A year of learning in depth - Lilith and Marsh.

I would like to show what I have been up to since the last The Rookies' entry. I have been improoving my anatomy and technical skills, focusing on shading, rendering and lighting. Let's go through these two renders and what I found challenging and what I learned.

I always like to give my characters a bit of  a back story, and here I will also explain a little bit about it too. I think it is important to understand the inside of the mind of your characters in order to complete them in a more accurate way.

I haven't been very lucky getting a junior position in the industry this past year, so I have had the time to learn a lot. Hopefully this year, things will turn my way! Please enjoy.

Lilith: nature vs. nurture.

Lilith is a young woman, raised in a Catholic family. Her mind is pure, but her heart is demonic, as her biological father turns to be a demon. After turning 21, her horns came out and her nature will fight against her nurture. Nobody knows which one will prevail, but her good actions get tainted by her inner evil.

XGen guides are placed manually, and the peachfuzz has been created with guides placed across surface, then groomed.

Marsh the Inquisitor: a Mistborn fanart.

I have read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. A total ammount of 7 fantasy books that explore topics as identity, religion, politics and society. It really inspire me and so I wanted to create a sort of homage to the author by doing a fanart of one of the characters of the series.

I firstly rendered it in Marmoset Toolbag, but later I introduced it in Unreal Engine 5 so I could do better renders. It honestly blows my mind how much tweaking and how precise you can be with the shading in Unreal.

The shading was made with a Master Material that includes all the maps and the shading, and an Instance Material to control things like specularity, roughness and micro-normals levels. In this way, we can control the impact of the maps depending of the situation and the environment that our character is in.

The Base Color map has an alpha channel with the SSS map that is direclty attatched to the Opacity (in UE, that factor controls the Subsurface Scattering).

Here you can inspect the model freely:

Thanks for reading! Please let me know if there is a topic that you would like to learn more about or if you have specific questions. I will be glad to answer them.