Merfolk Pilgrim

Hey there. 
I am currently a first year student at The Animation Workshop. This project was made within 4 weeks at The Animation Workshop. The brief for the project was a Bipedal Character rendered in Arnold as a clay model. This has been my first time trying out making a Bipedal character in Zbrush sculpting and it has been an immense learning experience

Special thanks to Kenny Anderson for his help with the concept phase of the pipeline and Pat Imrie for showing me the ropes for the 3D pipeline in sculpting. 

For the concepting, I knew I wanted to create a character that was an explorer. With this baseline I got the idea that I wanted to create a character that could explore the deep oceans. 
The Idea of a Merfolk on a coming-of-age ritual trial came to mind and I went on to explore references on how I wanted to create a Merfolk.

Once I had settled on an idea for a design, I gathered a collection of references and and started illustrating the character.   

I started off with Maya making a Basemesh, so I could have a solid base to work off on in Zbrush. For this one It spend a good amount of time to in Maya to make the Basemesh as I wanted the character to have a very muscular build. Especially as the tail is coming out of the back I wanted to make sure this part was solid and made sense. 

I then refined the musculature in Zbrush, wanting it to reflect a character that was very active, fixing proportions in my design. 

Afterwards I would do the Retopology in Maya using the Quad Draw tool, so the character could bend in the right places. With the topology done the time came to make the clothing and gear, as well as the UVs, so that it was ready for further refinement in ZBrush. 

At the last stage was further refinement and sculpting of details, before posing the character. With a Low Poly base exported into ZBrush, every major clothing and gear piece was added as their own tool. 

Next time I make a character with a lot of frills I will make sure they are better sculpted to make them easier to pose. A lot of time was spend posing the frills and head fin as well as doing the retopology for the thinner parts of the character. I would not recommend doing that, but lesson learned.  

The project was rendered Maya with Arnold.

With the posed made, I imported the new mesh from ZBrush into Maya, adding the normal and displacement maps into the shaders. Unfortunately I had exported a higher polycount when I exported the finished posed into Maya. I had forgotten to project the details form the high polycount model onto the low polycount model. So it was back to ZBrush to project the details onto the low poly model. 
With this fix, I could setup the turntable for the character. 

And with that all that was left was to render it.  

Thank you for having a look at my entry.

Have a good one. 
Dennis.