RE Collab (Process) (Patreon)

This is something I've always thought about doing for other projects, but I figured it'd be a lot of time to put together extra posts for stuff very few people would actually care about. That said, I think it would be interesting enough for this collab since it was so different from my normal process.

Outside of commissioners, this might be the first time most have seen what my "sketches" look like. I start off by vaguely posing characters, often partially t-posed, and just try to get the basic camera framing down. After showing some of these basic poses to Esqazy, he took three and sketched out more specific pose ideas for them.

I improved the pose based on his sketch.

I also did a first attempt at some basic lighting.

Esqeazy finished their versions.s

I took inspiration for high lighting to finalize mine. The light coming in from the blinds made for a much more interesting look. It was also quite challenging as blender lighting is going to act as realistically as possible by default, but his painted lighting took a lot of artist liberties. I actually had to use three different lights with very careful positioning and light gobos (textures that block light to achieve specific shapes) just to cover the blinds effect.

I ultimately kept a more cool tone to the images compared to his as I didn't think the warm skin tones translated as well to their 3D models.

The second pic follows a pretty similar pattern to the first. I improved the pose based on his suggestions. As awkward as it still looks. there's already some sculpting done to improve it. Namely, Jill's neck and facial expression were way worse from just posing with bones alone.

Early lighting was much like the first pic.

He finished his with lots more focused lighting.

This was might first attempt at blocking it out. It looks like garbage but the key details are framed out. Actually, I'm pretty sure this was the first pic I redid the lighting on, so that's why the first draft was extra rough.

Final version was pretty much completely overhauled except the lighting from the blinds. I went back and forth over the background color so many times, but ultimately kept it darker for better contrast.

I made some initial improvements to the pose.

This is where the order deviates a little and I finished my pic based on only an early draft of his.

My first draft looked technically quite good, and I think if it were alone I would have left it as is.

I didn't like that it didn't match the vibe of the lighting in the others though, so I gave it some edits with sharper lighting towards the middle. I sort of combined the light pouring into the scene from the door in the background along with lights from the window into the same diagonal for the composition.

The final version isn't too different, but I wanted more contrast and better positioning on the blinds. Once again, the lighting through the blinds here is actually three separate lights along with two blocking planes to get it exactly where I wanted. It is a combination of getting the lights where I want to be but also feeling correct. For one light to fall nicely on Jill, it extended awkwardly on to Claire so I had to use separate lights on her.

All in all, this set was a really fun challenge. Basing it on existing sketches and art made it feel more like a puzzle in order to fit blender's lighting to match.

Link