Embedded Files
This page has a brief documentation of all the steps I've taken to create one of the two projects I did for the first term of my final year at De Montfort University. From the top to the very bottom of this blog page, I carefully dissected my workflow week by week and captured the nearly three months of off-and-on work. This was my first hand-painted character that used sculpt information along hand-painting.
↓ Week 1 | Starting the Captain project
2023.10.16 - 2023.10.20
Around this time, I was still working on my Autopsy Table project, but I figured I'd play around with concepting my other character. Following the Captain Character project brief that I chose, I once again thought of creating something that wouldn't be necessarily typical for the brief's premise. Also, definitely knew I wanted to aim for something more light-hearted.
Ahri of League of Legends is a character concept extremely dear to me - she was one of the first 3D characters to inspire me to be who I am today, a character artist. I've always adored and admired her design, specifically the fact that she had giant fluffy fox tails and ears, a very inviting personality and so much charm. Inspired by her, like many others, I chose to create my own original character design. Although quite similar to every 'fox girl' character, mine would be unique in a way that she'd have a much softer look to her, to begin with. Quite literally.
I was curious to implement a larger body size into the concept of someone who had to be an agile leader. It intrigued me how much it contradicted your typical ready-to-fight captain design, but nicely added to her uniqueness and possible theory of how wealthy she was. After all, being chunky was considered a position and title indicator a while back - 'the bigger the person, the more resources they have to "eat well". '
Before making a 2D concept, I dived into creating the sculpt right away. It was fairly easy to get the basic shapes going. I could have started out in zBrush, but I made a little low poly block-out in 3DsMax.
Once enough of a vague block-out body was done, I added a couple starter meshes for heir tails. Unlike Ahri who has nine, my character was going to have two big ones:
I began working out the hands and added a very abstract placeholder for her hair. A messy middle-part that would separate out into two braids/sections in the back was what I aimed for. I was very eager to move onto sculpting her face.
I wanted to go for a very feminine, slightly childish looking face, helping my captain appear all the more caring, alert, as well as approachable. At this point I felt encouraged to start concepting about her crew, her environment and her personality as a captain, as well as how se came to be one in the first place. Usually, a leader is thought to look intimidating, experienced, whereas she was appearing quite innocent and gullible. I liked that, I thought it was refreshing.
I very much liked the idea of having the 'fancy' tail be dyed in a gradient. Right off the bat, these shades of blue and red reminded me of forest berries...
The PolyPaint brush in zBrush allowed me to begin thinking about my character's color palette, brain-storming about what would look unique. Continuing on with the aspect of duality, I wanted to make the two tails and the two sections of her hair be asymmetric. I thought of going with a sort of Harley Quinn red and blue, but then had a suggestion from my peer and friend Lincoln to have one tail be sort of blank. We wondered if a 'black and white'/'ying and yang' variation would fit, but I was determined to have this design be expressive through other colors.
↓ Week 2 | Concepting in 2D, shape language, environment considerations and material analysis
2023.11.06 - 2023.11.10
It was time to start focusing on this project over the other one, and figuring out just who I wanted this foxy captain to be. Her name, Everine, was something I knew since day one of creating her. But that was it until this week.
Making sketches connected me to my character on a personal level, and it absolutely helped me feel more motivated and inspired to work on her. With a playful approach to this design, I emphasized the initial concept that I had for her, featuring keywords like 'mother nature' , forest protector, scavenger, provider. I wanted to hyperbolize the aspect of her being half-fox, dedicating a lot of points of her design to revolve around nature. The brainstorming I did with her clothing involved a lot of leather, and I thought of ways of changing that - replacing it with some sort of sturdy, flexible leaves, dampened and oiled to be firm and provide a lot of support. Her forearm armor was going to be tree bark, also re-enforced in some clever way. The fabric on her would be what she and her crew may have possibly stolen from some kind of group that was a threat to the forest. Perhaps her 'crew' was a tribe. Perhaps it was a pack of grizzly bears. Or maybe she was the owner of all the foxes and wolves of a forest...
The artistic freedom I felt was endless, but I didn't let it overwhelm me. I made key visual points of her clothing/armor/gear/accessories, and cooked up an informative front view of my concept for myself. The backside, along with color considerations, would come a bit later.
Round, flowy shapes and lots of duality (two tails, two braids/sections of hair in the back)
Bare feet, dirty from black soil and the forest floor.
Closed pouch of sweet berries, nuts, mushrooms... (or deadly weapons)...
Feathers/flowers in the hair, perhaps a flower crown.
Material and accessories inspiration board. Realistic, organic, primitive textures.
I found a great Marvelous Designer artist on Art Station (their ArtStation) and I absolutely adored some of their designs, I felt like something similar would fit my character perfectly. Though I also had a slight fear of using marvelous, and genuinely kind of wanted to sculpt the flowy fabric clothing instead. Nonetheless this was very inspiring.
↓ Week 3 | Sculpting and settling on a design
2023.11.13 - 2023.11.17
I dedicated this week to shaping out my character's key features such as her face, hair and armor. Once I had the basic sculpts of those parts, I was excited to draw over the sculpt in 2D and bring in considerations for the dynamics of the design as well as the color palette. It was also a good stage to take a deeper dive on her title and role.
For the face, I used references of really youthful and feminine looking people such as Emilia Clarke and Barbie Ferreira. They helped me achieve a pretty, innocent and slightly surprised idle expression for my captain.
This picture of a seal, however, was the best reference for her face. It had everything I was looking for. I aimed for my character to have one of the most dangerous abilities in the world - the ability to cause cute aggression.
I also gave her bunny ears with the aim to show that it was a fantasy fox, a sort of fox-rabbit-human hybrid. I think they also fit well with my overall goal of having her radiate cuteness. The hair was at first a single mesh, allowing me to move it around and see how I'd like for it to frame her face.
I added base layers for her clothing, keeping in mind there was only going to be her skirt, pouch, shirt and little crop-cloak. The braids were fun to do, I decided to have them twisting. Separate polygroups helped a ton.
I planned for her hair to have a fer separate sections as well, enhanced and made to look fuller with some alphas that would accompany it later-on.
Above this text you can see the 2D concept I created by drawing over the sculpt. I was open to make changes to her color palette in the future as I felt it wasn't very dynamic at this point in time. I planned for the key color to be green, grabbing the viewer's attention to focus on her pouch that would have brighter and more vibrant veins. It was safe to assume it would be made from layers of some kind of big, sturdy fantasy cabbage leaves. I liked that it also fell under the definition of "mother" nature, tying in with maternity and the myth of cabbage babies. Or something.
I loved to hand-paint organic textures, and more and more I felt fond of the idea of hand-painting all of this character allowing my digital art skills to be displayed to the best of my ability, while being assisted by the normal maps from my sculpt. I kept getting a better vision of this project in my head, it was exciting.
↓ Week 4 | Texture sheet considerations, sculpting and retopping
2023.11.20 - 2023.11.24
It was important for me to keep track of the time I had for this project, as well as the rather constricting texture sheets, in contrast to the hefty budget of 65 000 tris. This was my arrangement plan:
TO DO:
Set up the texture sheets:
2048 x 2048 - Body
(Head with hair, shirt, arms, legs);
2048 x 2048 - Armor
(Tails, clothing, bark armor, some clothing, pouch);
1024 x 1024 - Alphas
(Tail and hair tufts, eyelashes, feathers, leaves, string, flowers in the hair);
512 x 512 - Eyes
Sculpt, retop, unwrap, bake and hand-paint:
Bark armor, pouch, skirt, shirt, crop-cloak, arms, legs, tails, hair, ears, face.
A clean, polished sculpt was one of my biggest priorities at this moment. I speculated my retop to not be too big of a pain because apart from the bark armor, I didn't have any extremely organic and intricate shapes in my design. I was a little anxious when thinking about how I'd go over the hair, but I was confident I'd do well hand-painting it.
I wanted to make sure the back of her clothing was clean even if it was going to be covered, just in case some imaginary animators would want to for example lift her hair up completely. I also shaped out a quite dainty looking pair of feet.
I decided to hand-sculpt the fabric parts of the design, not taking the Marvelous Designer route for the task. My aim was to portray a rather thick and stubborn cloth for the crop-cloak, used a lot of Dam Standard as the main brush.
My workflow involved a lot of ZRemeshing and polishing, as well as real-life anatomy referencing.
Below this text you can see I started my retopology stage at this time, as well. With a non-static character, animation loops were crucial for a future rig, so I made sure to include them on the face and joints. As per usual, I started with a low poly retop and planned to add geometry wherever it needed be.
↓ Week 9 | More sculpting and retopping, following industry examples
2023.11.27 - 2023.12.01
With the winter break approaching, I began to feel particularly behind on this project. The brief required it to be done in 4 weeks, and here I was, not even done with my sculpt for it. While reflecting on it, I did realize that it was 'my own fault' - the character design I went with was needy of extra attention, to say the least. And of course, my strive to make this character stand out, to indulge into making a unique and very detailed design played its part into taking up so much time. I sincerely wanted to do my best. And since I did have a lot of time on my hands, I had to use it to its fullest.
I focused on making more key assets of my character, one of them being the bark armor on her arm. I wanted to really push the aspect of stylization with this one, taking great inspiration by decorative and rather ornamental interpretations of wood other artists have created. Adding my own 'flavor' to it, I sculpted an almost feather-like chunk of bark wood for my character to defend and assert herself with.
Hand-painted texture by Jared Jones
Starting from four iterations of single feathery fibers of stylized bark, I created an especially intricate armor for the forearm.
While they were very flowy and soft-looking, I'm glad they still read as having the bark material. I believe the wood knots helped a lot, as well as the overall organic flow of the fibers and their composition.
I'd say the hair was also one of her most important attributes, if not the focus of her visual design. Like for the bark and everything else, I mostly used the Dam Standard brush to achieve clean and ornamental creases, displaying weight and lusciousness of her locks.
The retop process of the hair was, as expected, a very time-consuming one. The 'flat color' view in 3DsMax helped me to see where the silhouette was particularly faceted, and in those places I went ahead and added geometry using the cut tool.
I aimed to have the tails appear as very 'poofy' and flowy, possibly having resemblance to a stylized flame or roots.
With the help of a tutor's feedback, I made her face appear less shocked and made the eyes show more white, carefully pushing the lower eyelid upwards around the eye.
Final sculpt of the tails, my plan was to add some haircards with height later on.
The industry's approach
The tails were like a character on their own, making me nervous about my approach to their retop and placement on the texture sheet. Ultimately I decided I'd clone them in my texture sheet to save texture space, and make the geometry be as animation- friendly as possible, providing it with loops and cuts wherever the dynamic silhouette would demand them. I was glad to know I have the budget to do these tails justice, since they weren't your typical 'flat' fox tails like those of Ahri from League of Legends.
For her skirt, I did end up using 3DsMax's Cloth modifier instead of sculpting it by hand. It took many tries to get it right, but I ended up with a great result.
I hand-sculpted the crop-cloak as it was a slightly different shape and I wanted to have more control over how its fabric would lay over her chest. I started with pretty sparse topology for it, later on amping it up a bit since I had all the budget in the world.
I really enjoyed sculpting her shoulder armor piece, being creative with a 'blackhead' and 'lip texture' brush alpha in zBrush. Sculpting organic, nature-y materials made me realize just how connected they all are. This shoulder piece could easily be interpreted as a hard cap of a fungus, or maybe even a shell, though she wasn't too connected to sea life.
↓ Week 10 | Retopping, unwrapping and baking
2023.12.04 - 2023.12.08
Having a tidy workspace is very important to a smooth work flow, so I made sure my temporary naming conventions match up before I merged the assets together. And while it's best to not have intersecting meshes, I figured it would be fine to leave the bark pieces on the armor as separated retop since it would always be static and connect to a single bone. Overall I made them quite dense in topology since they were very organic shapes.
Like the separate fur tufts of the tail, I mirrored the bark pieces over after unwrapping them, assuring I'd save a good amount of texture space by cloning object that were going to have duplicated textures. Finally, it was time to retopologize the tail, and it cost me a few attempts to figure out how I wanted to approach this task. I decided I'd target the main creases first, 'quadifying' the areas where the locks of fur intertwined within itself. At this point, I had disregarded my reference to the idustry's approach from earlier, thinking I could form prominent animation loops along the way retopping the tail this way. I was happy with this retopology as it provided very careful consideration of the tail's silhouette.
...However, during a feedback session, I was told that the mesh I made wouldn't be as animation friendly as it could be, after all. So despite me putting a lot of time and careful manual step-build workflow into this one, I gladly remade the low poly version of the tails using just a dense cylinder and some basic modeling tools, only having to conform it to the high poly mesh beneath.
The model rounded up to be a little over 40 000 k tris, and was ready to be test-baked and adjusted to fit the high poly sculpt better in areas that needed it.
I learned having a separate 3DsMax file for the exploded model also helps me stay organized. Exploding a model is always an interesting visual experience...
At this point I wasn't sure if I could handpaint over the baking errors or not, in general it was a new experience for me, so I just chose to fix up the model instead. Here are a few sneaky bake errors that I saw and successfully got rid of. Overall, I was happy to see the bake translated most of my sculpt through its Normal and AO maps.
↓ Finalizing the Captain project
2023.12.11 - 2023.12.15
This section of my blog covers my work up until my extended deadline in January. I'm very grateful I was provided some extra time, as I really wanted to pour my heart into this character, but the Autopsy Table project still needed work, too.
On the left side of this text you can see my final pack of the UV islands of the model (top one - 'armor' sheet, bottom one - 'body' sheet). I was a bit shy to make more seams for the sake of saving texture space and preventing distortion because I was unsure whether I'd be capable of painting over them later on. Once again, I was in a sort of 'PBR' mindset, still.
I did make sure to have the UV islands have minimal stretching, and I was excited to go ahead and start hand-painting. Here you can see the AO map with only minimal errors at places of meshes interacting due to the cage having to be a bit too big.
I figured I'd start with masking out separate parts and putting them in their folders. Starting with the face, I quickly caught on how useful the 'light' and 'curvature' generators are, practically having the information of the sculpt do the work for me. While texturing the face, I realized I needed to add eyelashes to her now because of how big of an impact they had in my vision. I put them on a separate sheet - 'alphas' - to be detailed later, but for now, a basic eyelash shape would do. Once I had a soft base for the face, I moved on to her hair.
It was fun to texture the hair because I got to control all the careful detail of the sculpt by really bumping up the curvature map with some highlights, and inverting it with adjustments for the soft shadows. The shade of my character's blond hair was going to be sort of creamy, and putting light overlays of purples and blues helped not make it too yellow or orange. It was a bit like white chocolate at this point, and I went over it with shadows a little bit later.
I did try applying some tileable grunge/noise texture for something as organic as bark, though I found it looking a bit confusing to he eye, as if it becomes some kind of clay.
I added light and curvature to each part of the character with careful considerations of value, in-game light direction and the overall color palette of the design. It was interesting to imply some shadows by drawing them on.
This is where I also began experimenting with the color palette, going with a more warm and autumn-like set of hues on the tail, skirt and the pouch flap. This was a good brainstorm, and it made me decide on a warmer peachy pink instead of the cold one I had for the skirt. Although I was a bit unsure about her legs and skirt being around the same color.
Sketching the gworl also helped me stay motivated to work on her, making me ever so slightly more attached to her personality, though it was tough to adore her even more than I did at that point. Here she is, stomping grumpily towards whomever is unlucky enough to receive a lengthy lecture on why not to put your paw in a bee hive and annihilate a colony of bees... You're not supposed to do that in the harmonious ecosystem of the forest, yes, even if you are a bear. The other sketch I made features Everine riding a giant.. rabbit.. wolf? She had to have a sweet ride.
These spots here on the cloak are about the only tileable texture map I added across the model, feeling it needed a bit of disruption.
I was happy to see her coming together. I also fixed little delicate areas around the model in 3DsMax, making sure important parts aren't too faceted, such as the profile view of her lips.
I really wanted the final model of her to have her lips parted, revealing her slightly crooked teeth. I wasn't going to do a full animation-ready mouthbag, I sort of only parted her lips in zBrush and using the 3DsMax modeling tools, and extended parts of her lips to intersect with a plane that would have her teeth drawn on it.
Drawing on the eyelashes took a few attempts, but the most important thing was to not over-complicate them. Looking at industry examples for stylized eyelashes helped. I could have even made them solid meshes instead of alphas.
I was a bit anxious over my decision to open the mouth, as I didn't know if it had to be opened on the UV sheet, too. I couldn't keep it closed there as the textures bled a bit on the upper and lower lip. But I thought the teeth reveal was so cute.
Here you can see how I cleaned up some areas in photoshop, just going over the 2D UVs and painting over areas where either the curvature or AO map baked where it shouldn't have. I also gave her freckles.
Up next was the process of adding other alphas. I sculpted the shapes in ZBrush and I later retopologized them into much lower-poly planes.
While the alphas didn't have any sculpt information, hey were quite fun and easy to paint in, I just had to make sure they don't look out of place in regard to their contrast and shape. They needed to be stylized and simplistic, but just enough to be easily identifiable. My main materials for them were feathers, fur, string and a leaf. Little flowers were an idea in the concept, but I was suggested they would only make the upper half of the character too busy.
I knew from the start that I'd have to make a custom rig for her and luckily I found a very nice tutorial of it on YouTube. It was a CAT rig with manual bone creation, instead of the one based on a preset biped.
I felt very experimental adding so many (83) bones, and I kept in mind that doing so was quite expenive. Since this was only for the pose of the presentation though, I allowed myself to add as many as I thought I needed, making sure no parts were missing out on being unposed. Most of the small ones were in the separate hair sections.
The skin modifier did its magic, and I was getting closer to my vision for her pose.
Weight painting, as expected, was quite a finicky process, requiring careful attention to the heatmap brush settings like its strength and fall-off, but it did wonders in areas where it was needed. The geodesic voxel solver was the option that really helped the skin modifier better fit the bones accordingly and evenly to the bones.
After the skinning, I still had to make several adjustments that required careful vert editing just making sure the verts that had wrongfully weight-painted to certain bones weren't skewed or intersecting through different parts of the mesh.
The shoulder armor piece was the only one that I didn't adjust, leaving it be stretched since if didn't attract too much attention either way. I pulled the jagged edges to place and let it be deformed.
Some verts in the hair failed to get fully weight-painted to their assigned bones, so I simply re-imported the unrigged mesh to have it look non-deformed and flawless.
I did also make quite a few texture updates - one of the major ones being implied highlights on her hair. I feel like they gave a lot of believable shine and character to her, further pushing the aspect of her beauty. I minimized the amount of freckles on her cheeks, darkened her teeth so they aren't blindingly white, adjusted some very dark areas to be just a bit lighter, and added implied cast shadows in places of close contact of different parts of her. After that, when was all done and ready to be presented in Unreal Engine 5.
Beauty shots
Here are a few final renders of my captain project. While they look a little dimmed, it's because up to this point my view of her was always in just the base color settings. With some soft lighting applied, it was visible how her hand-painted textures tolerated a soft lighting set-up. Even though the most perfect game setting for her would be a fully hand-painted one. She looks best when she is not interacting with any light at all, after all.
In her turnaround video, I used an instrumental version of Melanie Martinez' song 'Spider Web'. Her album 'Portals' inspired this character greatly, from the aspect of femininity and self-confidence to the strong focus around nature and all things related to unique beauty.
Project Post-Mortem
Overall, I am satisfied with how this project turned out. I took a lot of time, effort and dedication to her sculpt, retopology, planning out her texture sheets and texturing. I would say I gave her a pretty balanced amount of tris, the final model consisting of a little over 43 000 tris while the given budget was over 60 000 tris.
I actually should have put more geometry into areas like the hair. Tails too, where the baked high-poly sculpt tried its best to cling to the low poly mesh and created skewed and jagged texture-work of the fur fibers from certain angles. I also think the skirt could have used more geometry, too, as its silhouette is rather faceted from some angles, or in the rigged pose, too.
I absolutely adore how her sculpt came out, I think that was the strongest phase of this project, like with most of my art. Retopology could have been more clean in areas like the tree bark armor and definitely the hair, which I have unwrapped through great trial and error due to their incredibly organic shapes. I love how her textures turned out as well, though I should have had a separate texture sheet for her skin, just so I could have given it a stronger subsurface profile.
Everine turned out to be by far one of the most adorable characters I've ever created concept-wise. I did not do her justice with some of the technical decisions I made regarding her topology, and perhaps went a bit against the rules of color theory abandoning her of her fullest 'chromatic bliss to the eye' impression, but I still think she was a great character for me to warm up to hand-painting and practice making dynamic and fun character and outfit designs. I believe she covered the brief, being presented as a gorgeous, tough and motherly leader of her forest creature friends. Thank you for reading about her creation!
Google Sites
Report abuse