Isabel Arauz - Puppet

This is my final project for the Foundations Term at Think Tank Training Centre. It is based on a beautiful concept by Zeen Chin. 

I box modeled everything in Maya, making sure I had enough geometry to match the shapes in the concept. The sculpting tools were extremely helpful to move the mesh around and get it where I needed it to be. 
Later I exported everything to ZBrush to add some details like wrinkles or nostrils. Before texturing, I did the first lighting pass and assigned colored shaders. 

The hair was done with Xgen, using many descriptions for the braids, the hair in the top, the bangs and the loose strands. 

For the characters' textures, I used Mari. First, I made a subdermal layer, a red base color with procedural clouds and noises. On top of that, I layered the base color of the skin, masking it as well to make it uneven and let the redness below show as well.

For the other objects, I used Substance Painter, taking advantage of the smart masks already in the software but modifying them to get the look I wanted. 

I rendered my scene in Vray and did the compositing of the final image in Nuke and Photoshop. They were minor adjustments such as adding depth of field and tweaking levels to match the concept. 

This video shows the process from modeling to compositing. 

Close up shot.

Final image.