Crystal Lance

Key Responsibilities:
Design, Low/High Poly Modeling, Sculpting, Design of Substance Painter Substances, Texture Creation, Lighting, Rendering, UV Mapping, Baking

Personal Work, 2022

This was a high fantasy lance that I designed on a napkin during my lunch that I decided to turn into a quick model. The inspirations range from Final Fantasy to New World. I incorporated elements of the Fabergé that I started to really fall in love with during my time with Mono Locco with a simplistic lance design with the twist being the warped metal hilt. I used a variety of generators and fills to create interesting gradients within each section of the model. This was made easier with a colour pallet from "https://paletton.com" which is where I often go for colour inspiration. I really enjoyed taking advantage of Substance painters Fill and Blur effects to help create height details in the texture without having to take the time to model them in the High Resolution Mesh. This allowed me to create the twisting and swirling effects seen on the handle and hilt rather quickly.

I created the low and high resolution meshes in Maya LT and once the LR was UV'd, I exported them to Marmoset Toolbag 3 to get their base maps. I love using Marmosets unique set of Baking tools, being able to paint my cage manually as opposed to trying to guide the computer to do it for me. It really is more satisfying and often cuts down on overall production time more than one would think. These maps were then imported to Substance Painter in which all textures were created, bar a few small additions added in post-export. Aforementioned additions were made in Photoshop 2021, these include; Fixes to Opacity Map, which is a common issue when translating maps from Substance to Marmoset, and touching up the overall roughness map to adjust for the small lighting changes between software. All of these textures were then sent back into Marmoset Toolbag to be rendered out. This is a process that usually takes awhile for me, I often get wrapped up (if there is no deadline) in picking the perfect lighting colours, the perfect angles, but this piece came quickly. I shot most of it with a 45mm lens and swapped to a slightly more fish eyed lens for the shots closer to the crystal.

Total project time was around 20 hours and the model is about 8k polys, but could easily be reduced by lowering the amount of sides in each cylinder and adjusting the edges accordingly.