Warhammer 40K – Servo Skull
I’ve always been a fascinated by the Warhammer 40K universe. I haven’t had the patience to play the board game, but play almost every 40K game on Steam. After some time in Mechanicus I decided to make this little fan piece.
The process: My entire preprocess these days can take place in the comfort of my couch. With a tablet I look up references on the web, doing sketches in Procreate, and do base sculps in Nomad. After that I was back at the desk. The cranium was done completely in Nomad, but I made all hard surface pieces in Cinema 4D. I then brought everything into Zbrush to removed cranium parts with boolean operations. I also made some microdetails before I moved back to Cinema 4D. All har surface parts were Sub-D modelled so they pretty much had their low polys done. But I had to manually retopo the cranium with the help of Cinema 4D’s Polygon Pen. One extra thing I do is to apply a shrink wrap modifier to the low poly and reference it’s high poly counter part. This gives a little tighter bake later on.
Time for UVs. Cinema 4D’s UV tools have been pretty bad up until S22 and R23. But now I must say it’s one of the best UV tools I’ve seen. Once I’ve had my shortcuts setup I UV’d everything in a couple of hours. I’m one of those persons who actually enjoy UV work. I put some nice music in my phones and I go into “UV mindfulness”-mode. I then auto-packed all island with “geometric” mode which takes time, but fills all empty holes with UV’s. Finally I could hop into Substance Painter and bake. I have suffixed all parts with “_high” and “_low” so no need to explode the model before bake. After that I made folder for all materials. Iron, bone, shiny metal, plastics etc. I then built every material up with a mix of Substance materials and my own paint. I painted in some emissive, rust, oil spill etc by hand. Finally I added a dirt layer over everything. I then add another Paint Generator and remove dirt with a mix of brushes and particles effects, for a more natural dirt look.
I then brought everything back into Cinema 4D and did a simple rig to try my little baby out. I rendered it in Redshift, and also made a setup over at Sketchfab, to try it out in real time. That pretty much sums it up. I might have forgotten something but I will update this post if I do.
Thanks for watching and have a nice day. ; )
-m-
