Cyber Girl

Project Breakdown

Reference Board

By starting the project I began gathering references on a PureRef board. The main concept I was orienting myself on, was a concept by Eve Ventrue. It wasn't my goal to exactly replicate that concept. I took inspiration from her costume and overall appearance. Due to the difficulty in reading certain sections of the concept, I had to find references that would clarify those parts and even come up with creative solutions to solve the puzzle.

Right after creating the reference board, I've written down my first thoughts and overall breakdown of the project by creating a short mind map.

Character

Texturing in Substance Painter
While texturing I tried to keep my layer structure as organized as possible. Maps created were based on the specular/glossiness workflow.

Jacket & Shorts
The Jacket was created using Marvelous Designer to simulate the wrinkles and overall weight of the fabric. By preparing for retopology, I exported the simulated jacket and the 2d pattern out of Marvelous Designer. After that, I retopologized the 2d pattern and transferred the vertex position onto the simulated jacket using the UVs as the sample space. From there on I merged vertices, cleaned up the surface, added seams and fixed the UVs accordingly. Surface details were added inside ZBrush using alphas, custom-made brushes and the surface noise function. I then exported the details as a cavity and displacement map for further use in texturing and ultimately in rendering.

The shorts on the other hand were built using the quad draw tool while utilizing the body as a live mesh. Details and wrinkles were added using custom-made brushes and alphas in ZBrush.

Head & Body
Since I just needed a head, torso and thighs, I started with a metahuman model that gave me a good starting point to sculpt from. Then I improved upon it and adjusted it based on my liking and the references gathered. I've added and fixed skin details using alpha brushes in ZBrush while putting them on layers and storing a morph target.

I wanted to have the freedom to be able to use some of my textures from a previous project, so I decided to wrap the head from the previous project onto the metahuman head to transfer UVs with its textures using Wrap3D. The head topology that came from the previous project was sculpted in ZBrush and manually retopologized using the quad draw tool in Maya.

For the skin I used metahuman textures as a base and painted some additional textures on top where it was needed, to add more variation. For areas like the chest that weren't covered with skin, I simply applied seamless skin textures that I had created in Photoshop.

Groom
For the groom I used Xgen. I manually placed guides and used modifiers in conjunction with density maps to break up the hair. For me to make things easier I separated the different areas into descriptions.

Environment

Look Dev

Compositing