Ballerina - Marina Victoria Pascual
Marina Victoria Pascual's final project for Advaced 3D with Autodesk Maya, Escuela Trazos.
Concept
“Ballerina” is my final project for my Master's in Escuela Trazos (Madrid). With this project, I mainly want to show my skills as a 3D generalist, being able to model hard-surface and organic objects with Maya and ZBrush and do advanced texturing with Mari and Substance. Additionally, I also used Agisoft for photogrammetry of my face, XGen for the eyebrows and eyelashes, the Advanced Skeleton plug-in for rigging, and Nuke for compositing.
“Ballerina” was initially inspired by several different artists such as Frederik Heyman and Erwin Olaf, and Ron Mueck. I found the cold and lifeless feel of some of their pieces really interesting and decided to create a cyborg of myself. Furthermore, the setting where the scene takes places was inspired by Kraftwerk Berlin, and although I went through several variations of the space, I finally came to one that fit the piece. Once I had a character and a setting, I had to think of the “story”, and for this, I drew inspiration from my own personal memories growing up attending a dance conservatory.
As you can probably guess from the main subject, the cyborg represents me and the machine-like nature I felt in such a strict environment. During my time in the dance school, there were always such high expectations of technical performance that I eventually lost touch with my artistic expression and felt like I had become a robot repeating steps A to Z. For this reason, the cyborg in “Ballerina” is holding still in an attitude pose while placed on a rotating object, expressionless. This being said, I truly love dancing, I just had to get away from the industry to reconnect with the art. But enough with the serious talk, let’s get to the process!
PROCESS
Setting - Warehouse
I started by blocking out the main set up of the space in Maya. As mentioned earlier, the space is inspired by Kraftwerk Berlin, so I wanted to make the place feel like a big dark warehouse.
Cyborg
One I had a rough idea of the space, I continued by building the cyborg. I started doing photogrammetry of my face (my professor and classmates helped me take the photos, etc.) with Agisoft Metashape. I then cleaned up and gave further detail to the model in ZBrush (retopology was done in Maya). Afterwards, I used Mari to project displacement maps from texturing XYZ for further detail of skin pores and imperfections. For the base color of the head, I initially used the texture created by Agisoft and then fixed it in Substance. I also created several different textures such as subsurface maps, roughness maps and cavity maps in order to achieve a more realistic look for the face.
Designing the concept for the cyborg was probably the hardest part of the project for me because it was my first time doing something like this and concept design is definitely not my strongest skill. Nonetheless, I am really happy with the result. The hard-surface parts of the model were done in Maya and then brought into ZBrush, where I followed by sculpting the organic parts of the cyborg.
Once I finished modeling the character, I brought it back to Maya and used Advanced Skeleton’s plug-in for rigging. Lastly, I used XGen for the grooming of the eyebrows and eyelashes.
For the lighting, I created high contrast between the cyborg and the rest of the space in order to focus the attention of the viewer on the subject. Likewise, since the cyborg is dancing, I added a strong spotlight pointed towards the dancer to create the feel of a performance.
Here's a breakdown video of "Ballerina":
Conclusion
I started this project on October 2021, and even though it’s taken me 7 months to finish, I feel like I could still continue to work on it because there will always be more things to improve. I think this is a really good sign though, because it shows the vast amount of knowledge I have learned through the process of creating this piece. This being said, submitting “Ballerina” to the Rookie Awards is a great way for me to finally put an end to it so that I can now start other projects and apply all I have learned in new creative work.
Special thanks to Arturo Gulin for being such an amazing teacher, to Fernando Perez for sharing his knowledge on audiovisual theory, to all my classmates for the support and advise, and most importantly, to my mom for always pushing me to do better!
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