The Conqueror — 3D Stylized Prop Breakdown
A student’s process of diving deep into stylized props.
Inspiration
In selecting a prop, I knew I wanted to pick a prop that would challenge me when it came to texturing. I wanted to emulate a stylized artist with a very illustrative feel, and Epic-Solider’s portfolio of props fit into this category perfectly. The Conqueror in particular dealt with unique shapes, included a piece of fabric, and had dynamic shadows and highlights. All of these were elements that I wanted to tackle in this project.
On top of gathering references for the sword, I also took a look at the artist’s style: the way they handle different materials, colors, textures, and contrast between highlights and shadows. This was especially helpful in understanding their style, considering I only had one view of the prop. Rather than taking too many guesses with the information I didn’t have, I could instead interpret how the artist might handle different viewpoints based on the reference I had gathered.
Blockout
Before jumping into modeling this prop, I had to break it down into individual sections. By focusing on individual parts instead of the sword as a whole, I was able to better discern the shapes, angles, and profile of the sword. The Conqueror is very tiered in its shape, with many parts layered over top of one another. In breaking these parts into individual pieces, it allowed me to also make easy adjustments throughout the process when I found that some pieces didn’t lay exactly how I wanted them to. Once I divided up the sword into sections, I started to block in the shape. For a majority of the pieces, I started with a plane, focusing first on getting an accurate silhouette of each piece.
Lowpoly
In the blockout stage, I was initially not too concerned with my overall geometry, but now that I had a solid foundation for each of my pieces it was time to go back and refine. This meant eliminating n-gons, unnecessary edges, slanted quads that could produce a bad bake, and refining as I go to make sure I keep a shape consistent with my reference.
Prior to establishing my low poly model, I duplicated the sword so that I had both an unrefined blockout, and a refined low poly. This is done to give me a chance to go back and retrieve past parts of my mesh if needed, just in case I make any modifications that were to ruin some aspect of my model. That way, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch, but from my initial blockout instead. This is a practice I continue throughout the lowpoly, and into the highpoly stage.
Before I began to prep my model for the high poly stage, I made use of the lattice tool on a couple of the prop’s pieces, primarily the parts that made up the middle and hilt of the sword. I used this tool to add dimension and weight to The Conqueror’s side profile, preventing the prop from becoming too flat. From here, I once again made a duplicate of the sword that would be used as a transitional stage from Maya to ZBrush. I added edge loops to the mesh to hone in and sharpen the shape, before converting the polygons to that of the smoothed preview and importing the model into ZBrush.
Highpoly
Once in ZBrush, I started to work on the most complex shapes first, which included the hilt and handle. The base of the hilt had a symmetrical s-shaped curve that rounded out the hilt, which I achieved through a combination of turning on symmetry, and activating Lazy Mouse with the Clay brush. The combination of features within Lazy Mouse allowed me to be slow and precise with the stroke I made, while the stroke of the clay brush provided the smooth yet polished features that I was going for. For details on the end of the handle, I repeated this method, but also added in a bit of Clay Buildup in the beginning to lay out some larger shapes.
Much of the details of The Conqueror include divots or small indents, much of which I felt could be best re-created through the use of alphas. In preparation for this, I created a set of alphas in photoshop, which I then applied through the Dam Standard brush. For the most precise placement, I changed the stroke to DragRect, and either increased or decreased the intensity of the brush depending on how dramatic the detail appeared in my reference. Afterwards, I would smooth out the edges of the added detail if they appeared to be too dramatic.
While Epic-Soldier’s original concept was very pristine, I wanted to add a few cuts into the blade of the sword to make The Conqueror appear used. Not too much to overtake the model, but just enough to give an element of life to the prop. I used the Dam Standard brush once again to add tiny to medium sized cuts, primarily through the mid-lower part of the blade.
Unwrapping & Baking
After the completion of the highpoly, I return back to Maya to my low poly mesh and begin unwrapping. In order to increase the efficiency of my model and streamline the texturing process, I divided much of my pieces in half. This allowed me to lay corresponding UVs over one another, before projecting the back half exactly 1 unit over onto a separate UV square.
From here, I like to do a couple of test bakes in Substance Painter in order to identify any artifacts or inconsistencies with my bake. Any artifacts I did find was the result of the seams of my UV shells not being hardened, or due to my max frontal distance being set too high. After making a few tweaks to my model through this process, I produced a final bake and proceeded to texturing.
Texturing
Texturing was my favorite part of this pipeline, as not only is it the stage where I can finally see my model coming together, but this is also where I wanted to challenge myself the most as far as conveying Epic-Solider’s style to 3D. The first step I took in tackling the texturing process as a whole was breaking the sword down into separate parts, similarly to the steps I took in the blockout stage. Except in texturing, I broke it down by materials. Specifically…
- Golden Accent Metal
- Red Accent Metal
- Dark Grey “Matte” Metal
- Light Grey “Matte” Metal
I first tackled the grey pieces, which I initially combined into one masked folder. I focused on getting the right shade and tone of the light grey, before I added another layer with a black mask and curvature generator over top. I continued this process, with each layer getting increasingly lighter in shade and less dramatic in curvature until the texture had become well defined and blended together. Making use of the curvature generator gave me very crisp linework around the edges of the blade, which matched up well with Epic-Soldier’s style. From here, I created a purple fill layer with a black mask, set to overlay. Set at different opacities, this created the perfect shade of dark grey that was needed. Because the fill layer was set to overlay, the sharp contrast I had achieved with the curvature generator still broke through, so there was no need to repeat the process over again. From there, I just painted over wherever the dark grey appeared, using a lighter or darker opacity depending on the contrast of the blade.
I then went through and created separate folders for the gold and red accents. This was where the exact color of the pieces became a little trickier, as Epic-Soldier’s style incorporates a lot of gradients which are blended together rather than a defined solid color. How I approached this was further dividing the pieces through their own masked folders. I still used a base color layer to cohesively tie together the corresponding pieces, but in masking off parts individually, I allowed myself to be very precise when it came to choosing and blending colors. Starting from the bottom and working my way up, I would mask off each color with a black mask before adding a position generator. By keeping the contrast at 1, I could see exactly where the color would start to blend in at first, before I would gradually reduce contrast and add a blur filter when necessary. After repeating this process over and over again with each individual piece, I eventually had every section with an accurate color profile compared with Epic-Solider’s concept. After this was achieved, I added another layer overtop with a lighter tone, before adding a black mask and curvature generator as I did with the grey sections to keep the cohesive stylized look. This would add in thin lines around the edges, acting as highlights while also defining each section.
The finishing touches from here consisted of painting in the highlights and reflections that the metal gave off. I decided initially that I wouldn’t be making the sword metallic so that I could manually place highlights and reflections, and overall give the sword a painterly look. Therefore, I had to paint these manually. I’d start by making a fill layer with the highlight color, before adding a black mask and delicately painting in the highlights with a basic hard brush. From there, I would duplicate the layer, before setting the blending mode to color dodge and adding a blur filter. This would create a nice glow effect, and depending on the highlight, I would repeat this process one more time while painting out any overblown reflections. In a complementary color, I would also paint in highlights over top of the ones I initially made, also in color dodge, to make a nice collection of repeating reflections.
The last step in texturing the sword was making the illusion of where the fabric started. For this, I made a separate folder over top of my other layers, masking it off before painting in a red base color. I added height in layers through various fill layers, which created the illusion of a piece of cloth wrapped over itself. Finally, I used a few purple-tinted fill layers set to overlay to add in shadows, and vary the color of the cloth.
Cloth
In making the cloth that wraps around the sword, I first started out in ZBrush. I created a long, thin rectangular shape, primarily using the move brush initially to get the exact silhouette I wanted. Using a combination of alphas and ZBrush’s cloth function, I began to add wrinkles into the cloth to give it a more realistic look. Compared to Epic-Soldier’s concept, this is where I varied the most, as her original cloth piece was very smooth. I decided to add more wrinkles and depth to the cloth to bring out contrast later on in the texturing process, which I felt would mesh together well once placed with the sword.
After the sculpt of the cloth was complete, I took the high poly into Maya, placing it over an elongated plane before baking it in Substance Painter. Texturing in Substance followed a similar pattern as was done with the sword: primarily by using masked fill layers with a curvature generator, with roughness set to 1 as I focused painting exclusively through the color channel. I started with a cooler dark red shade, slowly warming up the red tones before I used subtle oranges as highlights. I also made use of a dark purple shade set to overlay, then masked with a position generator and a blur filter. I concentrated this shade in the middle and top of the fabric, to give the piece a gradient shadow. After this was all completed, I took the results of my bake into Photoshop, creating a custom opacity mask. This proved especially useful when it came to the cuts in the cloth, which I left up to this stage so I wouldn’t have to spend time making them perfect in my high poly sculpt.
By baking onto a segmented plane kept my poly count low, and also made the fabric easy to shape once I went back into Maya. I made minor adjustments to the plane, such as adding subdivisions to round off curves and not make the transitions too dramatic. Once completed, I was ready to export both my cloth wrap and sword into Unreal for rendering.
Lighting & Rendering
My setup in Unreal ended up being very simple, especially when it came to lighting. Balancing both an off-white directional light and a magenta skylight ended up displaying my prop nicely, while not creating too harsh of shadows. I took some time to experiment with my camera’s focal length, especially when it came to dynamic shots of the blade overall. After some playing around, I chose to go with a blank background in Unreal, so that when I took my renders I could use a depth mask to create a transparent PNG of each shot. This allowed me to make a custom background in Photoshop, which ultimately saved me lots of time and kept my renders looking consistent by the end product.
For my construction shots in Unreal, I decided to create a wireframe material that made use of the emissive channel to quite literally illuminate my wireframe. In order to have the wireframe overtop of my model, I had to duplicate my sword and apply this wireframe material to the duplicated prop. Once I had it in the same location as the original prop, I made it slightly larger, which ended up revealing the wireframe over top of the textured prop as was desired.
Conclusion
I had a lot of aspects of my process that I wanted to improve upon with this project: stylized texturing, dealing with concept shapes, emulating an artist’s style, and experimenting with cloth. After undertaking this sword, I feel like I have not only a renewed concept of how to handle a hero prop, but also how to get creative and approach different aspects of the model with new techniques I hadn’t necessarily used before. This was a great learning experience, and as much as I love creating complete environments, I’m looking forward to setting aside time to also make some more props in the future!
Original Concept: https://www.deviantart.com/epic-soldier/art/Fallen-angel-and-the-Conqueror-CLOSED-610418887
