Renn of the Ocean-Desert

Hello, my name is Valentina, I'm from Italy and I'm a  first year CG student from TAW. I'm currently studying Computer Graphic Arts because I would like to work in the video game industry as Visual developer/ Concept artist, Environment artist.

-3D CHARACTER DESIGN PROJECT-   "Renn of the ocean-desert"

The project was made over 4 weeks: 1 week of concepting and 3 weeks of sculpting and modeling. This was my first time using ZBrush and making a biped has been a very interesting and useful way to expand my understanding of a general CG pipeline.

During this project we have been mentored by Kenny Anderson for character design and concepting, and Pat Imrie who supervised us trough the 3D process in Maya and Zbrush. Both incredible mentors and people. 

CONCEPT and CHARECTER DESIGN

For this project my goal was to learn the softwares Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Painter for a CG pipeline. I wanted to create a video game character inspired mainly by 'Mad Max' and 'Borderlands'. The main idea was to create a woman, called Renn, living in a post apocalyptic world where the ocean has become a deadly desert wasteland. Renn survives this wasteland by carrying her water and liquids in large, rounded containers.

I looked at 'Dune' as inspiration for designing the outfit of my character, and 'Borderlands' for the mood and the look of the rifle, made with old junk.

3D WORKFLOW:

-At first, I blocked out the basemesh using Maya, to define the shape and the muscles of my character. I exaggerated the proportions for having a more cartoony result.

-In ZBrush I remeshed and sculpt the final look of my character, getting ready for doing the retopology in Maya

-Once I finished the retopology, I stared modeling the clothes and the iron leg and I reimported everything into ZB for the final sculpting. 

-After finishing the sculping stage, I posed and exported the displacement maps from ZB, getting ready to create the final textures in Substance Painter and the final render with Arnold.

PROPS

For Renn I designed various clothes and objects mainly created to display the world where she is in. The main props that I designed are:

-The Rifle: created with old dirty junk. The main purpose of that object was to expand my knowledge on Substance painter, creating images and maps in photoshop.

-The Cameraball: attacked to her back.  A machine created for searching for external source of water in the environment around.

-The Water Containers: positioned on her hip bone and connected to her kidneys to take internal liquids and recycled them into clean water Renn can reutilize. 

Overall this project has been a unique opportunity to learn the base of ZBrush and expanding my knowledge on 3d programs, that are still new for me. Work with Kenny and Pat has been very helpful, not just for improving my skills during this course, but to better understand the process of creating 3d models and how to work with different 3d software.

Thank you for taking a look on my project,

best,

Valentina