Season's Change

This will be my final update to my entry for Meet Mat 3!

Thanks to Alwyn and Pablo for helping me troubleshoot my problems getting the fabric to render properly on Tuesday, and also extra thanks to Alwyn for all the feedback over the course of the competition!

Renders

All my renders were done in Blender using Cycles. I used a gobo to get the dappled light on the ground. The gobo was from a pack made by Stefan Kotuziak. 

Additional Renders

Breakdown

Layer Stack in Substance Painter for the head

All the paths I used for the embroidery on the vest. I actually used it quite a bit through the entire project for placing elements such as seam lines, and the moss and lichen. It would be a bit much to show every single path in my project so I'm only showing where I used it most. I even used the path tool to arrange the individual embroidery pieces I made in Substance Designer. It's really great for doing intricate designs that are still entirely changeable! This was the third iteration of the design I did and working like that was only possible with the path tool!

Renders done in Blender. Unfortunately the anisotropic effect of the brocade fabric is not working the same in Blender as it did in Substance. I need to figure out what's going on there. The first image is from Substance with the effect working.

Here are the materials I worked on in Substance Designer:

Perspective

Front

Head

Clothing in progress

Embroidery Graph I made in Designer

Moss Material

Lichen Material

I worked on the areas with wood. I made a bark material in Substance Designer, then applied it the model using warp projection to have the direction of the bark follow the sculpting. The face was done by layering and masking to get the look of slightly weathered wood carving. I made the mask for the decorative border around the face in Substance Designer.

Closeup of head

Bark in Substance Designer

Warp projection

Border in Substance Designer

I sculpted in Zbrush then exported displacement and normal maps for the model. They were then applied in Substance Painter. There are some areas where the displacement could use some clean up but I'm overall pleased. I plan to do the rest of the detail work in Painter since it will be less destructive that way. I'm not sure yet how much of the bark I want to come from Zbrush so I left some areas with less detail and some with more. I'll come back to that once I've done more in Painter.

I sculpted the first pass of the face in Zbrush, then generated an alpha from it which I used in Substance painted as a height mask.

My concept for the Meet Mat is to make it into this green man like figure worried that his leaves have begun to change. The face will be carved with the rest of the head being left as the raw bark and leaves of a tree. The outfit will incorporate embroidery. I particularly like some of the almost rougher, wiry looking embroidery in some of my references.

My anticipated difficulties will be in getting the leaves to look right. I'm not sure how to convey the thinness and placement of the leaves with only displacement.