This picture shows my finished high poly lace. Rough details sculpted with Clay and Dam Standard brushes.Used edge loops to make it double sided and added thickness to edges using the Standard brush.Inverted mask and removed masked geometry.This image demonstrates my modeling process for one of the lace pieces. I placed them with DragRect and shaped them using the move brush until I was happy with how the pattern looked. Then, I made an IMM brush that contained all of the pieces so I could place them on the character. After sculpting each piece, I decimated them a bit to make it manageable when placing several pieces at the same time.

For faster results, I decided to keep the sculpt pretty rough and focused on adding most of the small details in the textures. I started out by drawing alphas in Photoshop for use in Zbrush. I planned to sculpt five different pattern pieces for the lace. I decided to mesh them together since they lay on top of each other and will be seen from several angles, and therefore needed to be double sided. The third layer consisted of the big leaves laying over her shoulders. This would be similar to how the lace would be sewn in real life. I decided to structure the two shells this way to get the right shadows and depth. A top layer that is made up of meshed lace leaves.

A middle layer that contains hand placed lace detail baked on a shell.

A bottom layer made up of a tiling lace texture on a shell.

After analyzing the reference, I figured I would try to break it down into three parts: I found a picture of some lace with a lot of intricate detail that I really liked and thought it would be a bit of challenge. Reference is an important part of every project that aims to look realistic. Other topics I’ve covered are material setups, lighting, and presentation in Toolbag. In this breakdown article, I will mainly focus on how I created the lace dress for my recent artwork, ” Coronation”.

Hi, my name is Moa Alfredsson, I’ve been working as a character artist for 2½ years at Hazelight, and we recently shipped our first title A Way Out.

Marmoset toolbag double sided material