The Brave

This is my latest project 'The Brave', it was partly created during my mentorship with Ana Carolina. I created the character to be game ready for use in a real-time engine, in this case Unreal Engine.

A massive thank you to Ana Carolina's mentorship, and my friends who gave me plenty of feedback for this character. Another big thank you to Valeria Ivanova for letting me use their beautiful concept and also providing me support on this character's creation. The concept can be seen below.

Below are the final renders, after which there's a full breakdown showcasing the creation for this character.

The character was largely created in ZBrush. Some props were modelled in Maya first as I find it faster to do so and the loin cloth was made in Marvelous Designer, allowing me to quickly get some folds I could work with as a base.

For all my portfolio work thus far I've built every character from the ground up rather than using any base meshes so it can provide me an opportunity to practice and improve my anatomy. This goes through many iterations where eventually I had to break my characters anatomy in places such as the neck and the torso so that the clothing which covers it matches the shapes in the concept, I also had to temporarily part the legs during sculpting so I could avoid sculpting symmetry issues when working on them.

Alongside this I begun the modelling of the weapon, I've found Sabrina Echouafni's tutorial on weapon creation to be incredibly helpful for providing an excellent workflow, particularly when working from a concept.

I start off in Maya modelling just the plane shapes of the object, once these are in place I extrude them and model out the secondary shapes. I then throw this all into Zbrush to start sculpting all the details, I looked at a lot of environment artist's stylised work to determine what their workflows are, such as how to achieve a metal stylised look.

I spent a lot of time on the topology and UVs of this character as I wanted to improve what I achieved on my previous project Meg from Hades.

The head topology in particular I devoted a lot of time to, I looked to multiple artist's work for topology reference and ended up with topology I was happy.

With the UV's I wanted to replicate something I had seen in the UV's for Overwatch Characters, specifically that the UV's of the character Zarya's arm was perfectly squared and optimized. I had no idea how to do this myself and felt I needed to improve my UV skills. I managed to find Maya documentation which taught me how to pin UV vertices and using the align tool. Learning how to properly use these simple few tools helped to massively improve my UVs for this character.

My previous projects did not require extensive texturing work and were relatively quick to do, I saw this project as a great opportunity to texture a character within a PBR stylised workflow and to challenge my abilities.

When texturing my characters I like to get them into my rendering engine very early so I can go back and forth between Substance and Unreal in this case to see how they're looking in actual engine. Whilst doing this I'm also slowly beginning to set up the lighting for the scene. This process is one I have a lot of fun with, especially flipping back and forth between screenshots, it allows me to compare any changes I've done easily and also it's motivating to see the character become more and more alive.

During the texturing I contacted the concept artist Valeria to ask for her input on what the patterns would be on the side of the characters head, as the concept art did not fully show it. Valeria did not have any particular design in mind so I took some liberty with this, but she provided a draw over for me which included some changes from the original concept, I really liked the changes she provided and endeavored to include them in the character.

For the Loin cloth I wanted the ends of it to be tattered and ripped, as the low poly is just a single plane I thought it would be more optimal and smarter to use an opacity mask rather than model out the tatters.

Below you can see my testing of this idea in Substance, although I ended up manually creating the opacity mask for this myself to better match the concept.

During my mentorship, Ana pointed out the stars present in the jewels on the hips, suggesting I could do a magical like effect on them with a shader. I really loved this idea, I love to include tech art into my characters to make them pop just that bit more.

I watched a number of jewel shader tutorials, using these to piece together my own shader for the hip jewels, and adjusting the shader for the jewels on the weapon. I personally drew the stars that are present in the shader, I drew them rather scrappily as I wanted them to have an imperfect hand drawn look to them which I found charming.

With the textures and the shaders finished I began work on posing my character.

I made a basic rig and luckily the pose from the concept was relatively simple to set up. For the posing I again find it very helpful to take multiple screenshots as I go, it's an iterative process as I slowly push the pose closer to the concept pose, sometimes making changes that deviate away from the concept to make it work better in 3D.

I'm also finalising the lighting at this stage, making lots of small adjustments to make the character pop and come to life. Lighting is something I use to struggle with a lot and didn't understand a lot of the basic fundamentals, it's thanks to Ana's mentorship that I was able to learn the ropes of these fundamentals and I feel comfortably apply them myself for later projects like this one.

I grew a lot as an artist with this project and I'm really proud of how it came out, please look forward to my next projects that I have cooking!