Baba Yaga

At this stage, I am quite happy with the main build of the house, it looks like it has some personality. However, it needs more details to look like it's actually a place where someone lives. I image the Baba Yaga to use lots of dry herbs for her mixtures, so one side of the house can be used to dry them. For the front of the house, I wanted to place something scary which will keep people away, so I went for skulls hanged on a stick, I also want them to emit some eerie light. To create these props, I had to experiment with different types of modelling. Firstly I made a wolf skull and a stick. High poly for these was sculpted in ZBrush using mostly Clay Buildup and Move Topological brushes. The top and bottom parts are separate meshes as well as teeth and a stick.   I am aware that all of these subtle details I've sculpted will not to be visible from a distance. However, this sculpt was made long ago and I was going to use it for a different purpose. I us...

I spend ages looking for the way to create a thatched roof. I knew that I want to use planes witch an alpha texture to create a few segments which I can assembly and merge together to get a roof. This is the same method which I used to create hair for my characters. I know that the final result looks quite realistic and this is the easy way to achieve a roof which does not look flat, because I can bend each plane individually and give it some depth. It also helps to save some texture space, because I can unwrap 3 smaller planes instead of having one which has to be very big on the Uv map. The problem for me wasn't the method I will use, but the way to create the hay texture itself. I found some tutorials saying to use a Substance Designer, but I still don't feel too confident using the nodes in Substance. In this case, I started to look for a photo texture of the hay. The problem was that the photo texture was looking too sharp comparing to the other textures. It didn't wor...

The house was built, but I wasn't happy with the results. It was looking too clean and straight. Also, I received slightly negative feedback about the overall look of the model. At the beginning of this project, I was thinking to create an environment piece with a chicken leg house as a centrepiece. However, I realised that I might not have enough time, so instead, I pushed it more towards character design. The model I created may work nicely for the environment, but as a character, it has no personality. I was told that it should look like a character, it should have some facial features or something which can resemble it. It was a really good point. I haven't considered this before at all, and I stuck to the concept I created for the environment piece. I was also told that it is too straight and rigid and it may look good as an ordinary house, but it's not going to work as a character. It opened my eyes, and I realised that I might have to rebuild the whole structure. I t...