3D Character NFL player - Dat Matthias Nguyen ---

Hey guys, my name is Dat Matthias Nguyen and this is my entry for the Rookie awards 2022.

I successfully graduated from the PIXLVISN media arts academy in cologne at the end of April 2021. I have also entered the Rookie awards contest from 2021, which has also been a great success.

I have worked in the art industry since then.

I'm glad to be able to enter the rookie award contest for the last time and I'm very excited to present my work.

I wish all other contenders the best of luck!

This time I wanted to do a 3D character of someone I found visually interesting in the real world. Therefore I decided to create a 3D version of Troy Aikman.

The animation you see in this video is from mixamo, which I used to bring the character to life. It's quick and the skinning is not perfect, but it was good enough for the purpose.

I always love to see the things I have created come to life in the end.

Gathering a lot of references was very important to get a good result.

I tried my best to capture the main features of the person, which was very challenging because it was the very first 3D portrait I have ever done.

I had to pay attention to the facial shapes and structure that consists of muscle, bones, and fat. I had to study anatomy a lot and observe the images/references of the person.

I have noticed that his face and hair change a lot in every picture, because of different lighting.

But also his age and body fat percentage alter his appearance.

 I started to block out the body, then I went for the Midpoly of the body immediately. because I needed that geometry for the next step, which was creating the cloth inside of Marvelous Designer. I could have done the cloth in Zbrush by extracting it from the Body or using the new dynamics feature in Zbrush, but I decided to do the cloth with Marvelous Designer for the most realistic result.

Once I had the cloth done, I imported everything back to Zbrush and made some minor changes to the overall shape to match the concept. Then I brought the LowPoly to Maya and did the Retopology and the UV, I grouped the UVs into Texture sets and brought the new LowPoly back to Zbrush for the last 10% of the Detail ( tiny folds, pores, wrinkles, etc ).

After this was done, it was time to bake the maps and do the texturing. Later on, I did the hair in Maya with Xgen.  

I have also done some extra designs using the same meshes.

The hardest challenge of this project:

The hardest challenge was anatomy. I am still very new in this area. But I have gained a lot of experience from this fun project.