Alright! Here's the marmoset Renders of the Excalibur. I think I might have to take another pass at the dirt distribution along the handle, it feels a little heavy but we'll see how people feel tomorrow. I added a polish to the edge of the blade to try to emphasize it but I don't think it worked out the way I wanted it to, I'll take another pass at the lighting setup to try to catch that better.
So, I'm generally pretty happy with how Excalibur turned out, but I think I focused too hard on the sword and left the shield for the last minute (tonight) and have been kicking myself as I've started to feel out where I would want to take the sculpt in the process of sculpting it. The reference for the "shield" is pretty loose, but I realized more and more what I wanted to do with it the closer it got to midnight the day it was due. I took some time to look at jellyfish and squid arms to get some inspiration for the shape of some of the detailing on the shield. It's MUCH too loose for me to feel comfortable calling it close to finished, I spent way too much time (at least 6 hours) trying to figure out some smart way to do the hair in segments, but I realized I was following the extremely loose linework of the "shield" too literally, and it would have been more productive to look at the lady of the lake concept the Wang drew and find the detail in the sculpt that way. I'm also just realizing now there's supposed to be a roping pattern at the edge of the face of the shield, but that can be added with an IMM brush so I can fix that. Regardless, I wish I had given the shield more time and just gone at it with sculpting rather than trying to do some dumb masking "time saving", though I am pretty happy with the sword.
Okay so here's check-in one, I think the whole thing might be a bit thin, so I'm gonna gather some more references to make sure everything's checking out
I also realized I forgot to post a schedule so Week 1- Blockout Week 2 - High Poly, Low Poly Week 3 - Low Poly, Good Bake (get critique), base materials Week 4 - Final texturing
needs another pass to finalize the materials but I'm liking how he's turned out, need to play with some settings and take a pass with dirt and scuff but this should work as a base
The hands took a long time to get right, but I wanted to make sure they had pinch zones in the bends of the fingers and then I realized I had actually forgotten to Re-top the shoulder plates he had. I generally did a pass to reduce topology present in some of the arm pieces and I flattened the bottom of his boots to make it seem less organic and more boot-like.