My Real Time Character Art Portfolio

The last 12 months has been a great journey for learning and developing my craft; here are three characters that I created during that period.

The first character is my interpretation of Legion by Daryl Mandryk (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ykOzVR).  It is my mentorship project and I completed it over a period of approximately 4 months. I wanted to create a cinematic quality real-time character as a challenge as I had created a game ready character in my advanced term.

I was provided excellent guidance from my mentor, Denis Melenets who was invaluable in providing feedback to improve my quality immensely.  His input and knowledge was paramount in upping the level of this character.  There were also group bi weekly feedback sessions provided by Karam Chahal which also added great value and honed my end result .

Turntables and images of each pose/model follows.

This character had many props with some shown below:

My process for developing Legion was as follows:

1. Block out and high poly in Zbrush. 

2. Fabric sim/modelling in Marvelous Designer.

3. Retopo/lowpoly/UV in Maya. 

4. Baking in marmoset toolbag.

5. Texturing in Substance painter.

6. Groom in X-gen with Allembic import into Unreal Engine.

6. Rendering, look/dev, cloth simulation in Unreal Engine.

Zbrush high resolution sculpts are highlighted below, 3D scan data and wrapping was used for pore data:

As I was targeting cinematic real time, my overall poly count included all weapons and props was approximately 250K.  The hair was generated using allembic curves instead of hair cards as I had previously utilized the hair card workflow in other projects and wanted a new groom challenge.

Marvelous Designer fabric examples, texture set breakdown with example texture maps, and my Xgen setup is shown below.  The long hair, bangs, three braids, and vellus hair had their own descriptions,.. creating braids in Xgen was a challenge!

With a full time family and part time job, creating and sticking to a project plan was key over the term.  Overall I was able to keep to the calendar and adjust accordingly where needed.  The overall project took approximately 575 hours.

Next is my interpretation of the beautiful Warhammer 40k art by Karl Kopinski (https://karlkopinski.com/gallery-item/pilot/). Vapor is a game ready character with a triangle count of under 140k with 4k texture sets utilized.

Vapor was my advanced term final project. Many thanks to my talented supervisor Frédéric Arsenault for providing guidance and feedback along the way. Additional thanks to all my class mates and friends who provided key feedback.

Vapor's low poly was created in Maya and Zbrush (zmodeler), high poly sculpt in zbrush with cloth simulation in Marvelous designer, texturing in substance designer and painter, illustrator and photoshop, rendering in Marmoset Toolbag, with some animation action provided by Mixamo.

My breakdown includes low poly and high poly images:

Garments created in Marvelous Designer:

Texture set breakdown, texturing using substance painter and textures and alphas I created using Photoshop and Illustrator:

XGen hair strands for fur cards, creation of wrinkle detail normal in substance designer, Marmoset Toolbag / Shader Setup, and finally my calendar / project plan. While achieving the target by meeting the deadline, I seriously under estimated the time required for the low poly as indicated in the table, I made up the time in other areas and adjusted accordingly.

She is a game ready character with approximately 100 000 triangles. I started with a zbrush block-in using z-modeller for the hard surface components and sculpted everything to high poly detailing. The sash was created in Marvelous Designer. Retopo was performed within Maya before baking within Substance Painter. Texturing was performed in substance painter.  I created some custom alphas in photoshop for armor details and the eyebrows/lash cards. Final lookdev and rendering was performed in Marmoset Toolbag. Mixamo animations were added here and there to bring her to life because I couldn't help myself heh! Audio was comped in with Blender.

I worked on this for approximately 5 weeks following a daily project plan with milestones to ensure the deliverable was completed on time without overtime.

I created the Iris material in substance designer as I wanted something with a very Alien appearance.

Thanks for taking the time and making it to the end... now for something far less serious...