king arthur challenge - HAND CRAFTING stylized assets from concept

Alessandra Astrino did a breakdown on her Green Axe prop that she created for the King Arthur Artstation Challenge. Learn how she approaches working from concept as well as some of the brushes she uses in Zbrush.

Introduction

Hello everyone, I’m Alessandra Astrino and I’m 24. I’m an Italian girl and I live in Milan. I’ve just finished my studies and I’m actually working to increase my portfolio. I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, Milan, and that is where my approach to 3D art began 3 years ago with a base 3D course, meanwhile I’ve studied for two years in a digital school where I’ve improved my 3D abilities.

Creating Stylized Artwork

My passion for the 3D world is born late, but the love for videogames has always existed and it has grown with me in these years. I must thank World of Warcraft, because is the reason for my passion with stylized art. As soon I started studying 3D I knew that stylized art was the style of art that I would work for.

I think that stylized art is a really beautiful art, it’s really important to capture the likeness and to do that I usually pick up all possible references of every kind of material or concept so I can study better the shape of all the elements that I have to do.

I think the most important thing in stylized assets is the silhouette, so I like to exceed the shapes to emphasize the concept. For this reason usually when I sculpt something, I switch the color to total black to see better the shape.

The Green Axe

When I export the object to Zbrush, I can start to exceed the proportions, in this phase I don’t care about the cleanliness because in this step I continuously modify the shape.

One of the funniest material I’ve done here is the Wood, initially I’ve sculpted the major wood grains, in this way I’ve immediately got the general mood of the material, then I’ve detailed little by little all the veins.

To get the crispy effects I’ve used one of my favorite brushes: FlattenOrb from the Orb pack by Michael Vicente.

This brush is really cool, it allows me to flat the soft surfaces, and this looks great in combination with Substance Painter Generators.

When I get some good shapes, I start to subdivide to get more resolution that I can and is in this step that I make more details as I can.

Sculpting Stylized Assets

My favorite brushes for stylized art are Orb’s brushes, Shane Olsen’s brushes and standard brushes: Dam Standard,clay and ClayBuildUp.

Honestly I think that there is not a real secret for stylized art, but there are some things that can help to gain a good results. One of these is for example do little slashes over the mesh, that apparently looks invisible but in texture phase these things make a nice effects with ambient occlusion.

Texturing phase is one of my favourite, usually I start from base colour, then I add AO with the dirt generator and then I use a edge wear generator. Usually, when I use these kind of generators I just play with slider until I get a satisfying effect.

The major difficulty I’ve faced with this asset has been the research of colour variation, I’ve solved this with some kind of layers with low opacity and different fusion levels as soft light or multiply.

The major part of the work I’ve obtained with generators and masks, there is a little bit of hand painting, in some point as fake light or moss near the leather handle or even to emphasize the highlights that didn't satisfy me.

The most used generator is 3D distance, I’ve used a lot mostly on the crystal blade, to obtain this kind of very soft shade

Lighting

The last phase of this asset is the lighting and I think that is the most important stage because you risk to ruin it all, so it’s very tricky.

My aim for rendering was to obtain a sort of connection between the three assets of the challenge, because all of them are magic I’ve emphasized the emissive blue.

Firstly I’ve imagined all of them with a dark background which is in contrast with the magic light of the assets. The lights used are very simple, two directional, one point light and a skylight with low intensity; very important in this phase is the global illumination, from the beginning I’ve activated it because it changes the result of the lighting.

From the beginning I’ve thought to use some emissive plane to obtain the magic effects, I’ve set opacity and I’ve painted the emissive energy around the axe.

I’ve created two materials, one for the major intensity and the other with opacity and emissive setting lower.

For the emissive spheres I’ve used crossed planes and also here I’ve created two materials with different intensity of emissive to get an effect of perspective.

As you can see the lighting is very important and it can change the mood of everything.

Challenges

To make good stylized assets it’s very important to study the shape of the object and then emphasize that. I think that is not always necessary to start from a stylized concept, but when you do it, you save a lot of time because you should not stylize the shape.

Anyway I think that stylizing a realistic concept is a very creative phase, because 3D artists are not a machine as some may see them, but they are artists and as an artist you can create some cool stuff even without an efficient concept.

For example, I’ve worked in this way for the Merlin’s Staff, I’ve used the concept from Bobby Rebholz and since it was not a properly stylized concept I’ve mostly tried to cartoonize the wood and the dragon .

To do that I've seen many reference of skulls and woods both stylized and realistic and when the shape was clear in my mind I've started to sculpt this stylized stuff.

Thanks for reading!:)