Cycolps Phoenix Force

Cyclops Phoenix Force

This Character was made for my final project at ThinkTankOnline Characters for film, and it is primarly based on the phoenix force cyclops made by Gerard Kravchuk, with some new variations on the suit fabrics.

Renders with an HDRI

For this project the goal was to create a character for cinematic in 10 weeks.

To succesfully complete this project, a lot of planning was done before doing anything else. This to make sure that the project was going to be finished.

First I made a breakdown based on the concept on the left, By spliting the whole character into different sections.
Modeling (Blue),  Uvs (Purple),  Texturing (Pink), LookDev (Yellow).
And from that splitted every part of that proces into single pieces, since each one was going to be a new task to do and get approved. as I moved on with the project. Each task with its little side note mentionting how it was going to be made.

In this close up the modeling section was broken down into smaller and different parts, such as, body, suit, and the environment, in case the ground needed to be modelled or textured. This was followed by a calendar where the parts were assigned by the day, and a Chart to track de progress.

Before working on the model I need a lot of references to know how the model is expected to look like, so I used the software PureRef  and photoshop to give myself a direction for the character and how this one was suposed to look. This file was made taking into consideration, both real world  and cg textures, superhero suits, and anatomy studies.

Also along with the file some studies and breakdowns were made to know what to expect and better aproach the project. Since this project was going to require a facial expresion once it started that meant that a proper study of face anatomy had to be made, so I made an anatomy study based on FACS and how wrinkles are formed.

Once all the planning was done and references were gathered I started with the body sculpt. Taking time into consideration i decided to start with a base mesh from a previous project and start sculplting from there.

Once the body was completed as a base for the suit, i started extracting some parts to sculpt, zremesh, add thickness with Zmodeler, send the mdl to maya to retopologize and then bring back to zbrush tu sculpt small dents on the edges.

For the Fabric parts of the suit:
1.- The model was first extracted from the body.
2.- Masked into different sections based on the concept lines
3.- Convert those masks into different polygroups.
4.- Zremeshed keeping the polygroups.
5.- Exported the model with the polygroups to later on use those polygroups as and ID map in substance painter and play with fabric variations to avoid creating a suit with only 1 fabric pattern.

For the Suit wrinkles:
1.- I sculpted into a plane some tension folds.
2.- Created an alpha based the plane sculpt.
3.- Created a brush with that alpha.
4.- Used the morph target tool before using the new brush
5.- Started sculpting wrinkles with the new brush and smooth some of them with the morph brush.

After working on the suit the process was similar for the rest of the character, Extracting meshes from the body, Zremesh, sculpt and then send them to maya for retopology

Zbrush A pose Final Version

The Uvs in this model were arrenged into different udims and with symetry, which made things a but heavy to texture in substance pinter. The textures were painted by parts and once everything was textured I gathered everything inside Mari for final touches, ISO masks and texture projections.

Once the project was very advanced and some things started to take more time, a decision was made on how to finish the project in time with a high quality finished character. So some things were taken off the calendar,  like using a less dynamic pose when presenting the character, and using a headscan and then make some changes on it, in order to give it a more heroic look (bigger jaw, less fat, wrinkles and bigger mouth.).

In order to take advantage of all the features from the headscan, WRAP3ds was used to give the modified headscan  the topology from the body that was already modelled and had uvs. Then Baked all the maps that came with the head scan into the new topology in mudbox.

First Head - From basemesh
Second Head - Sculpted from basemesh
Third Head - Headscan modified with same topology from Second Head

After the head and the Textures were done I started with setting up all the textures and shaders in Maya with Vray mtls and Blend mtls using the Isolation and RGB masks prepared from the texturing part.

Here I´m using different materials and conecting them with a blend mtl and using the ISO and RGB masks to split the suit fabrics.

For The character Pose, I used the maya Quick Rig Tool step by tep, then cleaned some weights with the component editor, and exported the hands and gloves to pose and sculpt them making a fist.