and in some cases Photoshop. 

Thank you The Rookies and Adobe for holding this contest!

Final Edits

After a feedback run I did some changes to the head I made my own displacement alpha for the rose bud using Blender and Zbrush. I have zero knowledge of Zbrush and I'm not a sculpter so I tried my best to re-create what was suggested to me. I mixed it with my previous displacement to get closer to what I wanted to achieve. I also added some leafs to the back of the rosebud to try and sell the concept of a rose more. I wanted to do more changes to the displacement, but something happened to my Substance Painter file and it did not properly save my work, so I lost all of the work I did today. 

I did some final edits on the stand as well, adding stones to make it look a bit like a flower bed. Stone texture is from CGAxis. 

The Body

I struggled quite a lot to figure out what I wanted to do with the body. Now I would consider myself done with the body and I thought I would break down the process.

The base of the body consists of various layers to get an organic look with several colors, roughness and changes in height. I was inspired by this plant created by Yannick Gombart.

For the small pertruding circles I combined two different crab skin materials from CGAxis. I then adjusted the color and roughness to more match the look of something plant like.

The next layer of my rose Mat are the vines. They are 100% created in Substance Painter by hand painting, masks and anchor points. Thanks to the procedural strenghts of Substance Painter and anchor points I have been able to just paint my vines on one paint-layer and then all the layers on top containing variations in color and height updated automatically. This has been very useful for me cause I have been going back and forth painting new paths for the vines. I can save this as a smart material and use in another project in the future if I want. If I have time I want to spent a little more time on the look of the vines to make them look a bit more realistic.

Next are the "blisters", I don't know what else to call them. I've written about them before so I'll just go over them briefly. They are fully procedural and 100% created in Substance Painter utilizing anchor points. 

It's not a rose without some thorns, so after finishing the blisters I added some thorns on top of the vines. I created a very simple custom brush to create the thorns. Very similar to the vines and blisters I created my own smart material for the thorns using anchor points so that I could just paint my mask and have every thing else get updated based on this paint layer. 

Last thing is the collar around the neck. This part is just several hand painted layers with different amount of height to create a layering. The very last thing on top of everything are the water droplets instanced from the head.

The head

I think that the head is next to done. I might just adjust the water droplets a little bit cause the edges looks a bit too harsh. 

I started out by nailing the height for the rosebud, which I fiddled with for quite a long time. I got unwanted ripple in the displacement and realised finally that I was pushing the displacement too hard and had to tone it down. The displacement I decided to use in the end is a combination of an alpha I found on Pinterest and a picture of a rose that I adjusted in Photoshop. I know pinterest is not a source for assets, but I searched all over the internet for where it came from or if I could find something remotely similar and I could not. 

After doing the rose part I masked out the middle to make room for the eye. The eye was created by handpainting the displacement and for albedo/diffuse I projected a picture of an iris. I changed the color of the iris cause I wanted the eye to be blue.

To get a realistic feel of the petals and the green part the stem is attached to I used photos from Textures.com. They had just masked photos and I then used Photoshop to make my own roughness and displacement. The petals I had two masked photos of two different petals and I layered them in Photoshop to create my own full flower and the missing maps. 

I got a bit stuck with this concept, but like a week before Christmas I finally knew what I wanted to do with the body after narrowing down a new mood/reference board. 

Utilizing anchor points and how procedural Substance Painter is I made my own smart material to do "blisters" (I don't know what else to call them). 

So after setting it up I can just paint plain circles in my paint mask layer and everything else (height, color variation, the encapsulation of the blisters) will be added automatically. I'm gonna add more blisters and it feels much less daunting that all I have to do is paint circles and everything else is already set up. I made the blisters have less uniform shape by adding a warp filter to the paint mask layer before adding the Anchor Point. 

I have also added some water droplets to make the head more interesting

Slowly getting there with some of the details. Right now I'm only happy with the backside of the head. Having issues with not getting unwanted ripples in the displacement on the front. I might have to tone it down a lot and maybe do a rosebud instead of a rose in bloom. 

1.2 New Concept!

I decided to change my concept cause I saw that someone else was also doing a clicker from "Last of Us". It took me a couple of days to be inspired by something new. My new concept is a rose creature thing, I'm not entirely sure yet what to do with the body and stand, I only know that the head will be a rose with eyes. 

1. Concept

It took me quite some time to settle on an idea. I wanted to do something to really push myself to learn new techniques in Substance Painter, but also something I haven't seen someone else do before in this competition. I decided on a Clicker from "Last of Us" to work with both organic and non-organic materials. I can already see a lot of challenges ahead, but I'm really excited to do this. Since I'm not very skilled in 2D drawing I'm concepting and trying things out directly in Painter.