3D Character Space Ape - Dat Matthias Nguyen

Hey guys, my name is Dat Matthias Nguyen and this is my entry for the Rookies 2021 in the game development category. I have graduated from PIXLVISN media arts academy in Cologne successfully at the end of April. I enter the contest as my first step to connect to the industry, receive feedback, and challenge myself.

I'm very excited to present my work and I wish all other contenders that have entered the contest the best of luck!

For this project, I wanted to do a humanoid animal. I found a 2D concept online from Siu Jian, which I liked a lot. The character looked unique and very challenging to me because this character has a lot of hard surface objects.

Gathering a lot of references was essential to get a believable and realistic result.

I tried to capture the character without copying him 100%. I added a cigarette to emphasize the character and to make him more interesting. A small detail with huge effect, which didn't take me long to do so. 

The back of the character wasn't included in the concept art, so I had to improvise and had a lot of fun with that.

This was the hardest project of all 3 I made for this contest because this character has tubes, that go in the cloth and out again. So I had to plan what I should do first and with which technique.

 I started to block out the body, then I went for the Midpoly of the body immediately. because I needed that geometry for the next step, which was creating the cloth inside of Marvelous Designer. I could have done the cloth in Zbrush by extracting from the Body or using the new dynamics feature in Zbrush, but I decided to do the cloth with Marvelous Designer for the most realistic result.

Once I had the cloth done, I imported everything back to Zbrush and made some minor changes to the overall shape to match the concept. Then I brought the LowPoly to Maya and did the Retopology and the UV, I grouped the UVs into Texture sets and brought the new LowPoly back to Zbrush for the last 10% of the Detail ( tiny folds, pores, wrinkles, etc ). 

After this was done, it was time to bake the maps and do the texturing. Later on, I did the hair cards in Maya, manually placed them one by one, which was very tedious to do. I did the textures for the hair cards in Fibershop, a software that I bought on artstation. 

The lighting and rendering I did in Unreal engine 4. Real-time rendering was super quick.

The hardest challenge of this project:

Like I mentioned earlier, the tubes that went in and out of the cloth were very tricky to handle and it caused some problems inside of Marvelous Designer. To keep it short, it had something to do with the simulation. But I did some research and was able to fix that problem. 

I also had to learn how to render in Unreal Engine 4 and how to do Haircards together in a very short amount of time, because I decided in the very last month to go for game characters instead of movie characters.