José Almeida - 2023 3D Character Showcase & Breakdown

TOM HARDY LIKENESS AND SCI-FI MILITARY GARMENTS

This project was done as my final project for the Mentorship term at Think Tank Training Centre under the mentorship of Jonathan Phillips. 

For the likeness I chose to do Tom Hardy and the garments were based on a concept by Richard Bagnall.

All rendering was done in Unreal Engine 5.

Likeness and anatomy.

I decided to step out of my confort zone and attempt a likeness sculpt as a way to improve my skills. I also chose Tom Hardy because I quite admire him as actor and he has some pretty recognizable features. Because this was my first time doing a likeness sculpt I couldn't get it to be perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the result.

The eyes I used are the ones provided by Metahuman. The skin shader was also the one made for the Metahuman models, which I then modified to fit the look I wanted.

The following screenshot shows the references used in the process of sculpting the likeness.

The hair was made using Xgen.

Besides wanting to improve my skills at facial anatomy, I also wanted to spend some time practising full body anatomy. So, even though the character's fully clothed, I spent quite some time trying to get my anatomy right. 

Cloth and hard-surface.

I wanted to take the oportunity to use this project as a way to also showcase and improve my skills at both hard-surface and cloth. 

The reason I chose this concept was because it had quite a few complex objects that knew I would have to try new techniques to do them. 

Most of the objects that are made of cloth were done using Marvelous Designer. This includes the the shirt and pants but also all of the bags and the plate armor itself.

As for most of the hard-surfaces such as the neck armor, helmet and accessories, they were done using a mix of Maya and Zbrush. 

To make the handgun, since it's more complex than the rest of the equipment, the usual process I would use for hard-surfaces would take too much time. Because of this I decided to learn Fusion360 and use it to model the gun.

Final high-poly.

This what the final high-poly version of the garments looks like.

Topology and texture maps.

My main focus of this project was to produce both a likeness and high quality garments to be rendered in Unreal Engine 5. While I wasn't able to perfect the optimization on the low poly version, I did my best to optimize it as much as possible. The low poly, excluding the hair, sits at around 166k tris.

When it comes to textures,the character was divided into 6 texture maps, exluding the eye geometry. 

Alternate light.

WARRIOR OF THE SOUTH

This project was done as my final project for the Intermediate term at Think Tank Training Centre under the guidance of Chad Emond.

The character was based on a concept by Kate Voynova.

All rendering was done in Marmoset Toolbag using the RTX function.

Cloth and hard-surface.

Both the vest and pants were made using Marvelous Designer. It was quite the challenge to get the right result since both had very specific folds and volumes, but I was quite happy with how it turned out.

All the accessories and hard-surfaces were made using a mix of both Maya and Zbrush.

Hair card and cap.

The hair was made using hair cards. The hair card textures were made using FiberShop.

The hair cap was done by baking Xgen hair onto a cap mesh.

Final high-poly.

This what the final high-poly character looks like.

Topology and texture maps.

The entire character sits at around 223k tris, including the weapon and hair. I tried as best as I could to optimize the low poly version, but the scales proved to be a problem when trying to lower the poly count as they come at about 70k tris.

As for the texture maps, the character is made up of 9 texture maps, including the hair cap, hair card textures and feather cards. 

CONCLUSION

I'd the like to thank you for taking the time to see the full break down of both of these projects. I feel like this year has been amazing for me as an artist. I've made quite a lot of progress and I'm finally proud of some of the work I've done. Of course, I still have quite a long way to go and more to learn, but I'm hopeful to have the oportunity to work with more amazing artists in the future.

I'd also like to give a huge thank you to both Jonathan and Chad for the help they've provided during these last few months. I know I wouldn't have been able to improve as much as I did if I didn't have them giving me feedback on my work.