Apart from baking all my original hi-poly sculpts into base normal maps, I intend to start from the bottom and work my way up to the focal area of the face and the hands as I did during the retopology process.
Stage 1 - Boots:
Trousers:
Hands:
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| Beginning with baking the normals |
I decided after the sculpture process to sketch out a paintover on top of a screenshot of my originally sculpted hands to to try and get a better idea of what the hand could or should look like once textured.
To create a base material for the wedding ring, I created a fill layer with a base colour picked from a PBR guide for metals and added pitting and uneven surface detail with a noise texture in a fill layer that only had a height attribute.
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| reference on far right |
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| reference images are 2nd from left and far right |
While there's already some solid detail from the normal bake, I don't at all think it's enough to make a convincing burned hand. Using multiple references of skinned hand specimens from my reference board, I'm going to accent the details that are already there and add some extra ones.
The 2nd left image is great reference for me because it's an incredibly fresh hand specimen that still has a lot of moisture in its tissue, and is as close to a live skinned hand as I could possibly acquire as reference. The webbed tissue in between the base knuckles is a detail I definitely want to add. I created a new fill layer with just another height attribute of -0.15 and used the basic soft airbrush tool to carve out the soft cavities seen in the reference image.
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| Current height map |
Since I'm aiming for a burned hand and not a skinned one, I'm changing to a different alpha for the airbrush and increasing the angle jitter to make the brush strokes more random, and I chose a default cloud alpha to add some mottling as if even burning through the skin, the fire ravaged the underlying tissue.
As seen in a few images from my reference board, more moist tissues sometimes become webbed and somewhat sinew-like. After browsing the texture library inside Substance Painter, I found a texture that might work as a procedural stand-in for this aspect of the burned areas: Cloth Folds.
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| reference in middle |
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| reference image is 2nd from right |
Jacket:
Helmet:
Breathing Apparatus:
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Face:
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| Accenting the pre-existing gaps between the teeth |
To create the burned and sizzled skin the remains around the eye, I chose to create a group of 3 fill layers (with height of 0.2) that were 3 variations of skin tone that I colour picked from the images in my reference board. I then added a mask to the group and using the same cloud alpha with angle jitter, I applied some mottled dermis to the eye socket and cheekbone.
I also added another height and colour layer using a dirt texture as a mask to create some extra burned bits and pieces, so the remaining skin was uneven and more obviously damaged.
Shield:
The Burn of his Wife:
Using the original Boolean outline I created in Blender during the concept phase, I created an alpha of the wife's profile and used it as a stencil in Substance Painter. However I didn't think there was enough there to properly add the hint of a face to the burn without a lot of extra editing, so I then refined the alpha image.
The new stencil was much better and was appropriately feminine and easy to distinguish.
To make the burn more dynamic and prevent it from looking too much like a stain instead of a burn, I decided to check my reference images again to see if there were any particular effects that flames had on firefighters' clothing. I found this one to be interesting because of how the burn appears to have a brighter outline before blackening completely. While I think that it only happened to this coat because the black dye was burned away, I think it might add to the supernatural element of the burn - purely for the sake of artistic license.
Finally, I added one last layer and painting some light and rough streaks of fire staining above the burned in hand shapes to delineate where the flames licked at this coat while she was holding him.
