Romain Chapard 2022 Entry - Character Showreel

       Hi! I'm Romain, 3D-VFX Graduated from Institut Artline. I'm going to show you today a sample of my journey as 3D Modeler/surfacing artist, 2 pieces of work I finished recently to apply in the 3D Industry. I hope you'll enjoy the result!

Mushroom Hero

      First of all, I must admit I wasn't keen on the cartoon aspect, but the concept I found was a great exercise to reinforce fundamentals concept. Even if the project won't be the most ambitious, it wasn't an easy one either. Finally , I found a deep interest in the cartoon process. Be sure I will continue to experiment in this style!

        I want to specify that I put on myself some requests about this work:
-First of all, a fully handpainted surfacing process  , with a shading not PBR friendly: there is no roughness map applied at this character , so everything needed to be mostly cohesive with the base color, the normal and the SSS channels. 
-the character needed to be "Game Ready", mainly by an optimized topology, ready to be rigged. In the end, this little guy has only 6026  faces! But It will be for another purpose, because I worked exclusively on a precalculated Workflow with Arnold renderer.  

       When I was almost finishing the character, I wanted him to possess his own giant base, I've been carried away by the hype roughly speaking. But again, I made my experiments with vegetation, rocks and more, with many iterations and so on!

Process view: Wireframe, Normal map, Albedo, Beauty and Compositing pass.

UV Set

Concept art made by Firrka

Blood Moon Diana (League of Legends)

       Well, Blood Moon Diana's Splash Art was a big deal to me. I had in mind to reproduce her in 3D for a long time without giving it a shot because of the complexity and the lack of technical skills I had to render it entirely. But practice makes perfect , and I'm glad to see what I've done! Again, everything is fully handpainted, I created some alphas to create the skin on Zbrush, and the color have been made on Substance , layer after layer.  

         Here are my moodboards, but not  the only ones. I made both of these specifically for this project, and there is another one I made with a book I have called " Anatomy for Sculptors " by Uldis Zarins, and "Morpho" By Michel Lauricella. It's not the only references you can find, but they are greatly easy to use , I recommend!

          I knew the skin was a big part too, to gain some credibility I used 3 main type of reference:
-Cross-polarized imagery, to avoid specular bouncing on the pictures. 
-RBX imagery, red and brown: there are not so many on the internet, but I needed more a global and visible patern to think about , more than a specific , unique image to replicate. It allows to see vascularity of the skin and sun damages that I adapted to the age and the ethnicity of my character.
-Very high Definition pictures of the Human face. I discovered Daniel Boschung work during this journey, and it have been litteraly crucial during this process. 

Diana process view

Diana optionnal passes : Lighting, Direct Specular, SSS, Diffuse.

Splash Art made by Chengwei Pan

Here are some work in progress. Even if I love anatomy, I had some difficulties to shape the face, mainly because of  a displacement map gestion, so I did  many test to know what was the issue. When I saw it was a lack of configuration, I've been able to move on faster. Oh , and I used mainly layers and Morph Target to figure it out during the sculpting phase. 
Finally, the second big deal was hairs. I used XGen to make it , and It was so rewarding to spend time on this step. I was afraid of not handling it but  working on it was a pleasure and a true revelation to me. If you are in the same case, give it a try , you wont regret!  

Et voilà! I hope you appreciated and it helped some folks, thanks for watching!