Solar Celestial Mat

Solar Celestial Mat - Round Off

Just to round this project off, I'd like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this contest, no matter what place I come. I had a great time doing it, learned a lot more about Substance Painter and what can be achieved within it, and I look forward to competing in future competitions.

Thank you!

Solar Celestial Mat - Renders

This post shows the final renders for this entry. As per required, I am submitting 2 x renders, one from each of the provided cameras at a resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels. These are shown below.

Solar Celestial Mat - Rendering

The final stage of this entry is rendering. Before jumping into Iray, there are a few settings I wanted to change. The first being the Specular quality. I changed this from a low 16spp to the ultra 256spp. Because there is a lot of specular and metallic materials in this project, I wanted to achieve the best quality I could for this. 

I then also changed the Tesselation Subdivision count up to 32 so that I could achieve the smoothest height displacement possible.

The final setting I changed before going into Iray was the shadows. I enabled shadows, set the computation mode to Intensive, and set the shadow opacity to 76 to achieve a nice, contrasting lighting. Just from these settings, you can see a big difference. This is shown in the images below (before - left, after - right).

Once these were set, I jumped into Iray and changed a few further settings. Within Iray, I fist activated post effects and enabled the colour correction, glare, and vignette. These were all very minute tweaks, esspecially in the colour correction. For example, the sepia tone ratio was set to 0.2, the contrast to 0.99 and the brightness to 0.96. I applied a glare as I personally like to emulate CG as if it were shot through a camera lens. I also personally like using a very subtle vignette as it helps draw focus to the centre of the frame without being obvious to the viewer. I also activated the temporal anti-aliasing in order to achieve an even smoother, crisper image. The final parameter I changed in this window was the tone mapping function. This was changed from Linear to ACES. 

After that, I altered the max samples and max rendering time to allow for sufficient sampling for the image. I also changed the resolution to the required 4096x2160. Finally, I enabled the caustic sampler in order to achieve a more complex and interesting look on the lighting.

The final renders will be posted in a separate post.

Solar Celestial Mat - Skin and Pattern Work

Following on from my previous post, before starting the pattern work, I wanted to fine tune the skin material. For this, I used the "Skin Face" material, dropped the HSV to a dark grey to match the concept art, and applied a subsurface scattering to make it look and feel more organic. I used a yellow hue for the scatter colour as this Mat is a solar celestial, so it would be fitting for the scatter colour to emulate sun light. Almost how I envision Helios to have sunlight running through his veins. This can be seen in the images below.

As you can see, I have also changed the lighting from the previous post. I had an experiment with different different HDRI images from the default package, and chose the one I feel compliments Mat best. 

From here, on a new layer, I used the path tool and the symmetry feature to create the pattern work. For this, I used a gold material and a positive height displacement. Using the path tool made creating the pattern work a lot easier than it otherwise would have been, and it was very pleasant to have a non-destructive workflow for this. Once the paths were created, I then used an eraser to manually taper the points of the paths. This can be seen in the images below.

With this in place, the final step will be rendering. This will be covered in the next post. 

Solar Celestial Mat - Base Body Materials

The next task I had to approach was the base materials for Mat's torso. I thought a good place to start would be to add in the same placeholder skin material that I used for the head. This is seen in the image below.

From here, the next logical step would be to add the material for the panelling on his arms and legs. I wanted this material to contrast with his skin, I had a white, hard, shiny material in mind. And so, I used the "Marble Verde Alpi" smart material and adjusted a few values. The first notable change is the colour, which I simply dropped the saturation and increased the value of. This was the main change I did for the other layers which held a green colour. I also tinkered with the roughness very gently. This is seen in the image below.

From here, as seen in the concept art, the bottom of Mat's feet possess a gold plating, almost like shoe soles. This was a pretty quick and simple addition by applying a gold material, adding a black mask, and painting it back in in the UV view with the polygon fill feature. This is seen in the image below.

To finalise this section, I used the path tool to paint in the gold material for the necklace. Unfortunately, I did not think about this when drawing in the height displacement for it, and so I had to trace over the shape of it with the material. Luckily, I was able to cross-reference the path thickness so I could match the material coverage to the displacement. This seemed to work well, as is shown in the images below.

As is evident in the images above, I have chosen to add in some shadows from the display settings, and I have increased the tessellation and specular quality settings in order to improve the look of Mat. There were no rules stated against this, so I will run with it. 

The next section will cover the fine pattern work.

Solar Celestial Mat - Head Texturing

After the previous post, the first thing I wanted to do was to texture the head. For the base colour, I used the Copper smart material and adjusted the colour values to be more of a golden hue. I experimented with the gold materials however I liked the look and the extra imperfections of the copper smart material more, so I improvised and adapted. However, this was still a little too pristine and smooth for me. And so, I added the "Iron Old" smart material as well but only retained the height channel in order to add in some extra, soft little bumps. Being a timeless celestial, he's bound to have a few knocks and bumps along the way! With this in mind, I then went and added some colour wear to the centre bulge. Being a prominent, protruding feature, this is likely to have taken the most wear over time. Finally, for the mask, I then added some extra dirt and imperfections to add to the reality of it as it was still too nice and shiny. This process can be seen in the image set below.

I then wanted to add a placeholder for the skin. The skin material is going to be a material that will have more attention being put into it, but for the purpose of a pre-vis, I added the "Skin Feverish" smart material and adjusted the colour values to be a dark grey rather than a human skin colour. This will be revised later on, but as a prototype, this will suffice. This is shown below.

The next section will be approaching the base materials for the body before starting the finer pattern work.

Solar Celestial Mat - Body Updates and Head

Before starting on the head, I wanted to make a couple changes to the body. Firstly, In my previous post, I had used a custom alpha map to generate the border edges of Mat's panelling on his limbs. Since then, I have revised this and have re-done these borders using the path tool. This allowed me to not only be more accurate with the placement, but it was 100% procedural and was a lot easier to use. This was especially handy when it came to adjusting the size and height of the paths. I was also able to use a gold material as well when creating the paths, making the paint work a lot easier than it otherwise would have been! 

I then went and added the necklace using the path tool as well. Because I had already displaced the torso inwards, I had to create a white mask on it and painted in black with the path tool on the mask. This gave the same result as it simply painting on just with the height channel. I was then able to use a height adjust filter to fine tune the height values. 

I then got slightly side-tracked and added the white marble material to the base as I thought it was being a little left out thus far. These updates can be seen in the image below.

For those with a good eye, you can see I have altered the camera. All that has changed is the field of view, which has been increased to 26 degrees to allow for room inside the frame for the head design.

Speaking of which, I then approached the shape of the head. As seen in the concept art, he is to have a large golden mask with spikes protruding out depicting the sun's rays. The look of these deviated slightly as height values can inly be altered on the Y axis following a point's normal, and can not be transformed on the X or Z axis. However, I feel like the design I went with amplified the radiant feeling that I wanted the mask to give. This is shown in the image below.

As you can see, this now fits the frame nicely. It was outlined that this was an acceptable change to make, so I ran with it. From here, Mat's face needs a sun dial pattern. And so, I created an alpha for and stamped it in using a negative height value in order to make it look engraved. I also added a slight soft bulge in the centre to give it more visual variety. This is seen in the image below.

To finalise this section, I then went and created the head strap for the mask. I did this by first using the path tool with a gold material and height displacement, and then, on another layer, further displaced some basic pattern work. This can be seen in the image below.

As you can see, I have also altered the FOV for the perspective camera as well for the same purpose. From here, I will start to look at applying some materials and possibly the start of some finer pattern work.

Solar Celestial Mat - General Body Shape

After completing the mood board and concept art for my entry, I went into Substance Painter with the provided project file and started to break down how I was to approach achieving my design. I chose to start with the body of Mat first and isolated this section by hiding the head and the base. From here, admittedly, it was a lot of trial and error to get the right shape. I'm not the most familiar with sculpting in general, let alone sculpting solely through a height displacement. However, I managed to achieve a shape that I am happy with, and that also closely matches that of the concept art (not exactly, but close enough for me to be happy with). This can be seen in the images below.

For the patterning on the legs and the arms, rather than hand painting them, I decided to create my own alpha maps to stamp them on. In order to do this, I  roughly sketched out the pattern on the model in Substance Painter, screen clipped the UV view, and took this into Photoshop to draw over more accurately. In order to retain a high resolution, I then separated the alphas for each limb, and resized and resampled them on a 4K canvas. For each limb's pattern, I also retained an alpha just of the line art. This allowed me to create the borders on another layer. These custom alphas can be seen in the images below. 

My next task will be the shaping of the head before then adding some detailing into the whole model.

Solar Celestial Mat - Mood Board & Concept Art

For this project, the theme I'm aiming for is a mix of dark fantasy and mythology. The idea is to transform Mat into a solar celestial, similar to the titan Helios in Greek mythology. 

The image above displays the mood board I have collated. I have taken reference from other artists' works, as well as "Goldmask" from Elden Ring. I love the idea of him having a very unnatural body shape, but very grey as if the body is fossilised due to being so old. As the project progresses, I will likely accumulate more reference images, but this is a good start. 

I also plan on turning Mat's flat face into the face of a sun dial, with the outer edges protruding out like the sun (similar to the outer edge of Goldmask's mask). In the image below, you can see the concept art for my entry.

As you can see, there is a lot of major height displacement needed in order to "sculpt" the body. This will also be used for the gold pattern work to make it appear that it is placed over the top of the body rather than being a part of it. I may also experiment with subsurface scattering for the grey parts of the body to help make it feel more organic. 

From here, the next step will be to block out the general shape of the body before going in with more refined details.