Challenges

I challenged myself to make a stylized weapon because I have been making mostly realistic 3D art since I’ve been working in the game industry. Stylized assets were always out of my skill range, so I wanted to get better at stylized art. Some of the big challenges for me on this dagger were exaggerating shapes, pushing color and light, hand-painting instead of using realistic textures, and being hard on myself to figure out why something looked bad to learn from and be better at.

Hand-painting was probably the biggest challenge for me. I’ve dug myself into a realism art hole throughout the years. I still have a ton to learn when it comes to being a skilled hand-painter. There are so many different kinds of techniques, but It really just boils down to learning the art fundamentals. If you have a good eye for form, color, value, lighting, and composition then you’ll understand better why something might look off. I’m no expert when it comes to this, as I said, I still have a lot to learn. Also, hand-painting in substance painter is difficult because the viewport won’t let you orient the model however you like. Hand-painting in 3dcoat is much easier because of the viewport model orientation.

Another challenge was learning to take a step back and evaluating the model and checking if it looks stylized enough. There was a point when I finished the sculpt, and wasn’t satisfied even though it matched my friend’s sketch. So I pushed it further until I liked it. Pushing myself and breaking out of my comfort zone was a big challenge when doing stylized. I would bend or curve a part and continue until I felt it was too much and left it.

Stylized vs. Realistic

The reason I started this project was to learn stylized PBR. This to me meant hand-painted textures, stylized shapes, and realistically rendered materials. I learned from working on this that I needed to exaggerate where I could in order to break my traditional realistic techniques. The shapes and textures needed to be pushed as much as possible, because I was going to throw realistic materials and lighting on it for the end product. Small details are part of a realistic workflow, and I had to teach myself to work simple and go for the broad strokes instead of focusing on the small details. It’s like a painting, start with the broad strokes first, then get into the smaller details. For stylized stuff, you don’t really need to do the smaller details. However, I did add some nice surface detail and small scratches on the wood.

Modeling