Yöh'ni Urk'Düh the Urk'Ash VFX CHaracter

This character is based on the concept art made by the incredibly talented Xabier Urrutia.

I sculpted this model in ZBrush, textured it in Substance painter and rendered it with Arnold in Autodesk Maya, in addition I used PureRef to gather all the corresponding references, and Photoshop to compose the render passes and find the final look for the blue demon.

1- REFERENCE

The first step was to find as much reference from the character as possible, and after searching for a couple of weeks I eventually contacted the original author of the concept art, Xabier Urrutia, who was kind enough to send me detailed reference for the weapons, as well as some explanations for the mechanics of the sword seath and the spear propeller.

2-  BODY BLOCK OUT

After gathering references for the character, the materials and the anatomy, I started sculpting the basic shapes of the body, to set up the overall proportions and silouette.

During the process I tried to keep it as low poly as possible, using Dynamesh whenever i needed more resolution for smaller shapes like the eyelids or the ears, this workflow made it easier to change big volumes and focus on the appeal of the whole body, instead of smaller shapes that don´t really matter at this stage.

3- PROPS

Once I had a solid base for the body it was time to work on the weapons, cloths and accessories.

For the armor I made basic shapes with ZModeler and kept working each piece until they were done, whereas for the cloths I simulated the patterns in Marvelous Designer. Some of the parts of the armor required me to make custom brushes for cuts, holes or even ropes, which came in very handy as i mixed them with some other brushes I already purchased to achieve the desired look.

4- POLISH & SYMMETRY

For the shape of the head and the body y did a symmetry pass to make sure it felt natural, I changed the shape of the horns to have a more dynamic appeareance, altered the height of certain elements so they didn´t match perfectly from one side to the other, and finally I started focusing more on secundary and terciary shapes, for which I subdivided the model with GeoHD.

5- RETOPOLOGY & UVs

At this stage I started to prepare the mesh for texturing in Substance Painter, so I opened up Maya to retopologize all the different parts of the model, for which i used QuadDraw. After that I choose a UDIM workflow to unwrap 27 tiles for the whole character, and then, it was time to import the retopologized version to ZBrush and project all the details into the new meshes.

*As i divided the body with GeoHD before i did the retopology, i had to project each UV tile separately, making copies from the high resolution model of each part of the body. At first I didn´t know if it was going to be possible, but it worked surprisingly well, however, i´ll use another pipeline for my future characters. 

                                                                        Final projection

6- TEXTURING

For the texturing I used a single texture set and divided it with masks into separate materials, then i worked each separately using different masks, noises and generators, to create a procedural template from which I could paint manually to define specific areas.

The main idea behind the materials was to make it feel tangible, however my references were almost entirely paintings, so I had to interpret a lot of them, building upon what I had in my references while at the same time remaining faithful to the original source.

7- DISPLACEMENT TESTS & LIGHTS

The sculpting stage was almost finished, so I exported the displacement maps and tested them with a basic 4 area lights set up, as well as some HDRIs from Poly Heaven. 

While testing the materials and the lights I took notes of everything that might deteriorate the final render, and fixed it, like UVs not matching, displacement issues and colors being too saturated or bright.

8- FINAL TOUCHES

The only thing left was to pose Yöh'ni, groom some hair for his cloths and refine the skin material with some nodes.

Starting with the pose I used a simple rig in Blender, and corrected the armpits amongst other areas in Zbrush afterwords. Regarding the hair, it was done with interactive groom, as Xgen kept crashing or corupting files.

For the skin material I mixed some cell noise with the displacement to act as very small pores and i used some color correction for the final look.

9- Results