Sofia Bonini - The Creature, The Sorceress and an Egg

So, my name is Sofia, I am 24 years old and I am from a little city in the northern part of Italy! I am actually a computer scientist, but jumped into VFX 18 months ago. Without boring you too much about my life, I wanna present you my first project!

My Translucent Creature

Working on my little translucent creature really gave me ups and downs, excitement and headaches. It was the first time experimenting with transmission and SSS to such an extend.

Reference

It all started with me stumbling upon an incredible work by Roberto Digiglio on ArtStation, the "Triturus Profundis". I really like challenges and apparently making my life harder. I felt the urge to try out something similar: A little semi translucent creature.

So before jumping into it, I started gathering references of real life creatures, who have similar anatomical aspects. I quickly found out about glass frogs, those are great references for organs and translucent skin. I also looked into skeletons of all kinds of lizards, frogs and even little crocodiles.

Modelling

I started with the skeleton and it turned out to be much easier and faster than expected. I blocked-out the bones in Maya, following scientific images as blueprints. As soon as I finished the block-out of the main skeleton I jumped into ZBrush to refine the silhouette and test out some heads. I originally liked the idea of a fish-head, cause I thought of it as a creature living in the deep sea, but something was throwing me off. After losing a whole week to trying out different skulls, I landed on the lizard skull.

Organs, Veins and Posing

After finalizing the skeleton, I started blocking out the organs. I knew they where only partially visible, so I decided to save time and model only the main organs. For the veins I decided to put the skin over the bones and organs first, so to then trace the veins along the body with the curve tube tool in ZBrush.
After all that, I posed my creature with a basic rig in Maya.

Texturing and Shading

After that odyssey, the moment I was waiting for for so long has finally arrived! My excited hands are clicking on the yellow splash icon and now finally the fun part begins. I am opening Mari.

I quickly settled on the base color and added breakup and variation. Then I jumped to the bump, cause that would usually be my workflow: block-out the base color and as soon as possible finalize bump, so I could use it for the base color. But this project is different, the bump would only be visible partially. The main focus is in maps and masks for transmission, transmission depth, sss and so on. I spent the most part in black and white masks for different attributes in my shader, going back and forth between Maya and Mari, always checking my maps.

I even added flakes in Maya for the glas frog's shimmering cell-effect.

Rendering

Now I could start a rendering test and render one frame in HD 1080. The first frame took me almost 6 hours, and I wanted to render 2k resolution in the end. The next step was gathering reasons for long render times and slowly I went over them step by step to find the culprit. I reduced the resolution of my mask maps, reduced subdivision levels and after some changes I managed to reduce my render times by a few hours. 

Finally I found the culprit for my long render times: The interaction between sss and transmission. My render was taking so long cause the sss and transmission maps had mainly grey values in them, meaning that sss and transmission would be calculated at the same time in the same place. To resolve the issue, I went back to Mari and painted more efficient masks, trying to seal off transmission and sss as much as possible.

My render times now: *drum roll* 50 minutes.

Iterations

Here is a little process view to see how I got to the amount of detail and translucency. I started of, with way too much detail, noise, dirt and just too much happening on its skin. So I completely reduced everything to a minimum.

That is when I started slowly adding more and more of the dirt, breakup, sss-spots and so on, until I was satisfied. In this pretty process view, this seems very quick and easy now, but it took me quite some time to figure out the look. The creature even went back into the modelling stage to adjust the displacement and antenna a little bit.

Also the rock it was standing on had a few iterations.

Custom Fingerprints

For the "clean" scene I needed a simple and sterile environment, so I added a chrome sphere with some breakup. For detail and story purposes I even made my own fingerprint-texture in Affinity Photo with the finger/feet prints of my creature and scattered them on the sphere, as if he has been wandering around a little.

The Tiefling Sorceress

The inspiration for my second project I got from a concept I saw on ArtStation by Ahmed Aldoori, the "Tiefling Sorceress". I really love all his concepts, but the sorceress really caught my attention. So I slipped into his DM's and asked for his permission to take on the Tiefling Sorceress.

Reference

Again, the first thing I did after getting his blessing, was gathering references for clothes, horns, skin, jewelry, etc. I mainly tried to look into renaissance items for my references. I had quite a hard time interpreting the fabrics and materials in the concept, so I started thinking about what I would see in it and find fitting.

Modelling

Then I jumped into Sculpting the bust in ZBrush. I wanted to try out a different approach this time. I only planned to sculpt the main silhouette and aspects of the face, cause I really wanted to try out sculpting in Mari. I did not want to be reliant on polygons in ZBrush anymore and work on a pixel level.

I used projections from TexturingXYZ for my displacement and then added bigger folds and wrinkles with brushes as planned. I did the same thing with my horns.

So the following is what I got out of ZBrush, swipe for assets and displacement!

Horns

After getting down the displacement, I started projecting the base color from TexturingXYZ. And hand-painted maps for the sss-radius and her dried face paint.

I did the same procedure with the horns. At first I tried to project maps from a TexturingXYZ horn texture, but I soon saw it was not what I expected. It was neither detailed enough nor the shape I wanted. I looked into what they reminded me of, and downloaded some textures from Megascans for projecting. I added wood texture for the detailed cracks and sand texture for the wave shapes.

Groom in Houdini

The groom was really fun too! I used Houdini for it. The tricky part was to integrate the horns and the hair-jewelry. For the horns I just had to make sure the guides were correct.
When generating the hair, the influence radius and the density where playing key-parts.

Hair Jewelry

For the jewelry the whole thing was more complicated. I worked on it for a long time and tried to make it work with different attributes and masks until I decided to cut the hair off as soon as it enters the pearls to avoid later problems with collisions. Then I added planes at the end of the pearls to let the hair grow out again and make it seem like it is all connected. This would also make simulating easier later on.

Clothing and Lace

I made a first pass of the clothing in Marvelous Designer, put it in ZBrush and retopologized in Maya. 

For the lace, I tried out something new: Substance Designer. I never touched it before, so I had to learn pretty fast.
I used some alphas from ArtStation as a base for the pattern to start the stitching. I added the stitch-flow and also some knots in between the big patterns with noise variation on the holes to make it more natural.

Embroidery

Now to another fun part: The embroidery! I was very indecisive how to make it. I settled on Substance Sampler and Houdini.
It took some time, but in the end I was very pleased with the result I got out of Houdini. And it is also perfect for some fancy breakdowns.

Jewelry

I saved the jewelry on her face until the end. I figured the project would also work without it, even though it gives it the special something. It turned out great and made the Tiefling Sorceress even more special.

I used curves in Maya to trace out the chain-direction and then used a tool for duplicating my modeled chain piece along the curve.

I tried to build my pipeline, so I would also be able to leave away some pieces due to time constraints, and still get a finished product.

Gregg, The Possessed Egg

Reference

Last but not least: my little Gregg! I fell in love with this little fellow as soon as I saw Daniel Sherekin's concept of the possessed Egg. I wanted to do a small and fun project to get away from all the serious projects at the time. The project was my first attempt at sss and transmission, before my translucent creature.

The reference gathering was very quick this time! It consisted of just some eggs and egg-shells.

Modelling

The modelling was quite fast, at least for the eggwhite, yolk and eyes. I struggled with the shell. Modelling cracks is not that easy. I was constantly having issues with triangles, n-gons and it was never looking right.

I decided to paint the cracks on the texture, where I wanted them to be, and then just cut along the texture. So then I only had to fix up some parts, connect edges, bevel, and modelling was over.

Texturing and Shading

Texturing and shading was so much fun! This was one of the projects, where you can really see the power of shading.

Turntable

I added a simple environment with megascans assets and school assets. The only thing I worked on more, is the stove top. I painted an emission map to "turn on" the stove and put a glass field over it with smudges, stains and dried oil drops.

The magic then finally happened in Nuke, where I spent quite some time on the heatwave distortion and smoke overlays to really make it feel hot and cooking!

Conclusion

Translucent Creature

I know a lot of aspects still need revision. I got great feedback at the FMX this year, especially from Claudia Marvisi. I really want to rework some aspects and transitions on the fins and skin, and also the inner organs need more love.

Tiefling Sorceress

On my young sorceress I definitely need to improve a few aspects: The clothing really was a challenge for me, and so I really want to rework it. A few weeks were not enough to do her justice. Also the bump on her face needs better blending and more variation. I am still not happy with the transition of nose to cheek to under-eye pores. Also the jewelry, which I had done in a few days, needs more details and story.

Gregg

And last but not least, my little Gregg deserves a bit more love. His shell is too spotty and noisy and the yolk still does not give me the "alive" feeling. But I am so proud of him and I had to let him go at some point. Especially because it was supposed to be a small and quick project. I definitely have more knowledge now, after my translucent creature. 

So thanks to everyone, who made it till here! I really appreciate everyone who helped me on this journey.
I would not have made it without Tom Herzig, Renato Gregorio Scicchitano, Johnny Fehr and Fabrizio Meli.

I hope you all enjoyed my work! I will post my Demo-Reel soon on LinkedIn, so stay tuned.