3D modeling & texturing portfolio by Christopher Leder

The first step was planning the project. I was sure and confident enough, to create a creature which exists in real life. So I started to search for a photography which fits to my criteria on platforms like Pinterest, Google, Instagram etc. After quite a long time of searching I found a cool photo of a Red Eye Frog riding on a Hercules Beetle.

The strongest creature on earth - the Hercules Beetle! Able to lift up to 850 times its own weight.

This time in the course of my first demo project I planned to create a Hercules Beetle and a Red Eye Frog. Of course, I found not just one picture which means the decision for me was quite hard, but I am not regretting my choice.

I really enjoyed doing the research for some good references. In this case the search for good references was extremely important for me. I was looking for references in relation to the colors, size, and the anatomy and much more.

Of course - the research was not only important for the texturing. It was also essential for the modeling and especially for the sculpting work.

As soon as I had all the informations and references that I needed, I started blocking the beetle to get from the beginning on the right size of it. At first I was modeling the rough shapes of the beetle in real-world-scale. As soon I was happy with it, I imported it into ZBrush. I was modeling more details of the beetle and added the legs and the big horn. After that I did the blocking of the green passenger - the red eye frog. At the beginning of the project, I thought the modeling of the beetle will be tough, but to make the frog looking good was even harder. I had to study the anatomy of this animals intensely, to make it look believable. I had to put way more time into the modeling than actually planned. But after all, it was worth it.

As soon as I was happy with the shapes, I imported the DynaMesh into Maya, to make a good topology and also the UV´s.

Basic rigging of the Frog. For the final posing I had to do a simple skeleton and skinning for the frog. I have done the rigging only for the frog, because the beetle is sitting on a branch, so it was not necessary and I saved quite a lot of time. 

After I was done with the work in Maya, I brought them back to Zbrush to add all the details like skin, imperfections and so on. I decided to make the grooming of the beetle with ZBrush, because it was the fastest way to do it. After the sculpting, I exported the sculpting work as displacement maps back to Maya for the Arnold shader. I used the same maps also for the texturing with Mari and Substance 3D Painter.

The next step was to create the textures. Like I already mentioned, the texturing was done with mainly Mari but I also used Substance Painter. I used Substance Painter to bake some maps and to create some masks which helped me a lot in Mari. It was kind of a challenge because I have never done the texturing like this before. 

To make the frog looking good was a huge challenge for me. I am not into lookdev. I'm not into Lookdev (yet). I love to model and texture things, but Lookdev is difficult for me. I tried my best to make the frog as natural as possible, but I have to gain more knowledge and experience for this kind of work! However I was worth trying it! I gained so many new skills which will be helpful for the next projects especially if they need SSS.

Building the scene was pretty easy. I found the branch and the atlases for the moss at Quixel.com.

I have created some low poly meshes for each moss patch. After that I deformed them randomly to make them not look flat. As next I have done three sets of moss. One with brighter, with darker and with normal green color, to create more variety. I only used the color correct node in the Hypershade for changing the color. To safe render time I was loading the moss patches as an instancer in my scene, to have not too much geometry to load. I also created three MASH systems for each set of moss and scattered them on the branch. For scattering I painted three maps for each set of moss, to tell the MASH system where I want moss and how much I want. Additionally I used the frustum filtering inside the visibility node, to have the moss only visible in my film gate.

Last but not least the sorrel was provided by Cedric Oberhagemann. I have only done a new shader for it.

I added my two creatures, some lights, cameras and I was ready to start rendering.

After rendering I had to do the post production with Natron, a open source compositing software. I have done some color and lighting corrections. For the background I recorded a video of some bushes, and animated them in Natron. Unfortunately I couldn't use Nuke X for compositing, to use the crypto AOV´s neither the AOV´s for recreating the scene inside the 3D space.

I was sure and confident enough, to create person which exists in real life. So I started to search for a photography which fits to my criteria on platforms like Pinterest, Google, Instagram etc. I had a lots of ideas, but in the end I thought - who would be better, than the most legendary bodybuilder of all time? - Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

7x Mr Olypia winner

This time in the course of my demo project I planned to create Arnold Schwarzenegger in his heroic bodybuilding competition form.

After I was sure who to model, I had also to make sure which pose I will realize.

The biggest issue has been the research for good quality photography of Arnold.

Almost all images from his bodybuilding career are quite old with bad quality for nowadays. But in the end I found a great picture of him doing an awesome pose.

Of course - I found not just one picture of a cool pose, which means the decision for me was quite hard.

I really enjoyed doing the research for some good references. In this case the search for good references was extremely important for me. I was looking for references in relation to the size, and the anatomy and much more. It was essential for the modeling and especially for the sculpting work.

As already mentioned the quality of photos of Arnold where quite problematic.

Because of this, I was searching for references from other athletes which I remembered, who have a similar body type like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I am talkin about Artmus Dolgin, Jay Cutler, Mike O´Hearn and Joel Kellett.

This pictures of those guys helped me out pretty much.

Besides that, I used books like "Anatomy for 3D Artists" and "Anatomy For Sculptors" for doing my research of the human anatomy.

As soon as I had all the informations and references that I needed, I started blocking by using ZSpheres in ZBrush. At first I was modeling the rough shapes of the body.

One of the most important thing are, to get the proportions of the body right. To achieve this, I used a spotlight texture of pictures like a skeleton inside ZBrush.

As soon I was happy with it, I started modeling more details.

As next I went back to ZBrush and I decided to already do the posing of him.

The reason for doing it like this was, that I thought there is no symmetry at on his pose and I had devnetly no time for rigging/skinning. So I was risking it, to continue from there on without using any symmetry tool.

I exported the sculpting work as displacement maps back to Maya for the Arnold shader.

I used the same maps also for the texturing with Substance 3D Painter.

Meanwhile I had also to to the grooming with XGen and the his underwear by using Marvelous Designer.

The next step was to create the textures. Like I already mentioned, the texturing was done with Substance 3D Painter. I started with the color under the actual skin color. As next I painted the skin itself. It was kind of a challenge because I have never done the texturing like this before. After the color created a roughness map and onto a specular map, to get a bit more breakup. I made also some masks for the subsurface scattering in Unreal Engine and the Arnold shader in Maya. 

I was planning to do not only a render in Maya. I prepared als a project in Unreal Engine. Like this It would be possible to render in 4K resolution, without spending too much time for rendering. I knew that the quality of the shaders will be not as good as they will look like rendering with Arnold. Anyway, I learned alot about the shading and rendering with the game engine Unreal Engine.

So I created a material for the skin shading of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Unreal Engine 5.

Inside this Material I had six material functions for the base color, metalness, specular, roughness, sss & normal map.

With this method it was possible to create a material instance which I could use for changing all the parameters of the shader/material.

The Sony PSP is one of my favorite consoles and I still have one of them. I thought that the PSP was the perfect object for a hard surface project. I did the modeling with Autodesk Maya, the texturing with Adobe Substance 3D painter and I rendered with Arnold for Maya.

living on the edge - was my first project for my demo reel

This time in the course of the first demo project at Pixl Visn I had to create a fantasy house, but this was the only limitation for this assignment. Everything around this topic was allowed to create.

I found a awsome artwork from artist called Jean-Baptiste Monge, which I was sure to create in the end of my research for a concept art.

At the end I was happy with the idea of creating a big cliff and a cool stylized house.

Artwork by Jean-Baptiste Monge

As soon as I had all the informations and references that I needed, I started blocking the scene and created some cameras and light without too many details. At first I was modeling the rough shapes of the house in real-world-scale. This was imported for my workflow, to get an idea how large the cliff/mountain has to be. With this said, I blocked the shapes of the enviroment. As soon I was happy with it, I did the retopology of the cliff to get it ready for ZBrush.

Meanwhile I added more and more detail to house. The observatory was kind of tricky because I wanted to model it in a way that it could actually work. Unfortunately I had no information about it from the concept, so I had to reactivate my engeneering skills. I had to be more creative with the house then I thought in the beginning, but it was a lot of fun.

I made it finally from Maya to Zbrush to add all the details to the cliff and some parts of the house. After the sculpting, I exported the sculpting work as displacement maps back to Maya for the Arnold shader.

I used the same maps also for the texturing with Substance 3D Painter

The next step was to create the texture respectively the shading. Like I already mentioned, the texturing was done with Substance Painter. I spent a lot of time on painting layer over layer to get as much detail in a short amount of time. It was kind of a challenge because I have never done enviroment texturing like this before.

For not spending much time, I downloaded some texture maps form quixel.com.

I found also the plant there, which was helpfull.

I used downloaded texture maps for the walls of the house and tower and for the base of the roofs. The 3D assets like the bushes and trees plus textures came also from quixel.com. Beside that I used the ivy generator (ivy-generator.com) by Thomas Luft which is a great tool.

One of the final steps has been the rendering of the sequence.

I was rendering three diffrent cameras which have been around 340 frames.

I used the MASH tool which comes with Autodesk Maya, for painting all the bushes and other assets. To safe rendering time I was loading them as stand-ins into my scene.

I baked the smoke from the chimneys which I created with fluids in Maya as well.

Last but not least I added some small animations, improved the lighting and added all the AOV´s for the work in Nuke.

Post production with Nuke X. I added for example the fog and particles inside the 3D space in Nuke. I used the pultipass data for for color correction and some changes for the lighting. I had for every light all AOVs to have the full control. Last but not least , I used some look-up tables to creat a nice mood. The final touches has been the chromatic aberration and lens distortion.

For this Project I mainly used Autodesk Maya but this was obviously not the only software. I also worked with Zbrush for sculpting some details. I created the textures with Substance 3D Painter. Arnold renderer for the shading, lighting and rendering of this scene. Besides that I used Nuke, Affinity Photo and DaVinci Resolve for the post production. I used PureRef for keeping my references organized and IVY-Generator for the ivy.

I have learned a lot, especially in relation of enviroment modeling and texturing. Also in this case I taught myself new techniques for modeling and sculpting.

But in every Project I learn more about time management and how to handle the pressure when the time limit is getting more tight.

At the end I have to say, that the research for this project was one of the most important parts because there were a lot of little things I had to take care of.

I had to think and plan about the presentation, the lighting, the texturing and the time management.

I'm using an app on my phone to plan every project. I was putting myself time limts for every step like modeling, UV´s, texturing etc. This is always a huge help to not forget something and like this I knew when I was working too slow.

Also for the upcoming projects it is quite useful because I know like this, where I need more or less time.