Rookies Award 2023 | Ivan Ho - 3D Game Art Showcase

Cyborg Woman

Hello! This is my take on the cyborg woman concept created by the talented Coco Kim. The character was done within 4 months during my second term in 3dsense Media School. 

4k resolution and some more video renders can be seen on my Artstation!

Reference Board

Gathering references is one of the most important steps. I broke down the character to different parts such as the gloves, heels and weapon. Starting with good references helps to create more believable proportions and textures.

ZBrush Sculpts

Retopo

Hair Card

This is my first time creating CG hair. This was really challenging and the whole process took me about a month of going back and forth while continuing the other stages of the character. The hair was generated in Hair Strand Designer.

UV

I split up the character into 4 x 2048 texture maps - Head, Top, Bottom and Accessories.

Texturing

One setting that I feel is important to change before the texture process is the Environment Map to Studio 03 or Studio Tomoco in Display Settings. This ensures that there is no other color information from the HDRI that could potentially affect the colors while texturing.

I always cross check my textures in Substance Painter with the final rendering software (which is Marmoset Toolbag for me) to make sure that the final output is what I am aiming for.

I tend to create my own materials instead of using smart materials as I have more control for each layer.

Rigging

Marmoset Toolbag

This is the final step and it was fun playing around with the lighting and animating cameras to finally bring the character to life.

Izakaya 居酒屋

This environment was done in my final term at 3dsense Media School. Original concept by the amazing Zhaozhe Deng.

Also, more 4k renders can be found on my Artstation page.

I broke down the concept art into several parts to ensure that I fully understand and capture each part in detail.

A - Foreground

B - Midground

C - Focus Area

D - Kitchen Area

E - Left Walls

F - Floor and Ceiling

G - Background

Blocking

Trimsheets

I used trimsheets mainly on all the wooden planks in the environment. The second trimsheet is part trim, and it is used for plastic materials and for the hanging lights.

Asset Breakdown

Unreal Engine

First time using Unreal Engine and it was a very steep learning curve. Spent hours watching tutorials while travelling to and from school and even while having meals.. 

Lighting

I learnt one simple light function that I thought it was cool to share. It was the flickering light at the vending machine in the first sequence of the flythrough video.

More realistic reflections

I wanted to make it feel like the objects have interactions with one another, and especially at this part, the chair and counter table are very close to one another. In real life, there should be a slight color reflection from the chair to the wood at the table as light bounces.

I decided to add a red light with low intensity in front of each chair to fake the reflection. 

Material Settings

I faced lots of problems with the material at the start, figuring out why materials from Substance Painter look so much different in UE in terms of Metallic and Roughness.

It is a very simple fix and it is due to the technical aspect of the texture map and its color space.

The only texture map that uses sRGB is the base color. The others (roughness, metalness, normals) should NOT be used as sRGB as they are data maps. Unreal automatically detects them as sRGB and uses them as such. Therefore after importing the maps, you should uncheck the box that allows sRGB.

Asset Callout Sheet

These are my works done within my time at 3dsense Media School, I have enjoyed the journey and gained tons of new skills. I hope you enjoy what you see and this is just the beginning of my art journey!