Good and Bad Faeries - Samuel Edwards

hello everyone this is my first official entry into the rookies been busy with my coursework all year which left me with little time to submit stuff until now. the entire shot had a lot of pre planning, for starters the concept artwork for the faerie in the shot is from Brian Froud's good and bad faeries.

during my preproduction process I needed to do a lot of research on Brian Froud's artworks and any media that he has helped worked on during his career, what has helped me to create the 3d version of the faeries was with his work on the dark crystal and labyrinth, the puppet work featured in both movies gave me some insight on how to look shape my chosen faerie. 

for the background plate of my shot I wanted to do a 3d faerie treehouse as I wanted to challenge myself in environmental artwork, when it came to the design I looked to some of Brian Froud's artwork and noticed that some of his artwork had Norse runes, that led me down to a rabbit hole of ideas on how I could blend those two elements together. what kickstarted this was his art piece known as the Norse goddess
 

with the treehouse itself to save on time on the base tree I used my background footage and photogrammetry software like mushroom to create the tree itself, which I then took into Zbrush and cleaned up, sadly I was unable to use the tree mesh from mushroom in the final shot however it did led to to a super accurate mesh placement, when I combined it with nukes proxy geometry (which was also made when I tracked the footage.) 

For the character itself it started off on pure ref to get some human anatomy and animal features such as leaf insects to get a bases on how the faerie would function then I started off sculpting from a sphere, dynameshing and zremeshing it, to get a previz model, however when Zbrush 2021 came out I was able to combine its new retopology features in zmodeler with zremesher to get a more refined mesh, I was able to get it to final model as seen in the breakdown video. 

texturing I used substance painter to get a more accurate material for skin and leaf textures, then eventually I took it back to Zbrush touched up the textures and used HD geometry to pull higher details from the normal map and displacement.