Eddie

So this is where I ended up before my rig decided it didn't like the number of layers I was working on at 4k. I think my own hubris got the better of me, as I believed my machine could handle it.  Playing around with this app, it seems to have an amazing interface and some really cool features, however I've still got a lot to learn with it. 

I'm happy with the final result, however I know there are a lot of other people that produced things far beyond this in terms of quality. Seeing everyone else's work gave me a lot to learn from. 

My idea for Eddie was that of a life sized toy robot/child caretaker that was abandoned in some way. Sadly, I couldn't get to some of the small detail I wanted due to a major amount of lag. Things like screws, and height maps had to be put aside. 

If I had time to do this project again, I would do it at a much lower resolution. Working through this and a little but of research showed me that each UV tile was set to 4k, and as such made a major dent on speed. Being able to work faster would allow me to make more iterations, and change things much more quickly. 

At this point I've begun coloring the entire work. With masking the different UV islands I was able to run through a lot of iterations, which eventually landed on me working on a design similar in color scheme to childhood toys. My eventual goal is to degrade the cleanliness of the design and make it look similar to a futuristic 'buddy bot' similar to the teddy bear in AI. 

So I've started by blocking out my color ideas by directly painting before going in and using my masks to finalize it. I'm focusing only on the color, and not on the other options available in substance painter right now. 

Once I got the colors down I did some final tweaks before moving forward. I wanted the design to look like it was planned out for toy manufacturing to appeal to younger audiences. I'm still toying with the idea of going for a horror element, or more along the lines of an epic adventure. As I'm working I'm trying to come up with the story of Eddie. Making the base gives me time to think it out while still working. 

At this point I've added screws and seams. I'm thinking of how I'm going to break up the chest piece in an interesting way. My goal for this portion of the project is to make it look factory fresh before adding aging elements from use and abuse. Little things, like seams in the molding process are my focus right now, as they'll make the final version more convincing. 

Hello everyone. First post here, I heard about this place from a youtube channel. I came over to try to show my work more frequently, and on more locations. Once I got here I saw the competition and although I'm very late to joining I feel that there's no better way to figure this stuff out than to hop in and try. I want to use substance painter for all of this project if possible just to test out how far I can push it.  

The first thing I found on trying to open a file was that I couldn't simply select the file and get started. There was a lot of stuff here I'm not familiar with, however I'm familiar with unreal, so I chose that, and I know my system can handle 4k textures, so that's what I'm going for. On opening the file and exploring all of the parts I found that there weren't any of the things I'm used to seeing whenever I export/import from my other programs (such as ambient occlusion). It took me a second to realize that I did not select the option to use the UV tile workflow. 

This was what I was running in to that set me towards realizing that I had made a mistake somewhere. 

Now that I have everything right and I'm on my home PC, I've started masking off all of the different UV islands. It may be a bit overkill, but I'm hoping it will save me some time for making quick iterations on the project. 

While I'm working on this I'm reminded of robots from varying media. I don't want to completely replicate the styles I can recall, however it gives me ideas. The eyes and mouth remind me of the design similar of a certain pokemon as well. The angles of Eddie are sharp in some places and smooth in others. The head looks like it would be at home as a kid's toy robot, while the hands and feet negate that. I think I want to play with that for the paint concept and see what I can pull out.