Cannon Progress

 

Russian Licorne Cannon (3D Art Week 11)

 

Russian Licorne Cannon (3D Art Week 10)

For this week I decided to change things around and restart my project on the right footing. After fixing some of the issues I mentioned in my previous post, I did more research on the kind of cannon I was going for and realized that another kind would fit that better. The Gribeauval cannons are lightweight and compact, but are also very generic since they were standardized during the Napoleonic era. I found a type of mortar, the Russian Licorne, and this proved to have the bigger bore and stockier features I was looking for. 

Without further ado, here are my progress pictures!

Goals

-Eventually I would like to be a Creative Director. 

-First we need to get in a studio: employment in an established studio. 

-Currently I would like to explore being a 3D environmental artist

-I want to investigate interior spaces as an environmental artists

EXTRA STUDIES:

-Concepts and modularity

-Trim sheets

-General architectural stuff (window, door heights, asset types and styles, etc)

-Top artists that I respect (top 10)

-Start a conversation with them

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Gribeauval 12 Pounder Cannon (3D Art Week 09)

 This week we prepped the model to go into Zbrush. What we needed to do with our low poly mesh is use techniques such as beveling and fencing to get the edges just right. Here are a few pictures of my progress. 

Low Res

High Res

And the imported model in ZBrush

I ran into some issues while converting the pieces into Dynamesh, but the fixes were simple enough. From ngons and bad topology in need of fixing, to open mesh pieces that needed to be closed off. 

For example, here is the cannon bracing that I would have around the wooden carriage. To economize on topology, I deleted the bottom faces since the body would be right under them. What this led to in Zbrush, however, is that the open mesh was closed off by the algorithm as best as it could, leading to topology in unwanted areas. If I were to continue sculpting using this mesh, I would have interpenetrating geometry as soon as I combined all these pieces together, and that's simply not convenient. 

As a result, the fix was to close off that part of the mesh. The cannon would have a handful more polygons, but it would avoid the nastiness of interpenetration. 

Another issue I had was edge flow and how the topology looks after uprezzing. However, it doesn't seem like it would be an issue because everything will be baked afterwards, and the true model will have clean and minimalist topology. 

Likewise, the UVs aren't exceptional and were actually made with automatic means. The high resolution model simply needs to have functional UVs for it to display properly in ZBrush. As such, this has been a learning process not only with the process and how it functions, but as well as the presentation of these details to properly show off my thought process. I tend to like to ask many questions and figure out whatever I'm doing thoroughly, so this process was good for my learning style.