Character and Environment for Animation - The Rookies entry 2023

"She's a Pirate". This character was made for Animation, and was prepared during my classes in L'idem Barcelona. It was based on the concept of my classmate, but I had pretty much freedom to add details to make it more appealing in 3D.

She's a Pirate was made as a stylized character exercize. It has an animation-ready topology. I studied the loops I had to make for the body to be "riggeable". All the topology work was done in Maya.

I like realistic textures, so I tried to create a realistic skin. I followed J Hill's tutorials on Skin Textures. I wanted to understand how the skin works so I made a couple of layers as Subdermal, Dermal, I studied temperatures of the face. Bump was made in Substance as well, I used substance generic skin textures and dry dirt brushes to create masks manually.

Going from open-mouth neutral expression to something more appealing was a challenge for me, I made a couple of tries with sculpting and blendshapes, also texturing fixes.

Rendering Passes

My other Character I made - Widow. It was my 2nd year final project. We had a theme, but we could adapt any desgin we wanted. I was pretty much influenced by Alberto Mielgo's shortfilm Witness. So I took the oportunity to create something alike. 

These are my first concepts ideas, I firstly just drawed all the crazy graffiti and tattoos, and then had to figure out how to translate it to 3D.

I sculpted her in ZBrush. It was a good exersize of anatomy.

Retopology made in Maya.

Final Look

Also I made some blendshapes. I sculpted them directly in Maya.

And lastly, my 3D Diorama. I love to embrace my culture, so I've chosen a slavic mythology to create the Baba Yaga House. My main inspiration was work of Ian Worrel "Mystery Shack Diorama". I wanted to create 2D-liking textures, and to try hand-paint. All the topology is for Animation.

Firstly, I looked for references

I created low-poly base meshes in Maya and then pulished them in ZBrush. I mixed game and animation pipelines creating Modeling Kit and texture sets for groups of props. 

Retopoly made in Maya

Texturing was cruicial for this work. So I created a base pattern that I applied for all of the props. And then I just hand-painted them manually. My main idea was to create this strong black Line Art so it would fake a Toon Shader.

Thanks for your attention!