Alchemist Salamander Mount | Process

The Goal

Since the beginning of this course, I've been trying to get pictorial textures that could be adapted to a dark fantasy world, as I haven't found many such games in my research. Also, I love both handpainted textures and dark fantasy, so whenever I can, I try to combine them.

The Process

Concept

One of the requirements of this project was that what we modelled should not be human or anthropomorphic, but it had to be a creature.

I really like fantasy, so I opted for this way.

I made a couple of creatures but I didn't really like them, like they lacked something distinctive .....

For some reason, I thought of a wizard goose, with a hat, wand and other wizard stuff, especially because calling him "The Goozard" made me laugh, but the wings and in general the anatomical construction reminded me too much of a person so I thought of making a 4-legged creature.

Another funny creature I thought of was the salamander. I really like reptiles in general, especially dragons.

I combined the general structure of salamanders, big head and eyes of geckos and added some horns just for the sake of it, the cool rule.

This is the reference panel I used:

In the beginning, the salamander was going to be the alchemist Itself, with boots and backpacks for when it went out to collect plants, berries or whatever material it needed. But when I was making the concept I realised that it wasn't quite right in terms of functionality and I couldn't find a way to make the backpacks and other props suitable for the salamander's use. So I changed the concept and made the salamander the mount of an alchemist, now indeed, with backpacks and props that fit its user.

After the change to make the salamander a mount, I updated the reference panel:

The most obvious change is the mount. I changed the chest for a saddle and a backpack that could have other backpacks hooked to it or various utensils.

As you can see, the concept is somewhat different from the final one. The backpacks on the tail didn't have too much subjection and I eliminated them, the potions on the right horn too, except this time because I thought it was too much detail in that area and the paella and the saucepan were suggestions from my friends as I developed the project and I liked them a lot, so I included them.

With the concept completed, we move on to the blocking of the creature. 

Blocking

The blocking was done in ZBrush, using different meshes for each main group of muscles or areas that I found more comfortable to be separated, but all of them were initially worked with Dynamesh. I like to separate the different meshes into different colours, it helps me to see the real volume of what I am working on.

High

Once the blocking was finished, I did some detailing with grooves on the tongue and especially the eye sockets.

Retopology / Low

First, I started with the rings of the mesh, i.e. in my case the salamander's limbs, tail and head. With organic mesh retopologies I always try to find these 5-vertexes or star vertices as soon as possible, as they help me a lot when it comes to fitting the whole mesh together smoothly.

The orange and green mesh you see is the geometry used to adjust the animation of these parts of the limbs such as elbows or knees.

Modelling of the props
The props process varied depending on certain aspects, for example, I modelled the plants and flowers separately and using the 3dsMax reference system I modified them and applied the UVs to the original.

I recommend this system for repetitive meshes as it is very convenient to choose what to share between children and what to keep as the mesh's own change/modifier.

For the backpack and mantle, I used a mesh with the Turbosmooth modifier and then cleaned up the geometry after collapsing it. I don't think you should always do this but for this occasion, it was more comfortable for me.

I preferred to do the salamander first and finish its low and then do the props as the details that could be baked could be achieved with the Substance Painter maps. Besides, I could take advantage of the already relaxed mesh of the salamander to duplicate it and take out some curves like for example the reins.

Once the mesh of the props was finished, I used a chamfer of 1 so that the edges were not so straight.

UV MAPS

I used 2 2k maps for this project, it could probably be scaled down but since I was mostly experimenting with the art style it wasn't a concern.

The first map corresponds entirely to the salamander, not only because I find it easier to organise, but also because I conceived the salamander as a creature that inhabited the game world and the most skilled player could train it so that in case I needed the salamander in "Wild" state all the maps needed for it would be already prepared.

The second one is entirely for the props for the exactly same reason as I explained above.

BAKE

I only baked the pieces of the salamander. I used Marmoset for this. The main artefacts happened inside the mouth of the animal. This one is separate as it was originally going to be able to be opened but in the end, I decided against it as I wasn't going to be able to animate it for the project. But, as it was not going to be opened and the inside was not going to be seen, the fact that it was black from the AO bake was not a major problem either.

Texturing

I used the substance painter to make the handpainted textures.
I got a couple of oil brushes for substance and did a couple of tests. The one that gave me the best result is the following one:

1. First, make a layer with the jitter colour on to create a loose base with a lot of colour variation.

2. Then, on a different layer, do the same but with a mini rake brush or continue with the same (depending on the level of detail needed and how big the prop is) and apply highlights and shadows.

3. Use a stippling brush and paint stipple brush to finish the painting touch.

This was the process for the wood:

Metallic and Reflective Materials

While that is the whole process, metallic and highly reflective materials have another step.

I wanted to make the reflections also look like brushstrokes, so I chose to use the World Normal Maps instead of the tangential ones. The reason for using these on this occasion is because of their high reflectivity, if you don't have this attribute and the prop moves, it is very likely that at certain angles with the camera, they would be black.

These are how WorldNormals look in the project:

The textures are albedo and an arm with AO, Roughness and metallic each in a different channel.

Render and Material Configuration

As I mentioned before because there are 2 different UVs and the normals of certain materials are different, I require 3 different materials to make the model work:

1. The salamander

2. Non-metallic props

3. Metallic props

Marmoset:
At Marmoset I finally decided to use one more material to separate the glass from the metal.

Both the salamander material and the props material work the same but for glass and metal, you have to activate the WorldNormal.

To make the material for the glass I started from the Marmoset preset and I was tweaking the parameters a bit to make it fit what I wanted.

These are a few renders I did with this configuration of materials:

Unreal
For Unreal, the configuration is similar to Marmoset's but the glass has a bit of a trick.

If this is a basic opaque surface material in unreal:

What we need to do to be able to plug the normal to a translucent material is to change the translucency to Surface Translucency Volume:

Now the glass material applies the normal map:

LODS

The most important thing when reducing is to take into account the UV cuts because if any of them are removed or moved, the texture will be deformed.

Apart from that, it's just a matter of time and seeing little by little how it looks and if it looks too faceted at the distance of the LOD.

I reduced especially in the plants, as they have in the LOD0 volume and most of them I left them as flat in the LODS.

The toes of the legs and many rings of the body geometry were the next ones, as well as the round props that I reduced to half loops because the faceting was not appreciated.

This is the whole process of the salamander model. I have enjoyed experimenting with this artistic style and will continue to do so in order to perfect it as it is far from perfect in this state.

Thank you very much for reading the post!