SpiderMonkeylord's Stuff - Oberon Weshiggan Update

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Edit Oct 25, 2017:

Update: I reworked the Weshiggan skin based on DE (and Tenno) feedback and updated the workshop item on Steam. Obviously no word yet on if it's accepted, but, for obvious reasons, I'm actually embarrassed about the original skin now. The revised version looks like this:



And for the sake of comparison:




Obviously it's the same theme, same helmet model, and uses a lot of the same ideas, but it's a lot easier to look at and hopefully a far better match to existing skins. I pulled out both the Trypophobia and Scarification ideas because they honestly don't really work with it, and the skin is no longer specifically Halloween themed.




Current status for Trinity Sanguinaria (not accepted/no feedback):

On 8/25/2017 at 5:01 PM, SpiderMonkeylord said:

I've been making progress on the Trinity skin, and I'm fishing for feedback. Sketchfab HERE.

Also still unsure about what to call it. It still has the "bone" theme I started with but I'm going with something slightly vampiric too, because of EV and because Well of Life and Link both *feel* vampiric as well. I've been thinking that "Bone Priestess" (inspired by bless) or "Marrow Eater" are potentials.



Thanks!

 

Original Post:

 

Spoiler

 

Hi everyone. I want to introduce myself and show you what I've been working on for the Halloween-themed Tennogen round, as well as hopefully post progress on a second skin that I hope to finish in time for the deadline. I'm a long-time Warframe player but have not contributed to Tennogen previously. I decided this would be a great opportunity to learn a lot about building an asset within the bounds of specific design constraints. I have experience in designing game assets for my own amateur, hobbyist game development and I minored in traditional art in college, but I have not attempted to contribute to anything like this previously.

Here are some renders for my first, and hopefully not last, contribution to the halloween-theme: a Skin and Alt-Helm for Oberon called the "Weshiggan". I'm also including blips on my design decisions but I'll hide those behind spoiler tags because I know that sort of thing can be boring reading depending on your preference.
 

 

Spoiler

So, first of all I wanted to go for scary imagery but I wanted to stay away from gore and from edgy, dark colors for the main design. I wanted to try to work within a color palette that wasn't traditionally used for halloween or horror themes, because I think it can be too easy to use conventional color schemes as a design crutch. Still, there are certain tropes that it's hard to get away from when designing with fear in mind, because there are certain forms and angles that we just naturally respond to in certain ways. What I ended up doing was drawing inspiration from various legends and depictions of malevolent forest monsters (as evidenced in the name: Wendigo, Leshy, Spriggan... "Weshiggan". I feel it matches nicely with the almost GRRM-esque, pseudo-future-word naming convention we see in Warframe so often). I also drew inspiration from the real-life malevolent forest monster called the Moose. For the accents, I went for a combination of three very uncomfortable / scary types of imagery (for me); open sores, trypophobic stuff, and fresh, open, scar tattoos. All of that would probably end up being too much though so I constructed larger, more attractive forms to place the accents into; this might be a scary, rotten, evil, dark-forest warframe but it's still a warframe, and warframes are badasses.

Spoiler

The main shape of the helmet is made up of abstracted bony forms with emphasis on avoiding real facial features. This is a surprisingly difficult task since people automatically see faces in everything, and because I'm attempting to do an abstraction of a lot of "skull" forms. I understand why so many warframes have very blank helmets: it becomes really easy to see distinct features.

With the antlers I ended up with a bit less abstract representation than I had originally hoped, but since Oberon's default helmets use only very marginally-abstracted antlers I decided it worked pretty nicely. Initially I had a different design going but the silhouette was only interesting from the front and really boring from the side, top, and 3/4 views. I am much happier with the satisfying feeling of weight that I hope I properly expressed with these antlers. I extruded additional spines in unusual areas, drawing inspiration from a horned melon: a fruit whose form makes me marginally, almost subconsciously uneasy. Hopefully it worked. I like it, anyway.

 

Spoiler

For the body I tried to go for a mixture of plant-like and animal-like forms that looked like they had grown slowly and become really sturdy over time. With the more detailed bits I wanted to give the viewer a bit of a "skin crawling" sensation so I went for forms taken from termite and beetle-infested wood. I was trying to invoke the feeling of this sound while sculpting those parts.

Here are some screenshots from within the Tennogen tool testing out various color combinations:

And here is a pair of tests to demonstrate the cross-compatibility of the helmet and skin with the default Oberon skin:

Spoiler

Unfortunately the shoulder plates aren't a perfect match but it was more important for me to make sure I liked how the skin and helmet worked together on their own than to make them perfectly compatible with the default skin. Still it's close enough that I would feel comfortable mixing and matching in-game if I were so inclined. Note: I also tried to match the darker metal material as closely as I could to the default darker metal material on the Feyarch skin but unfortunately I don't actually have the skin so I couldn't compare the metallic channel behavior that well. Still, with matching color channels, I think, based on seeing people mix-and-match the Feyarch and default details in-game, that the Feyarch helmet should work pretty well with this too. Not that the goal of making a skin is to match it perfectly with preexisting assets, but I want as much cross-compatibility for customization as possible.

That's it! I will submit to Steam as soon as I'm sure that I won't mess anything up in the process, and as soon as I've finished writing a good, short description for the skin. This is my first time going through this particular process or uploading anything to Steam at all so I'm a little anxious about actually submitting.

Now, ideally I'll be able to make submit another skin before the deadline, and hopefully make it even better after all that I've learned from constructing this one. I have two that I *want* to do but it's incredibly unlikely that I'll finish another in time to even start a third. On the one hand I was thinking of doing a "bone medicine" themed Trinity; sort of a skinwalker/vampire/lady of the wood inspired thing. On the other hand I really want to do a Grimm's Fairy Tales-esque, Headless Horseman inspired Limbo. Drawing on the legends of headless horsemen with a warframe that could literally pull its head off is almost too much to pass up. What do you all think I should do?

 

 

Edited October 25, 2017 by SpiderMonkeylord
Updated content and modified title for relevance

[DSkycroft]

Looks awesome

[(XBOX)DS Monkfish]

I'd buy that right now. Fantastic work op :)

Edit: I love the Trin idea as well!

Edited August 14, 2017 by (XB1)DS Monkfish
Trin!

[Vlada91]

Wow whos the man? You are dude you are! I love this style 👏👏👏👌👌👌🍻 and you can go next with limbo 😊👌

Edited August 14, 2017 by Vlada91

[Wrum]

that looks dope. excellent for Halloween. 11/10 good job.

[Baterial]

is that moose?

[Xolgys]

mutated halloween moose king on his way to spread some goosebumps.

[(PSN)iPoisonedFlint]

U won!

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Thanks everyone! I've decided to to the Trinity skin and if I complete it quickly enough I will try the Limbo skin. The thing is, I don't know how the Limbo model actually interacts with his animations, so I'm going to have to reverse-engineer his model and try to match the functionality of the seam.

So with Trinity, I'm going to call this theme the "Bone Seer". Here are some images of the sculpt:

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Design decisions: 

 

Spoiler

So here I am trying to blend very "bony" forms with some sharp, organized "vampire"-esque shapes here. On top of that I'm finding it pretty much impossible to put detail in the "tail" that causes it to *not* look like some sort of crustacean thing. It's possible, for sure, but I would have to smooth out the form a bunch and bake some very aggressive normals onto the default mesh and I'm not sure that I'd like how they'd turn out anyway; so instead I'm just going to try to push a bit of that look into the rest of the detail sculpt, forgoing a bit of sharpness and polish in the legs to instead get something slightly more organic. That should work better with the theme of Warframe tech anyway.

 

I'm not going to push the details too far in the sculpt because I'd like to have a little more room to work extra detail in during the texture painting phase than I did with the Weshiggan. I'm still very happy with that skin but the busyness of that one won't work as well with my plans for this one.

[Brachion]

Really digging the design aesthetic for Oberon! However, I have a few critiques. First, I'd suggest trying to stick a little closer to Warframe's established aesthetic if you want it to be accepted; DE definitely prefers entries that mesh well with the rest of the game. I'd also suggest refining the texture and materials a little more; the skin looks brilliant from a distance, but not as good close up.

That's all I have to say; I think you have a lot of potential here!

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Thanks Brachion! I was reviewing a number of previously accepted Tennogen skins and I see what you are saying - the match to pre-existing assets is good, but not as good as it can be. I will set aside a couple dozen hours to rework the Oberon skin a bit. There are a couple places where the UV seams are showing up on the main model in the Tennogen application while they aren't quite as visible in other rendering engines, including substance painter, so I'm going to have to try to mess with those to somehow try to hide them. I know it's not an issue with OpenGL vs DirectX normal formats, as it often is when that sort of seam shows up, because when I flip the green channel *every* seam shows up.

I think I will re-unwrap and re-paint the details on the helmet. Right now I am using full unwrap without mirroring the UVs because I wanted to make the accents asymmetrical; unfortunately that asymmetry isn't doing much for the initial read on the design. Hopefully mirroring the UVs will allow me to get better texture fidelity on that part.

Also, while it seems counter-intuitive, I think my messing with the materials to try to get a very close material match in the Tennogen app might have actually pulled the aesthetic a bit away from the overall appearance of the game. The thing is, the default Oberon skin is quite shiny in comparison to many other in-game materials. When I try to match it exactly it might actually be pulling it *away* from what we're used to seeing most of the time while playing the game. I wish I knew a way to compare it in-engine with the Feyarch skin, so I could try to fine-tune my materials based on that reference point; if anyone knows a way, please enlighten me.

I have a pseudo-technical and/or conventions question, for anyone who knows: many of the accepted skins utilize images in their workshop pages rendered with far higher quality than what *I* can manage to get in the Tennogen application (all but the first two images above are screenshots from within that application). I can get the same fidelity without issue in, for instance, sketchfab, but it's not exactly representative of what I am able to get working within the Evolution renderer. Are there settings that I'm missing in the Tennogen app that will allow me to get a closer representation of what I've authored (even just some shadows would be great) or is it regular practice to submit a number of images in the Steam submission process that are rendered out-of-engine?

[CY13ERPUNK]

i am not even a broberon fan

but i think this is the best helm/skin for him so far, definitely gives off that 'nurgle' vibe =]

[Kyotra]

Sweet baby Jesus that Oberon looks creepy.

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Today I resculpted, re-unwrapped, and repainted the Weshiggan helmet. I'm really glad I did, and that I chose to forego a slightly asymmetrical design for a symmetrical one with higher texel density:

Here's a screenshot from sketchfab, but instead of including a ton of angle images I'll just include sketchfab links for the whole skin and just the helmet:



Sketchfab, whole model (posed): 

https://skfb.ly/6sXMG

Helmet only: 

https://skfb.ly/6sXMM

EDIT: Small edit to the sketchfab normals to make the accents on parts of the skin "pop" a bit. I might pull this back a little in places but I like it for the most part.

EDIT2: Updated sketchfab body with hands detail and some minor general detail changes.

Edited August 17, 2017 by SpiderMonkeylord

[Vlada91]

Some how he looks like from some game from 2010 and some texture is for 2017 i dont know but you need to add something too look more smooth

[Vlada91]

Some how he looks like from some game from 2010 and some texture is for 2017 i dont know but you need to add something too look more smooth  (otherwise I do like the design of your skin)

for example this you can see my point:

 

Edited August 17, 2017 by Vlada91

[Vivian]

On 8/14/2017 at 6:47 PM, SpiderMonkeylord said:

Weshiggan Helmet Retexture:
 

Trinity Progress:

 

  Hide contents

 

So with Trinity, I'm going to call this theme the "Bone Seer". Here are some images of the sculpt:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

Design decisions: 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

So here I am trying to blend very "bony" forms with some sharp, organized "vampire"-esque shapes here. On top of that I'm finding it pretty much impossible to put detail in the "tail" that causes it to *not* look like some sort of crustacean thing. It's possible, for sure, but I would have to smooth out the form a bunch and bake some very aggressive normals onto the default mesh and I'm not sure that I'd like how they'd turn out anyway; so instead I'm just going to try to push a bit of that look into the rest of the detail sculpt, forgoing a bit of sharpness and polish in the legs to instead get something slightly more organic. That should work better with the theme of Warframe tech anyway.

 

I'm not going to push the details too far in the sculpt because I'd like to have a little more room to work extra detail in during the texture painting phase than I did with the Weshiggan. I'm still very happy with that skin but the busyness of that one won't work as well with my plans for this one.

 

Original Post:

 

  Hide contents

 

Hi everyone. I want to introduce myself and show you what I've been working on for the Halloween-themed Tennogen round, as well as hopefully post progress on a second skin that I hope to finish in time for the deadline. I'm a long-time Warframe player but have not contributed to Tennogen previously. I decided this would be a great opportunity to learn a lot about building an asset within the bounds of specific design constraints. I have experience in designing game assets for my own amateur, hobbyist game development and I minored in traditional art in college, but I have not attempted to contribute to anything like this previously.

Here are some renders for my first, and hopefully not last, contribution to the halloween-theme: a Skin and Alt-Helm for Oberon called the "Weshiggan". I'm also including blips on my design decisions but I'll hide those behind spoiler tags because I know that sort of thing can be boring reading depending on your preference.
 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

So, first of all I wanted to go for scary imagery but I wanted to stay away from gore and from edgy, dark colors for the main design. I wanted to try to work within a color palette that wasn't traditionally used for halloween or horror themes, because I think it can be too easy to use conventional color schemes as a design crutch. Still, there are certain tropes that it's hard to get away from when designing with fear in mind, because there are certain forms and angles that we just naturally respond to in certain ways. What I ended up doing was drawing inspiration from various legends and depictions of malevolent forest monsters (as evidenced in the name: Wendigo, Leshy, Spriggan... "Weshiggan". I feel it matches nicely with the almost GRRM-esque, pseudo-future-word naming convention we see in Warframe so often). I also drew inspiration from the real-life malevolent forest monster called the Moose. For the accents, I went for a combination of three very uncomfortable / scary types of imagery (for me); open sores, trypophobic stuff, and fresh, open, scar tattoos. All of that would probably end up being too much though so I constructed larger, more attractive forms to place the accents into; this might be a scary, rotten, evil, dark-forest warframe but it's still a warframe, and warframes are badasses.

  Reveal hidden contents

The main shape of the helmet is made up of abstracted bony forms with emphasis on avoiding real facial features. This is a surprisingly difficult task since people automatically see faces in everything, and because I'm attempting to do an abstraction of a lot of "skull" forms. I understand why so many warframes have very blank helmets: it becomes really easy to see distinct features.

With the antlers I ended up with a bit less abstract representation than I had originally hoped, but since Oberon's default helmets use only very marginally-abstracted antlers I decided it worked pretty nicely. Initially I had a different design going but the silhouette was only interesting from the front and really boring from the side, top, and 3/4 views. I am much happier with the satisfying feeling of weight that I hope I properly expressed with these antlers. I extruded additional spines in unusual areas, drawing inspiration from a horned melon: a fruit whose form makes me marginally, almost subconsciously uneasy. Hopefully it worked. I like it, anyway.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

For the body I tried to go for a mixture of plant-like and animal-like forms that looked like they had grown slowly and become really sturdy over time. With the more detailed bits I wanted to give the viewer a bit of a "skin crawling" sensation so I went for forms taken from termite and beetle-infested wood. I was trying to invoke the feeling of this sound while sculpting those parts.

Here are some screenshots from within the Tennogen tool testing out various color combinations:

And here is a pair of tests to demonstrate the cross-compatibility of the helmet and skin with the default Oberon skin:

  Reveal hidden contents

Unfortunately the shoulder plates aren't a perfect match but it was more important for me to make sure I liked how the skin and helmet worked together on their own than to make them perfectly compatible with the default skin. Still it's close enough that I would feel comfortable mixing and matching in-game if I were so inclined. Note: I also tried to match the darker metal material as closely as I could to the default darker metal material on the Feyarch skin but unfortunately I don't actually have the skin so I couldn't compare the metallic channel behavior that well. Still, with matching color channels, I think, based on seeing people mix-and-match the Feyarch and default details in-game, that the Feyarch helmet should work pretty well with this too. Not that the goal of making a skin is to match it perfectly with preexisting assets, but I want as much cross-compatibility for customization as possible.

That's it! I will submit to Steam as soon as I'm sure that I won't mess anything up in the process, and as soon as I've finished writing a good, short description for the skin. This is my first time going through this particular process or uploading anything to Steam at all so I'm a little anxious about actually submitting.

Now, ideally I'll be able to make submit another skin before the deadline, and hopefully make it even better after all that I've learned from constructing this one. I have two that I *want* to do but it's incredibly unlikely that I'll finish another in time to even start a third. On the one hand I was thinking of doing a "bone medicine" themed Trinity; sort of a skinwalker/vampire/lady of the wood inspired thing. On the other hand I really want to do a Grimm's Fairy Tales-esque, Headless Horseman inspired Limbo. Drawing on the legends of headless horsemen with a warframe that could literally pull its head off is almost too much to pass up. What do you all think I should do?

 

 

Thanks for the nightmares!

[SpiderMonkeylord]

7 hours ago, Vlada91 said:

Some how he looks like from some game from 2010 and some texture is for 2017 i dont know but you need to add something too look more smooth  (otherwise I do like the design of your skin)

for example this you can see my point:

 

Thanks for the feedback! However I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean. At first I thought you meant the design looked like something from a particular game in 2010 (if that is what you meant, ignore the rest of this, and if you can remember the game that would be great) but I think you may be bringing my attention to the texture fidelity? If I interpreted you correctly, unfortunately there is only so much texel density possible in 2048x2048 maps and in a 2048x1024 map. Additionally I have to take into account that the map might be scaled down by DE for use in-engine so pushing too much super-fine detail in has a number of drawbacks: it could end up noisy or blurry depending on the scaling method, it may be seen by players as a significant downgrade in quality from the steam workshop page, and/or it could cause seams to become too visible.

When authoring a texture like this, it's important to try to strike a balance where there's enough detail to create something interesting (and express the idea you're trying to express) but when you add a ton, more detail appears less smooth at extremely high zoom levels. Luckily the maximum zoom you can get in-game without glitching the camera against a wall is several zoom factors below this, and for what I wanted to express I decided that the nature of the skin was best served with somewhat high, grungey detail. If I add more, the effect you see would be amplified, and if I have significantly less the materials would feel smoother than what I want to portray, even if I ramped the roughness map up a lot. 

For reference, here is an image of the default Oberon skin from approximately the same zoom level and angle. You can see issues with how much detail is possible, and in this case some of that is hidden with the somewhat low fine detail of the texture, which gives it a very smooth look overall, but it's particularly obvious on the edges of materials.



Here is an image of a more recently-authored helm, Nidus, from within the game. To get this close I needed to glitch against the back wall of my Liset and the image has still had its dimensions doubled:



So hopefully that explains everything. If I smooth out my materials, which I suppose I could do - and I'll consider messing with them some, for sure - but if I do it too much what I'll get is smoother looking materials at all zoom levels; however, it will only increase the visible quality at extremely high zoom levels that will functionally never exist in-game. Unfortunately that will come at a loss of the material read at all other levels as far as expressing the surface feeling that I'm after.

Thanks so much for taking the time to look at and critique the model though. Please don't take this response as me trying to get defensive. I'm just trying to explain what's going on to the best of my ability, and explain why the textures look the way they do at extremely high zoom. I will definitely see what I can do to clean things up and improve the read, but there's only so much that's possible with these texture sizes and triangle budgets (which are actually quite generous, but still, they're finite).

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Update: I was unhappy with the whole energy bit on the Weshiggan, and although I was really happy with the overall design I was unhappy with how the skin didn't express the "biotech" aesthetic of warframes. To that end I added in bits of hard-tech poking through the skin, with glowing bits on most of it (save on the antler/tusk things where I just added the metal to try to blend the detail levels of the main helmet and the less-detailed antler/tusks together a bit). I've attached a couple of screenshots but you can get a good view of how they all fit on the skin by visiting the sketchfab links (provided again below).

I will be submitting the Weshiggan today, and I haven't given up on finishing and submitting the Trinity skin in time; I should be able to skip many of the mistakes I made with the first skin and hopefully cut the time to completion down enough to scrape in before the deadline.

Sketchfab:

Full: https://skfb.ly/6sXMG

Head Only: https://skfb.ly/6sXMM

Edited August 19, 2017 by SpiderMonkeylord
Updated with accidentally missing images

[Brachion]

It's looking better already! Can't wait to see it improve further!

[SpiderMonkeylord]

@Brachion Thanks! Do you have any suggestions? Because at this point I'm concerned about overworking / overcomplicating it. But I only have my eye and my wife's, and she thinks I've been overworking it for a little while.

Edited August 19, 2017 by SpiderMonkeylord

[Brachion]

All I can think of right now is cleaning up the textures a bit and decreasing blank space. Try adding some subtle color gradients or markings to the arms and other areas with lots of solid color to break things up a little bit.

[Aldarys_]

That's simply horrific and disgusting.

I like it.

[SpiderMonkeylord]

Alright, so I went through the materials and re-painted a bunch of the height information to clean it up, changed a few parameters on some of the materials, and repainted the tertiary color because there were some hard edges that were visible in the texture images that weren't really visible on the model but weren't very clean and were bothering me anyway - and might have hypothetically become visible under certain viewing conditions. I was also able to clean up some of the texture seams a bit; since I was personally unable to get the substance painter material provided by DE working properly when I first started the paint, I was getting some issues with my manual assembly of the maps in PS, and I got that all cleared up by adding additional padding. I also did add some subtle gradients all around the skin that appear mostly on the diffuse map but they don't modify the overall appearance very much. Overall the neither the macro design nor the position of the materials have been modified, but the polish is noticeably better.

The sketchfab models have all been updated to reflect the changes.

Body Helmet Posed

After a minor delay with some paperwork the model is now available to view on the workshop.

I do have a bit of a problem and I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions: somehow my tags were lost during upload, and I'm not sure how to add them back in. Do I have to re-upload or they can be added somehow through the Steam interface? A quick google suggests that re-uploading might or might not work and I don't want to artificially inflate my changelog. Thanks!

[Valiant]

Hmm, still not a fan of the textures. They just look/seem too... Blurry, embossed, stretched and glossy in quite a few places.

Edited August 23, 2017 by Valiant