Kan Jia-En 3D Artist Portfolio

Hi my name is Jia-En and I graduated from 3DSense Media School in Singapore last year. I decided to enter the Rookies competition to showcase my work over the past year and hopefully build connections with other artists. 

Project 1 - Kunoichi Game Character

This project was done during my second term in 3DSense. It was my first experience creating a 3D game character and I learnt so much from this project. I'd like to thank my mentor, Mr Julian Khor for his guidance throughout the project. He is a true game industry veteran that has taught me so much and helped me to become a better artist during my time at 3DSense. I would also like to give a special thanks to my classmates and to Gerald Wee (and colleague) for giving me invaluable feedback and advice. 

The concept art was by Yucheng Hong and I chose this concept art because I wanted challenge myself and improve on my hard surface modelling. Here are some of the final renders:

I started off with research and accumulated a lot of images and links on each part of the character. It helped me tremendously to figure out certain parts of the character that aren't as clear in the concept art. I did further research and created my own concept designs for parts such as the robot hands and the various mech pieces. I also had to figure out how the jacket fabric was stitched together, but it was more manageable after I worked it out with my mentor. 

I sculpted the character in Zbrush while working on the mech parts in Maya. I paid extra attention to creating the folds so that the silhouette would be as accurate as possible. 

I decided to go for a more realistic facial structure, as opposed to the very stylised and exaggerated proportions in the concept art. I tried to match up to the concept art by exaggerating her 'makeup' during the texturing phase. 

I worked on 6 UV maps for the entire character. Due to a lack of experience, I feel that I could have done better optimising my UVs at this stage, and moving forward I will learn from my mistakes and improve on my workflow. 

Here are the hard surface parts of the character. I did my best to match the sizing to the concept art, and the lecturers and my mentor gave us lots of help during review sessions. 

I created the hair texture maps in Hair Strand Designer, and manually laid out the strands in Maya. It was challenging to get the curls in her hair to the correct flow.

Project 2 - Old Chinese House

My final term project was a 3D environment of an old Chinese house. I'd like to thank my mentor, Venny Lie for all her dedication and help during this project. The concept art is by Forky Xu. 

 I really wanted to do something that was oriental themed for my final term. My main goal was to create the atmosphere of the old house, and adding details to create storytelling elements of the environment. I wanted to show the life of this imaginary family that lived in this environment.

Here's the research I did for the project. I split the concept art into different segments and categorised the assets needed for each portion. For some of the assets that were unclear, I enjoyed creating my own designs and coming up with ideas of what the prop could be. 

As a little easter egg, I included my own family photos in some of the frames in the environment. I achieved the retro look mostly in Photoshop where I added grunge and yellowing paper textures to the photographs. 

I had fun creating the old medical bottles that would be placed on the table. They are medical oils and ointments that are familiar to me. 

The sofa prop was an important asset in the environment. I revisited this asset many times to improve on it. I feel that the most challenging part was figuring out how each part stitched together and how to achieve the texturing that would match the concept. I learnt a lot about sculpting realistic cloth folds and creating further detail for secondary folds. 

After graduating, I refined the texturing of the towels, creating a more realistic normal map and including details such as fraying onto certain parts of the cloth. 

For the food on the dining table, I enjoyed the ideation process the most. I did research on what kind of food would be feasible to sculpt and what the family living in this old chinese house would actually eat. I considered the type of cutlery the family would own, and it gave me a pleasant sense of nostalgia to include the kind of cutlery and food in my grandmother's house. I also included weathering detail of the dining table. I created the chipped edge by projecting a mask over the layer, and manually painted in some height and highlights on the edges.

For the fridge, I included household items that would be less used and carelessly thrown to the top of the fridge. I also took some time to figure out what kind of banner was depicted in the concept art. My idea of the banner is that it is a company commendation banner hung up many years ago. I included dust and dirt at the areas where it would accumulate. 

For the commendation banner, I generated the maps in Photoshop. For the opacity map, I refined the mask manually to create the fringe frills. I applied a similar approach to the ornamental tassels, after modelling them in Zbrush and Maya, I created the maps in Photoshop and projected them in Substance Painter. 

The two figurines on the TV was a blast to sculpt in Zbrush. I included a little blu-tack on the astronaut man's feet as an added detail to this set. I also textured a layer of dust onto the top of the TV to show the lived-in state of the environment. 

For the frilly cloth under the TV, the albedo map was created by photoshopping images of frills to fit the shape of my UV unwrap. I did a lot of editing on the contrast, as well as using a lot of liquify to shape the pattern.

Lastly, I used one trim sheet for this environment. It consisted mostly of a lot of wooden assets for optimisation. I also generated the floor and walls using quixel mixer, where I layered dust, dirt and cracks onto the original texture and added them into Unreal. 

I have come a really long way since the start of my 3D art journey in Nov 2021. I hope that I will continue with the same enthusiasm and determination to build a sustainable and exciting career in the game industry. Thank you so much for looking at my work. 

My artstation: www.artstation.com/jiaenkan.

Thanks and have a wonderful day!