Pumpkin asset

 

Our first project of this term was to create a pumpkin asset. I am really excited by this project as it is near to Halloween and the perfect season to be making something like this. I have a lot of ideas of what I would like to do however I will first collect some images from online to use as a reference. To get me back started into the swing of my uni project I will be refreshing my skills with a pbr workflow baking down a zbrush sculpt and texturing it in unreal.

Before I started sculpting I wanted to collect some references that I could use to give me some ideas of what I was going to do for my pumpkin asset. I saw these pumpkin carvings and thought they would be a really good way of pushing my sculpting skills on zbrush a bit. I really enjoy sculpting on zbursh too so i was very enthustaic to incorporate this into my design. I wanted to go about this project thinking of how I waas going to sculpt and retop into my texturing. From my research i also decided that I wanted to make a horror inspired pumpkin rather than a more typical cute one. I haven't done a horror concept before and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do something new. I was thinking of the narrative and I came up with this kind of man eating pumpkin monster type thing with arms made from stalks. I also want to include lots of blood on it to further push its concept towards the direction of horror.

I began by shaping a basic pumpkin on Zbrush by using a sphere shape and using masks to inflate the areas which would stick out. I also made a lid using a mask and appened a stalk sculpted from a simple cylinder shape. I used the move tool a lot during this sculpt as I wanted to add a more organic and less balanced feel to the shape. I made the pumpkin slightly uneven whilst also thinking about how big I wanted the carved face of the pumpkin to be. I actually started the base shape sculpt of the pumpkin much too high poly therefore it was really difficult for me to make large sweeping chnages. This is a mistake that I will correct later. On top of that I did have some inital issues with the actual topology of the sculpt being warped even after zremshing. I was however able to work around this.

As you can see there's some strange lines going on on the top of the pumpkin however this does not bother me too much since it is an organic form and I plan on making it disgusting looking. I used the extract tool for the shape of the lip and will retop a lip into my low poly in order to make the bake nicer.

I then used a Boolean to cute out holes from my pumpkin in zbrush and I then put a duplicate of pumpkin behind it so that I could start sculpting into that to make the faces. I decided to add 3 more Booleans either side as if the creature had 3 faces to it. I wanted to sculpt each one differently. I wanted to create very dynamic facial expressions on the monster and i was consistently thinking about how I was going to texture it. However I knew I wouldn't have enough budget to carve in details which effected the silouttete too much so I made sure that the face stayed lower than the outer pumpkin as I wanted to bake the face down onto a relatively flat surface. 

Once I had finished my sculpt in zbrush I decimated it and then brought it into 3Ds in order to retop it. However I realised when I was about half way through that I had done my retop way too high poly. It ended up being 6k tris when out budget was 3K it took me a long time to delete some of the loops and get it down to 3K. This is something I will think about next time I retop.

My finished retop looked ok however due to the mount of tris I had to delete I ended up loosing some of the loops and nice topology however I did try and keep it as nice as I could. Furthermore I also kept in mind how easy this would be for me to texture therefore I amde sure to keep any sections that would require different textures in separate loops to each other. Such as the faces I made sure to unwrap those separately to one another so that it would be easy for my to mask them out. 

The image above shows my final bake and texture on substance painter. I spent a long time on this using a mixture of masks layers and hand painting to achieve a natural dynamic texture. I hand painted in between the contours of the face to make them pop out a little bit. I think the blood really added a sense of horror to the pumpkin. I made these using an alpha brush and height. I wanted to make it look like the pumpkin monster had been ravaging something.

Final results in Unreal

Overall I am really pleased with how my pumpkin looked in unreal. I was messing about with emissive masks on the faces however I found that it was blurring out of the details I had put into the face too much and I wanted to maintain the details of it. I also tried out sub surface scattering with a thickness map however I also wasn't happy with the results of this. therefore in order to create the illusion of the faces glowing I lit the scene to make it look like they were using point lights. If I had a bit more time on this project I would have liked to have further explored sub surface scattering and see if I could get some better results which worked with my project.