Turtle Sculpt Progress

     I think the base sculpt is about ready now. Next I'm going to modify this to create a stone sculpture of the turtle.

 

 

    One technique that helped out was stamping shell alphas with the Standard brush and DragRect. To do this, I made some simple outlines from top and bottom, loaded them as alphas, and then dragged them onto the shell. Once the basic outlines were stamped, I used Trim Dynamic and Pinch to further refine the shapes.

    Another thing that helped was setting the focal shift to -100. Typically the alpha had a soft falloff to it when I stamped, so lowering the focal shift allowed me to stamp it with full intensity.

    Overall, I think the turtle is off to a decent start. Once I'm finished with the stone sculpture, I'm going to revisit the original and make a live version.

Turtle Model

    I've started modeling a box turtle. There are two main uses that I have in mind for it. For one, I want to create a stone sculpture with it. After that, I would like to make some animated turtles. To do this, I'm going to create a base model that's as accurate as possible and then modify it for these two purposes. 

    So far, I've created a block out and started sculpting it in ZBrush. Next I'm going to work on matching the legs and claws to my reference images. After that, I will sculpt in some textural details, such as scales and the patterns on the shell. Hopefully this works out. I think the turtle will add a little more life to the scene.

The block out mesh.

Current progress on the sculpt.

Lighting and Set Dressing Edits

     I've started on some revisions to the foliage scene. So far, I've mainly edited the lighting and worked on some debris meshes to add more height variation to the ground.

 

     I also made a few custom ground materials to better fit the environment that I'm referencing.

 

     To create the ground debris, I used a mix of meshes and a material that I painted under them.

 

Debris atlas sculpt and material.

 

Ground debris meshes.

    Using the atlas that I made, I generated the underlying material in Substance Designer with the Atlas Scatter node.

    In this case, I basically layered multiple Atlas Scatters together. This gave me some control over the layering. For instance, on the lowest layer, I set height scale to .25 to keep it dark on the texture. On the highest layer, I set the height scale to 1 to make it as bright as possible.

    I used a similar technique for the leaves, but this time I only used two layers. To give it some depth, I made the bottom layer less saturated than the top.

 

 

    I think this small showcase scene is almost finished. Next I'm going to make a turtle sculpture and some mushrooms to place by the center tree. After that, I'm going to start on a full forest scene.