Ruben Brouns - 2022 Portfolio

Rookie Awards 2022 Entry

I proudly present my entry for this year's Rookie Awards! 

Frank - Character Showcase

Here I was responsible for the UVs, Texturing, Shading and Look-Development of the creature. For this project I decided to change my workflow a bit since I wanted to take a look at how Mari is to work with. Instead of doing the texturing exclusively in Substance Painter I alternated between the two. Using a combination of procedurally generated masks from Substance and bakes from Zbrush I put together the final textures in Mari with its node-based workflow. I then took it into Houdini where I did the Shading and Look-Development work with Renderman

Texturing References

When I saw the concept art made for this creature I immediately knew how I wanted to texture him. I really like the rough-looking skin of elephants and rhinoceros so that's what I also wanted the creature's skin to feel like. I looked up references of that kind of skin and got started! 

Odyssey - Character Demo

For a larger project I'm developing together with a few classmates that revolves around the creature above we decided to create a character demo.  We wanted to go through all the steps in the pipeline before we started actual production on the main project so we could find out what kind of issues we would run into. We decided to build a little set that the character could be added into later in comp.

Character Demo Shots

On top of the Shading and Look-Development on the creature, for the shots of the character demo I was also responsible for the Lighting and Rendering.

This first shot was a tricky one to light with the creature moving pretty much all over the place. I firstly put in place lights at all the locations where practical lights were present in the shot and then build on top of that with some additional lights to get some nice rim lighting on the hairs for example. Lastly, I put in place the lighting that was going to be emitted from the spirits surrounding the creature, which really tied it all together

Corellia Speeder Recreation

I really liked the industrial look of Corellia from Solo so I decided to try creating a shot within that world together with a few classmates. Here I was responsible for the modeling, texturing, shading and look-development of the environment and the speeder

Speeder Asset

I really liked the design of this speeder when I watched the film so I wanted to match it as closely as I could. Gathering references from various different sources I think I came pretty close and I'm pretty happy with the end result!

Vader Cinematic

On this project I was responsible for the Texturing, Shading, Lighting, and Look-Development for the entire cinematic. 

Mace Windu 

To texture the head I started with albedo maps from Texturing XYZ inside of Mari to get a base down. I then did an initial LookDev for a non-scarred skin version of the face before moving on to the scarred variant. For that version, I took the base textures into substance painter, where I experimented with procedural and hand-painted scarring. Firstly I made some pretty intense scarring but in the end the director wanted to go for a more muted look.

The clothing was textured fully in substance painter with a combination of hand-painted details, manually placed stitching and procedural scratches etc.

Thank you

I'd like to give a shoutout to all the talented artists that worked on these projects with me. Without them, they wouldn't be what they are today! 

Bo Schutte, who designed the creature in the character demo. Emiel van Vliet and Stijn Van Der Plas who animated the creature, Nick de Leeuw who did the FX & Grooming and Menno Haas who did the sculpting and compositing work. Also a big shoutout to Emiel van Vliet for the animation, Sem Zeis for the FX and Mark van Kuik for the compositing on the speeder shot. And lastly Stijn van der Plas for the animation, Nick de Leeuw for the FX and Tim Forsgren for the compositing work on the Vader Cinematic.