Arctic Soldier

Software I used in this project: Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Mari, Maya, Xgen and Arnold render engine.

The first step was to sculpt the bear body, the foundation for clothes and fur. I did the human like hands because at the end he will be holding a weapon.

For reference I used photos of polar bears and Nicolas Morel’s bear anatomy ecorche.

For this character I really wanted to create realistic and believable clothes, so i decided to dive into Marvelous Designer, for this software can simulate the fabric’s behavior on top of the 3D model.

I found a jacket template on the internet and edited it’s pieces to suite a bear.

I wanted pants to be baggy and have a lot of folds and simulate them in Marvelous Designer was a challenge, so they were manualy sculpted in Zbrush.

Obviously the bear has to have a fur and for this I used Xgen system in Autodesk Maya. I already had experiense with it in my test wolf project that you can find on my artstation page.

I find this software very easy and straightforward. With its tools artist first create guidelines on top of the mesh for generating fur and then can modify it with clump, wind and noise effects.

For the final renders i decided to use Arnold render engine, as it comes with Maya and I have a lot of experience with it. For the fur I used default aiStandartHair shader with some tweaking to make it look like polar bear’s fur. aiStandartSurface was assigned to everything else in the scene.

For the texture of eyes I used Foundry Mari software, with it I painted color and displacement maps for the iris. And for the nose i created specular map with Substance Designer to give it an animal like look. Also as a weapon i gave him a space gun I modeled year ago during learning hard surface modeling in Maya.

And the light in the scene is Arnold Dome Light with a HDRI picture as a texture.