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Description
This is the final Kain render modeled first in 3D-Coat, finished in Zbrush, polypainted in Zbrush, finished texturing in Photoshop. A fully sculpted redo of the GlyphX model seen in the Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Full Motion Video intros of the Legacy of Kain series, by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos/Square Enix.

Low Poly model Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 2. Normal Maps, gloss and specular maps, for items. Metalness maps for some metallic items and his skin. Cavity, occlusion used in spots, etc.

Back in the last week of August, I spent four, or five days modeling the preliminary model you see here in 3D-Coat, which I planned to show the devs working on the game Nosgoth at the event in England. All went well and I got some nice compliments. I didn't get back to it until October, and then I continued modeling and detailing him. I won't go into it all, but I wound up having to redo him. Basically, 3D-Coat uses dynamic tessellation in Surface mode, which means as you etch details into him, the polygon count keeps increasing. It shouldn't have increased, both times I modeled him, like it did, though, and it put me in months of a bind to try and fix. I didn't then expect all of the trouble in Zbrush fixing it. I should note that I've never modeled anything before, so this all was new, and the problems I faced were probably every problem there is to face in doing it. The modeling part wasn't a problem, it's the fine dealing in figuring out how far to subdivide the model, when to go into HD Geometry (Zbrush's way to let you go higher in polygon count than it could normally handle -- I say it, because it's still a 32 bit program, running in a 64 bit environment, so it caps the memory it can use). I didn't know how to uv a model (the models I retextured before already existed, and had their own uvs with them), how to retopologize, how to combine model parts into one, and finally how to generate proper normal maps, and other maps. I wound up spending a long time trying to achieve the best maps, and wasting time making displacement, even vector displacement maps, which I ultimately can't use anyway in Marmoset. I went into HD Geometry after subdividing too far on the regular subdivisions, and this didn't come back to bite me until after all of the detailing was done and the UVs applied, and I was painting the model. I tried and finally succeeded in breaking up the model's HD parts, and getting that information into maps, but anyway, this is now 6 months later, so this was a long cramming sessions of learning how to fix things, learning what not to do, hopefully, for the future.

You can read more detail on my problems and journey here:

www.hylden-dimension.holocron3…

Tons more pics. I'll upload closer shots here to show the detail better also. This journey will continue. I hope to make animations, recreations of the ingame cutscenes. Kain's Reaver is modeled. A Human Kain has been started, modeled from this version of him, and I plan on trying to recreate BO1's cutscenes, his turn as a vampire, and his stages of evolution, with all of his armors and outfits in the series. The rest of the cast, of course, too. Lots of stuff in my head. Lots of work ahead, heh.

Thanks for stopping by to look.

Edit: Updated some things on Kain. His gauntlets when arms down weren't long enough. His forearm and claws are longer now. The cape is finally sculpted to show the folds I wanted it to, and is fuller. Added in displacement maps. The 32 bit ones I tried before in Marmoset didn't work right. They just ballooned the mesh out uniformly. I saved out regular gray-scale height map displacement from Zbrush and these work better to do what they're supposed to -- expand out the shape of Kain. His lips didn't have quite the arc and fullness, so their angle and look wasn't right. This is closer to the high poly sculpt's look. It's not perfect still. The eyes in Marmoset look wider, where they look relaxed in Zbrush. But, it's as close on the low poly out of Marmoset I'm probably going to get.

Updated the site with more pics of him. I think it's updated now, anyway.

Description
This is the final Kain render modeled first in 3D-Coat, finished in Zbrush, polypainted in Zbrush, finished texturing in Photoshop. A fully sculpted redo of the GlyphX model seen in the Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Full Motion Video intros of the Legacy of Kain series, by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos/Square Enix.

Low Poly model Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 2. Normal Maps, gloss and specular maps, for items. Metalness maps for some metallic items and his skin. Cavity, occlusion used in spots, etc.

Back in the last week of August, I spent four, or five days modeling the preliminary model you see here in 3D-Coat, which I planned to show the devs working on the game Nosgoth at the event in England. All went well and I got some nice compliments. I didn't get back to it until October, and then I continued modeling and detailing him. I won't go into it all, but I wound up having to redo him. Basically, 3D-Coat uses dynamic tessellation in Surface mode, which means as you etch details into him, the polygon count keeps increasing. It shouldn't have increased, both times I modeled him, like it did, though, and it put me in months of a bind to try and fix. I didn't then expect all of the trouble in Zbrush fixing it. I should note that I've never modeled anything before, so this all was new, and the problems I faced were probably every problem there is to face in doing it. The modeling part wasn't a problem, it's the fine dealing in figuring out how far to subdivide the model, when to go into HD Geometry (Zbrush's way to let you go higher in polygon count than it could normally handle -- I say it, because it's still a 32 bit program, running in a 64 bit environment, so it caps the memory it can use). I didn't know how to uv a model (the models I retextured before already existed, and had their own uvs with them), how to retopologize, how to combine model parts into one, and finally how to generate proper normal maps, and other maps. I wound up spending a long time trying to achieve the best maps, and wasting time making displacement, even vector displacement maps, which I ultimately can't use anyway in Marmoset. I went into HD Geometry after subdividing too far on the regular subdivisions, and this didn't come back to bite me until after all of the detailing was done and the UVs applied, and I was painting the model. I tried and finally succeeded in breaking up the model's HD parts, and getting that information into maps, but anyway, this is now 6 months later, so this was a long cramming sessions of learning how to fix things, learning what not to do, hopefully, for the future.

You can read more detail on my problems and journey here:

www.hylden-dimension.holocron3…

Tons more pics. I'll upload closer shots here to show the detail better also. This journey will continue. I hope to make animations, recreations of the ingame cutscenes. Kain's Reaver is modeled. A Human Kain has been started, modeled from this version of him, and I plan on trying to recreate BO1's cutscenes, his turn as a vampire, and his stages of evolution, with all of his armors and outfits in the series. The rest of the cast, of course, too. Lots of stuff in my head. Lots of work ahead, heh.

Thanks for stopping by to look.

Edit: Updated some things on Kain. His gauntlets when arms down weren't long enough. His forearm and claws are longer now. The cape is finally sculpted to show the folds I wanted it to, and is fuller. Added in displacement maps. The 32 bit ones I tried before in Marmoset didn't work right. They just ballooned the mesh out uniformly. I saved out regular gray-scale height map displacement from Zbrush and these work better to do what they're supposed to -- expand out the shape of Kain. His lips didn't have quite the arc and fullness, so their angle and look wasn't right. This is closer to the high poly sculpt's look. It's not perfect still. The eyes in Marmoset look wider, where they look relaxed in Zbrush. But, it's as close on the low poly out of Marmoset I'm probably going to get.

Updated the site with more pics of him. I think it's updated now, anyway.